Though a lackluster article, the question posed in the headline is a thought-provoking one: Is political comedy inherently leftist?
Upon seeing it, I immediately thought of the young bespectacled girl in the movie V for Vendetta. There aretwo brief scenes in particular in which she, for me, made an impression.
In one she is sitting in front of the television, incredulously watching the evening news, which is laying it on thicker than normal due to the character "V" and the difficulties he's causing the country's right-wing political establishment. We see her decidedly shaking her head, and then softly she utters her verdict: "Bollocks."
In another scene, she's enjoying a comedy skit that is lampooning the government's "high chancellor." Is she a leftist?
The girl's alternate responses of mistrust and amusement are obviously connected. The news is engaged in misinformation in an effort to protect the interests of the government, which needless to say, do not square with the interests of the people. When the high chancellor is parodied on television, in a sense he's shown for what he is. Many a true word is spoken in jest.
What programs like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart are doing is basically no different. Stewart and company merely highlight either the glaring contradictions and inconsistencies in what people holding political office say and do, or call attention to the cooperation, cravenness, and ridiculousness of the media. And frequently both.
Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and others are by and large centrist liberals who tend to be on board with Democratic politics, and therefore the bulk of their satire and mockery is leveled at the Republican variety along with likeminded news organizations such as Fox. These comedians basically work within the liberal framework found in the New York Times (see my essay "The Liberal Media and Foreign Policy," CounterPunch, Jan. 2012) and therefore are not really located at the left end of the spectrum.
But given the contrived polarity in American political discourse, Stewart and Colbert are perceived as being the critical left, when in actuality they approximate the center. Moreover, as both major parties have moved to the right, the corresponding discourse echoed in the media coverage is artificially calibrated accordingly, thus pushing the center to the left.
However, the true liberal center is where most of the population is positioned - a sadly unacknowledged fact in the United States. Many people who self-describe as being "conservative," operationally tend to be more liberal when their specific positions are taken into account.
This means that the so-called leftist slant of American political satire is really not slanted at all. Stewart's brand of humor is simply populist in nature. (Incidentally, because he and others have been branded as "leftists," their audiences are probably not as big as they would be otherwise.)
We therefore bear a great deal in common with the young girl in the thick-framed glasses, sitting on the couch, watching, knowing something's not quite right, and then laughing at the fidelity of a caricature. A joke, as they say, is a very serious thing.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/10/tech/web/sxsw-internet-comedy/index.html
