If you havent seen Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, you should check it out! Its an HBO show, but its been posted elsewhere online. Ill share a link below. ----- Though both Stewart and Colbert are excellent comics who offer cathartic relief from mind-numbing bureaucracy and the 24/7 reactionary news cycle — and can, when they want to, rally the masses, their jokes are usually in the service of mocking Fox News anchors and rolling their eyes at cartoonish figures like Donald Trump. Rarely, if ever, does their comedy seek to fix the broken systems they so frequently mock. In a 2012 essay for the Baffler, writer Steve Almond described the shortcomings of Stewart and Colbert’s style: “What Stewart and Colbert do most nights is convert civic villainy into disposable laughs … [treating] the ills of modern media and politics as matters of folly, not concerted evil.” He identified the core emptiness of their satirical approach: “Rather than targeting the obscene cruelties borne of greed and fostered by apathy, they harp on a rogues’ gallery of hypocrites familiar to anyone with a TiVo or a functioning memory.” Stewart and Colbert’s goal, he said, is to “mollify people, not incite them.” But comedy, at its loftiest, should confront the “moral complacency” of its audience. Enter John Oliver, who is confronting America’s “moral complacency” much more effectively than either of our two leading cable satirists. On the “Daily Show,” he could seem like the goofy, faux-oblivious British lackey peering through the window at American politics. But on his own show, he has demonstrated the potential to convert his audience’s frustration into action, challenging his viewers to answer tough, uncomfortable questions that Colbert and Stewart often sidestep.
Posted on: Wed, 25 Jun 2014 19:54:36 +0000
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