Satire and the Educated Elite in The Daily Show and The Colbert Report

This paper was originally presented in the “News and Satire” area of the Film & History Conference, Dallas, TX (November 8-12, 2006).

The National Annenberg Election Survey of 2004 finds that the average age of viewers of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is 35, their average income is $67,000, and they are 78% more likely than the average adult to have four or more years of college education. While perhaps shocking to Bill O’Reilly, whose audience was found to be much older and less educated than Stewart’s, this information should not be all that surprising. After all, Stewart’s show is a satire; and satire, both as a definition and a literary genre, is somewhat elitist. Accordingly, this paper argues that The Daily Show as well as its satirical progeny, The Colbert Report, attracts and maintains its educated audiences because its choice of commentary — satire — actually caters to the informed, or the educated elite, so to speak. In other words, in order for the spectator to get and thus receive pleasure from many of the in-jokes and allusions that the sarcastic hosts spit out, s/he must be a relatively learned person — and one, I argue, who is familiar with both high and low culture.

Perhaps the most basic convention of satire is that in order for it to succeed, the audience must know what the satirized object is (McKain 417). Indeed, to find the most pleasure in Jonathan Swift’s essay “A Modest Proposal,” Mel Brooks’s film Blazing Saddles (1974), and Dave Chappelle’s sketch “The Racial Draft,” we must be aware of, respectively, poverty in early eighteenth-century Ireland, the conventions of the Hollywood western, and the way in which professional athletes are recruited in America. Likewise, in order for us to understand and indulge in the jokes offered by “fake” news shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, we must be literate both in the content and the conventions of national news programs like CNN Headline News, NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, and The O’Reilly Factor. But the “fake” news shows also offer other jokes that depend on our knowledge of both popular and high culture.

Several of The Daily Show’s visual jokes and puns derive from popular culture. In fact, most of the titles that introduce the show’s headlines, “live reporting” segments, and correspondents’ reports are taken from popular television shows, films, and songs (see exs. at end of post). The Colbert Report likewise embeds pop culture references within its satire, most frequently in its segment “The Word.” But perhaps even more interesting — and probably more relevant to Nielson’s findings — is that the two shows also frequently incorporate high culture into their satire, again suggesting that their audiences are literate in something more than just the content and format of national news programs. Perhaps the best example is Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones’s ”report” on George W. Bush’s encounter with Camus’s The Stranger.

To appreciate their sketch on The Stranger (August 2006), Jon Stewart and Jason Jones assume that we are already informed of two matters: George W. Bush’s frequent vacations to his Texas ranch and the fundamentals of existentialism. The first of these — that Bush regularly leaves Washington D.C. to visit his Crawford ranch — is well documented in the media, so anyone who keeps current on the national news will understand the humor behind Stewart’s sarcastic line “This year, President Bush decided he’s only doing a 10-day vacation at his Crawford Ranch…which really, why even bother at that point?”

A person who watches the conventional news might also get Jason Jones’s joke “I love being in Crawford, TX; it’s got the best brush clearing in the world” since the viewer has probably also seen images of Bush clearing cedar from his ranch. But this reference is perhaps even more amusing to the regular Daily Show watcher because s/he knows that Stewart frequently airs and makes fun of this footage of the President as he simultaneously clears brush and talks to reporters. The show’s second assumption, however — that its audience is well-read in existential philosophy — is arguably reserved for viewers who are educated in high culture.

To be fair, Stewart does summarize Camus’s novel for the audience: “It is about a Westerner who kills an Arab for no good reason and dies with no remorse.” So if one had not read the book, one now at least knows its storyline. However, after this line — an obvious jab at Bush and his involvement in Iraq — Stewart and his correspondent do not discuss Camus’s narrative any further. Rather, the two bring up existentialism, a topic that neither Stewart nor Jones introduces or summarizes for the audience in any way. So from here on out, The Daily Show is clearly pandering to the educated elite, assuming that when Jones rattles off the names Camus, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Nietchze, and Heidegger, we know who these people are and of their contributions to existential philosophy.

Similarly, when Stewart runs Tony Snow’s statement — that the President didn’t “want to go too deep into it, but [he and Snow] discussed the origins of existentialism” — we are expected to know that existentialism is a complex theory on the individual’s existence and essence, and that the theory is nothing if not “deep.” And even when Jones mentions that the room got “a little heavy” when Bush put down his pipe and his “snifter of brandy,” we are expected to connect these words to the stereotypical image of a pompous philosopher. After all, none of these references — the philosophers’ names, the fundamentals of existentialism, or even a snifter — is defined for us. Again, only the summary of Camus’s novel, which the show uses merely as a springboard for its philosophical humor, is presented.

But those who are literate in philosophy almost certainly find Stewart’s satire here quite amusing. The juxtaposition of Bush — someone repeatedly depicted by comedians and even by himself as unintelligent (e.g., see his pronunciation of the word nuclear) — alongside the weighty theory of existentialism is both ironic and funny. And of course, Stewart’s customary Buster Keaton-esque, “deer-in-the-headlights” reaction to this news and Jones’s Bush impersonation (“heh, heh, heh”) are equally amusing since they reinforce what the educated elite already recognize as a bizarre connection between an existential author and their current President.

The Colbert Report also integrates high culture into its headlines and sketches. And because it is a show that prides itself on toying with language and words, it perhaps does this even more often than The Daily Show. One example is Colbert’s take on William Shakespeare. To appreciate this sketch in full, the audience should be familiar with four things: first, Colbert’s pseudo-rightwing persona; second, Bill O’Reilly’s “Talking Points”; third, the general thinking of right-leaning conservatives; and fourth, quite a bit about Shakespeare.

First, where Jon Stewart essentially plays himself to expose the absurdity and hypocrisy in American politics and the media, Colbert adopts a character to do the same — an often pretentious, always conservative Republican. Consequently, to see the satire in this sketch and, indeed, in the entire show, we are expected to identify Colbert’s fake persona. In the same way, we are also supposed to notice that the show’s segment “The Word” is modeled after The O’Reilly Factor’s segment “Talking Points” in which Bill O’Reilly’s verbal commentary is paraphrased visually on the screen as the host speaks. And finally, the writers of this sketch also assume that their audience is familiar with traditional conservative beliefs about raising children, which Colbert will ultimately spin and make appear absurd. We see this for instance in the host’s comments on discipline (“Our kids need tough love, not iambic pentameter”), on banning literature that might negatively sway young minds (“the plays are immoral”), and on detaining criminals (“put them in prisons because prisons work”). Consequently, like Jon Stewart’s comments on Bush’s vacation and brush-clearing, most people who pay attention to the national news and those who know of Colbert’s persona will get these jokes. But the show’s attention to Shakespeare here is explicitly directed toward the educated elite.

In the same way that Stewart summarizes the premise of Camus’s novel for his audience, Colbert explains why Shakespeare is a bad influence on America’s “at-risk youthssss,” as he enunciates it. For example, while Colbert claims that the playwright “was a debtor and a blackguard,” the word blackguard is defined for the audience on the side screen. But again, like Stewart’s existentialist humor, the rest of the sketch relies heavily on the viewers’ knowledge of high culture, specifically Shakespeare’s plays. Nothing else is described for us.

For instance, if the audience does not know the storylines of Twelfth Night, Othello, and Macbeth, the over-simplified but funny connections to lesbianism, homicide, and regicide are essentially lost on the crowd. And if one is not familiar with the complexities of and the death-count in Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, Colbert’s jokes on fratricide, matricide, and suicide are again probably rather humorless. In the next section of this sketch, when Colbert begins to cite characters and lines from specific plays, the show caters to the educated elite even more. Specifically, the host claims that “the Montagues and the Capulets are nothing but Crips and Bloods in tights,” and then he reveals on the side screen the words “drive-by thumb-biting.” This joke is obviously written for those who have not only read Romeo and Juliet, but who know by heart act 1, scene 1 and the feisty exchange between Abram and Sampson that begins with “Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?” But to the spectator who is unfamiliar with these lines and their contemporary connotations (thumb-biting is analogous to giving someone the finger today), Colbert’s reference theoretically makes little sense.

I would imagine that when Colbert puts on the ruff (Shakespeare collar) and begins reciting Hamlet’s famous speech, all types of spectators get the joke, as virtually nearly everyone has seen drawings of Shakespeare and has heard the lines uttered “To be or not to be.” And at this point, perhaps even the pop culture references that the host integrates on the side screen like “Deal or no deal” and “Shakespeare had TiVo?” are readily accessible to most audiences as well. But after this, and after the jokes on Broadway musicals and sodomy in prison, Colbert returns once more to Shakespeare, citing that bizarre stage direction from Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale: “Exit, pursued by a bear.” As before, with his direct references to Shakespeare’s plays and characters, Colbert offers no explanation. The sketch ends, leaving those viewers who are inexperienced in classic Elizabethan literature somewhat clueless, and those who are educated in the same, rather satisfied and maybe even more confident in their own knowledge.

Some pop culture references…

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