THE TALK OF THE TOWN COMMENT EXIT, STAGE LEFT
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELL
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olitical life in America never ceases to astonish. Take last week’s pronouncements from the Republican Presidential field. Please. Mike Huckabee predicted that President Obama’s seven-nation agreement limiting Iran’s nuclear capabilities “will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.” Ted Cruz anointed the American President “the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism.” Marco Rubio tweeted, “Look at all this outrage over a dead lion, but where is all the outrage over the planned parenthood dead babies.” And the (face it) current front-runner, the halfway hirsute hotelier Donald Trump, having insulted the bulk of his (count ’em) sixteen major rivals plus (countless) millions of citizens of the (according to him) not-so-hot nation he proposes to lead, announced via social media that in this week’s Fox News debate he plans “to be very nice & highly respectful of the other candidates.” Really, now. Who’s writing this stuff ? Jon Stewart? Over the decades, our country has been lucky in many things, not least in the subversive comic spirits who, in varying ways, employ a joy buzzer, a whoopee cushion, and a fun-house mirror to knock the self-regard out of an endless parade of fatuous pols. Thomas Nast drew caricatures so devastating that they roiled the ample guts of our town’s Boss, William Marcy Tweed. Will Rogers’s homespun barbs humbled the devious of the early twentieth century. Mort Sahl, the Eisenhower-era comic whose prop was a rolled-up newspaper, used conventional one-liners to wage radical battle: “I’ve arranged with my executor to be buried in Chicago, because when I die I want to still remain politically active.” Later, Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor, and Joan Rivers continued to draw comic sustenance from what Philip Roth called “the indigenous American berserk.” Four nights a week for sixteen years,
Jon Stewart, the host and impresario of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” has taken to the air to expose our civic bizarreries. He has been heroic and persistent. Blasted into orbit by a trumped-up (if you will) impeachment and a stolen Presidential election, and then rocketing through the war in Iraq and right up to the current electoral circus, with its commodious clown car teeming with would-be Commanders-in-Chief, Stewart has lasered away the layers of hypocrisy in politics and in the media. On any given night, a quick montage of absurdist video clips culled from cable or network news followed by Stewart’s vaudeville reactions can be ten times as deflating to the self-regard of the powerful as any solemn editorial—and twice as illuminating as the purportedly non-fake news that provides his fuel. Stewart grew up in New Jersey. He was schooled at William & Mary, in Virginia. Adrift for a while, he took odd jobs. He tested mosquitoes from the Pine Barrens for encephalitis. He put on puppet shows for disabled children. At the Bitter End and other clubs around the city, he studied all the varieties of standup. He proved especially fluent in a meta-Borscht Belt post-Friars Club rhythm. As a performer, Stewart is nearly as connected to Molly Picon and Professor Irwin Corey as he is to George Carlin. On January 11, 1999, he made his début as “The Daily Show” ’s host, replacing a less political wisenheimer named Craig Kilborn. Initially, Stewart seemed ill at ease with the trappings of his position. He wore a suit that first night, and, in the midst of an interview with the actor Michael J. Fox, he blurted, “Honestly, I feel like this is my bar mitzvah. I’ve never worn something like this, and I have a rash like you wouldn’t believe.” The evening was rounded out by a report on the Clinton impeachment hearings by Stewart’s THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 10 & 17, 2015
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