Laughing on the Inside
I have a piece on the Weekly Standard website about the success and failures of the Jon Stewart comedy camp.
Like most of my fellow anti-cultists, I don’t deny the comic talents of the Stewart camp; I know their gags can hit gold. I’m grateful for the emergence through their channels of Steve Carrell, if not Lewis Black. I respect Chicago’s Second City improv school where they trained. Though darlings of the liberal-left orthodoxy, deviating from it on nothing at all, their politics don’t account for the problem, either. What, then, explains it? Why do I and so many others find it impossible to watch even a few minutes of The Daily Show or The Colbert Report without hurting the remote in our haste to switch channels? Why did we look upon the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, staged in Washington on Halloween eve, to be one of those nightmares from which a reading of Thomas L. Friedman: Selected Sonnets would be a welcome respite?
