No.
Performances are inauthentic
I think the saying “it’s funny because it’s true” is as true as “it’s true because it’s funny.” Comedy is as efficient in turning reality into laughs, as it is in selling a specific narrative with its laughs, and it does both by disarming the listeners with humor.
Comedy, like most performances, aims to entertain. While telling the truth can be a part of it, it is not the motivation, and this intent is important.
Because punchlines are reductive by nature. Elegance is reductive. Wit is the ability to repackage reality into something clever and rub others’ noses in it and have them enjoy it.
Politics is about resolving conflicts, and the rise of standup comedy being used as a gateway to serious political conversations has added to the problem of growing partisanship in the US. Because punchlines usually (although not always) need to be resolute and un-nuanced, to summon laughs as a political slogan would summon cheers.
But it’s about activism and awareness. It’s about getting the audience interested in the issue and wanting to do the research themselves.
That’s overestimating the audience. I think for every audience member who would later do “the research”, far more would just retell an even more watered-down and reductive version of the partisan punchline at their next social gathering, perhaps at a Thanksgiving dinner. I am also against activism and awareness politics in general, but more on that another time.
I am not saying that we shouldn’t allow politics in comedy. I’m only saying that political comedy is good for comedy and bad for politics. It is good for entertainment but bad for social discourse.
I enjoy eating fried chicken and will never suggest that we should ban fried chicken — but I’m not gonna say eating fried chicken is healthy. And I think too many people consume political comedy thinking that it is a “healthy” way to consume politics, and political comedy is also being sold to the public with that notion, and everyone who’s involved — from the comedian to the audience member — all believe that the whole thing is healthy.
I don’t even think presidential debates should be televised. They are performances that overemphasize charisma and wit, to the point that they usually overshadow the more substantive elements of the candidates.
Politics at its core is boring and complicated, but a democracy simply cannot expect its 300 million people to all tune into C-Span 24/7 and consume raw, unprocessed political information to stay informed as a competent voter — full-time politicians can’t even do that. And so, there is a demand for reductive political narratives, and the storytellers — journalists and comedians alike — will each choose their ingredient and add their flair and sell the pill to the willing consumer who has been told that they should be taking these pills regularly, as an upright, informed citizen of a democracy.
I do think that as caricaturesque as modern US politics are, the way it is discussed by the average voter is consistently even more caricaturesque, and with the voter-media-politician feedback loop, the window of absurdity shifts further and further away from cordiality. It has been a rather embarrassing descent, and comedy is partly to blame.
The sugarcoat makes the poison
At the beginning of the last section, I said that most performances aim to entertain, not all. Some performances aim to persuade. Political theater, for instance, or any form of propaganda. Commercials are another example of campaigns that are disguised as entertainment. Sometimes a proclaimer is omitted and the audience takes the pill without knowing its content because of the sugarcoat, thinking it as just entertainment.
The audience may consume the heavily biased information as facts, more easily than otherwise, because it was entertaining. It was sugarcoated.
This applies more to network and late-night TV hosts than stand-up comics.
By monetizing politics as entertainment, the information is steered by the invisible hand of the market, which tends to favor the things markets tend to favor — money, power, and inertia, not necessarily the best ally of change.
Hiring an expensive lawyer won’t get you off every time, but it will give you a significant edge on average in the supposedly fair justice system. Along the same vein, a funnier comedian, regardless of their political viewpoint, can better capture their audience and be heard by more people.
How funny a person is should not be a major factor in whether their perspectives deserved to be heard. I concede that this is natural, but just because something is natural does not mean that it is good. It is natural for us to crave fatty food, but this is not a valid argument for a hypothetical pro-fatty food lobby during a cardiac disease epidemic.
Of course, there are bigger fish to fry and this is not the biggest problem in our society by a long shot — but I do think that it is a growing problem that tends to fly under the radar of those who tend to be the most politically aware.
We should not put comedians on a pedestal just because they are already on stage. They are not the thinkers we need, but maybe they are the ones we deserve.
Epilogue: The tragedy of Jon Stewart
I was partially inspired by a video essay by Coffee Break titled “The tragedy of Jon Stewart.”
I recommend it.
Tl;dr Comedy lacks nuance. Politics require nuance. Politics discourse is becoming less nuanced. Political comedy further discourages that nuance. This tl;dr lacks nuance. Read the whole thing for nuance.
