Bill Fitzhugh

Letter to the Editor

Paul Brownfield wrote an interesting article in the Los Angeles Times Sunday Calendar in late August. The article was titled, CHEAP SHOTS AT A STEEP PRICE? It dealt with the level and school of political humor that was currently on exhibition on late night television. I wanted to reprint the article here but the Times wants $150 for me to post it. Now if I thought Paul Brownfield would receive most of that money, I might pay it, but I'm not sending it to the Times. Sorry. So all you get to read is my response to Mr. Brownfield's article. I suspect you'll get the gist of what he was saying by reading the letter. I think you can go to the LA Times website and (probably for significantly less than $150), read the original article.

To the editor:

In arguing that a generation of voters is disengaged from the political process because Dave, Jay, and Jon [Stewart] are blithely flip and cynical about it in their monologues, Paul Brownfield seems to be suggesting the politicians have nothing to do with it.

Read almost any column by Molly Ivins -- better yet read one of her books -- and you’ll have a much better understanding why people have given up on politics. To paraphrase James Carville, "It’s the politicians, stupid."

The type of political humor coming from the talk show monologues has nothing to do with comedians not caring about politics. It has more to do with their understanding that the sixth-grade-civics model of our democracy is not the one we ended up with. I don’t have access to my Senator because I don’t have enough soft money to get his or her attention. But how many jokes can you do about campaign finance reform? Better just to make fun of a candidate’s inability to pronounce ‘subliminal’ before moving on to the celebrity interviews. As Brownfield later quotes Leno, "In the TV world right now, funny beats clever."

(As a side note, the problem with satire in relation to the television talk show monologue is that satire tends more toward clever. Satire -- which, rightly or wrongly, is frequently associated with cynicism -- is simply an attempt to expose human shortcomings with the intent to bring about improvement. The irony is that if satire were to succeed, it would bring about the end of the profession.)

But speaking of the former vice president who said, "A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls," I’d have to disagree with Harry Shearer’s contention that Dan Quayle became politically non-viable because the talk show comedians made jokes about him. Rather, I think they made jokes about him because he was so politically non-viable. The fact that he was actually holding the office of vice president just made the jokes funnier.

As to Brownfield’s notion that today’s comedians make their living with an "unending stream of easy cynicism," think of it this way: If the assumptions underlying cynicism were wrong, things wouldn’t be the way they are. There would be no reason for satire. But such is not the case, thus satire and cynicism persist. If the cynicism happens to be easy, it’s only because the politicians are so helpful.

Brownfield quotes Todd Gitlin as saying, "The earlier political comics were more opinionated and less indiscriminately and bitterly dismissive." Perhaps. But today’s political comics have seen thirty or forty more years of this crap than Lenny Bruce or anyone else doing comedy in 1960. The nakedness of the greed and the politicians’ disregard for the obligations of any given political office these days is enough to justify anyone’s bitter dismissiveness.

On a separate subject, I think Bill Maher is right when he says he shouldn’t be lumped in with Leno, Letterman, and Stewart. They’re all very funny and talented men, but Maher runs a different kind of show. He (and Shearer) stand apart from the others in that they are far more intellectual in their attacks. Even when his guests are busy tossing out fatuous comments and struggling to come up with punch lines that stray from the point under debate, Maher brings it back to the issues. And, as proof of his skills as a political satirist, he not only gets in the best lines but they’re almost always on point.

As a novelist I’m frequently accused of being cynical. The only thing that bothers me about that is the use of the word as a pejorative. Originally, a cynic was a member of a school of Greek philosophers who held virtue to be the only good, and stressed independence from worldly needs and pleasures (like accepting golf and skiing junkets with oil industry lobbyists in exchange for favorable legislation). A cynic was one who believed in doing the right thing over the profitable thing. Modern cynicism in humor springs from the knowledge that while we are capable of greatness in everything we attempt, we routinely fail to achieve even mediocrity. This is especially true in politics in this country. One of the reasons this persists is that by comparison we seem to be doing better than anyone else. In other words, the good news is we have the best political system in the world. That also happens to be the bad news.

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