How liberals killed the talk show Jesters were never moral authorities

One of the most effective spots run by the Trump campaign simply showed Harris in 2019, asserting her support for taxpayer-funded transition surgeries for prisoners. It also referenced her backing for male athletes in girls’ high-school sports. It ended with the punchy slogan: “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” One analysis said it produced a 2.7 swing towards Trump in voters who viewed it. Bad enough that this underlined Harris’s association with a deeply unpopular cause. Worse, in an election where the economy was of prime importance, it reminded voters that they would be picking up the cheque for these values.

The undeniable salience of the trans issue means that this became the first line of defensiveness for the late-night shows. During his show Last Week Tonight, Oliver fumed that “it was frustrating to see the Harris campaign failed to formulate a response” on gender, “especially because it’s pretty easy to do”. Meyers was somehow even more dismissive: “Anyone suggesting Democrats could win elections by throwing trans people under the bus, let me just say: fuck off.”

Of course, the late-night hosts haven’t always held faultlessly liberal opinions. Back in 2013, both Stewart and Colbert were taken to task for jokes about “tranny hookers” and unconvincing transvestites. But over the last 10 years, all of them have fallen in line with the activist position on bathrooms, sports and child transition. In 2018, Colbert (then performing as himself rather than the Stephen Colbert character) confidently told his audience “gender is clearly a spectrum, we know this”. In 2022, Stewart made an episode of his Apple TV show The Problem With Jon Stewart that credulously repeated activist talking points about child transition.

Oliver also joined the trans cause. In 2015, he announced that fears about predatory men exploiting gender identity were “like dragon rustling or space bestiality… Terrible, but it doesn’t really happen.” (Inevitably, it has happened.) And the same Meyers produced a segment that was hailed for “tearing apart trans myths”. All along, the late-night host ideology has held that there is no practical issue with gender self-ID, and that only the most antediluvian would claim otherwise. That position has now been put in front of the electorate and shown to be a liability, but the men who’ve spent a decade making glib jokes on the matter aren’t ready to admit that they got this wrong.

Oliver’s post-election monologue was at least willing to accuse the Harris camp of missteps — although he claimed the problem was not in their muddled and unpopular policies, but rather one of messaging. “As we’ve discussed before, there are vanishingly few trans girls competing in high schools anywhere,” he spluttered. “It is very weird for you to be so focused on this subject.” The actual biggest concern for girls in sport was not male competitors, but “the creepy assistant volleyball coach who keeps liking their posts on fucking Instagram”.

As political comms goes, this is hardly a masterclass. “This isn’t happening, it doesn’t matter, you’re weird for caring and by the way your daughter is probably being groomed by someone else anyway” seems perfectly calibrated to antagonise not assuage. But the late-night TV host doesn’t have to think about persuasion. His job is to flatter and gratify the people who watch him. It was “easy” for Oliver to win over his audience because they already agreed with him.

Meyers delivered this rousing peroration: “If you’re choosing this moment to scapegoat and demonise vulnerable people, rather than aim your criticism at the powerful elites and moneyed interests who paved the way for the return of Trump and stand to benefit from his second term, you’re way off. Instead of blaming marginalised people, maybe look inward, take some accountability.” It’s a laudable sentiment, until you remember who he was actually speaking to here.

It’s not the audience — either at home or in the studio — who are being enjoined to “look inward, take some accountability”. Almost everyone listening to Meyers already agrees with him: this is a polemic for the faithful. The effect is to reassure everyone watching that they don’t, in fact, need to engage in any reflection at all: all accountability can be directed outwards. The audience rewarded him with a warm bath of clapter.

“Clapter” according to Tina Fey is “when you do a political joke and people go, ‘Woo-hoo’. It means they sort of approve but didn’t really like it that much.” She gives credit for the coinage to, surprisingly, Meyers (then on SNL with Fey). And she also pointed to late-night TV hosts as particular culprits, name-checking The Daily Show on Comedy Central. Later she said she hadn’t meant to single it out, but it wasn’t an unfair comment, because The Daily Show is probably the single most influential force in the history of clapter.

Since 1996, The Daily Show had been hosted by Stewart (he left in 2015 and returned this year). It offered fact-dense political satire with an explicitly Left-wing bent, and became a refuge for Democrats in the wilderness of the George W. Bush presidency. The liberal cause was out in the cold politically, but it still had cultural clout. “It would be no overstatement to say that, in the pre-Obama years that followed, the leader of Democratic resistance was Jon Stewart, and he was holding rallies weeknights at 11 p.m Eastern on Comedy Central,” wrote Devin Gordon in a 2022 profile of Stewart.

It’s hard to exaggerate how important Stewart was to an audience that was in danger of feeling utterly defeated by their times. The Daily Show offered a still point of intelligence in the churn of a dumb world, and the relief of laughter at the absurdity of the free world being governed by (imagine!) George W Bush. Stewart’s style — clever but not lofty, funny but still serious, charming but also forensic — presaged Obama’s own urbane presentation.

Not that Stewart would want to embrace such responsibility. His work, he has said, is “pleasant, it’s a distraction… but ultimately feckless”. This feels not entirely honest. As a clapter purveyor, he got to choose when he was playing the clown and when he was playing the legislator. Each role gave cover to the other. Stewart is conflicted about his legacy now. In the years after he first stepped down from The Daily Show, he’s said, “almost everything that I believed and advocated for didn’t come to pass, and probably got worse”.

Perhaps his mistake was believing that satire had any power beyond the destructive. It seems far healthier to take the approach of Peter Cook, who liked to say that he modelled his club The Establishment on “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War”. The worst thing that can happen to a comedian is for them to start to believe in the myth of their own importance.

Stewart couldn’t change politics, but he did change entertainment. Without him, there would probably be no Meyers, or at least not the Meyers that exists now (he has said that his version of late-night TV owes a direct debt to The Daily Show). There would almost certainly be no Oliver or Colbert, since both of them got their big breaks on The Daily Show during Stewart’s tenure — Oliver in the role of British correspondent, and Colbert playing a parody version of a Right-wing broadcaster called (confusingly) Stephen Colbert.

This was a time when the Right-wing media in America was dominated by figures who were both emotionally unhinged and factually unencumbered (Glenn Beck, for example). Colbert skewered them so brilliantly that some of his phrases are now embedded in the language. In 2004, he came up with “truthiness” to denote something that feels true without being, in point of fact, true. And in 2006, he delivered the immortal line “reality has a well-known liberal bias” (a twist on the habitual Right-wing complaint of liberal bias in the media) while roasting George W. Bush at the White House correspondents dinner.

These jokes stuck because they named something that was instantly recognisable. The Right, which was then engaged in its flirtation with the Tea Party, had a whole host of quarrels with actuality — from the mysterious failure of WMD to materialise in Iraq, to the denial of man-made global warming, to the bizarre revival of creationism. Maybe it simply was the case that the Left was dealing with reality while the Right dealt in wishful thinking. Pointing that out and laughing seemed a worthwhile enterprise. Meanwhile, comedians who didn’t fit so comfortably into the Left-liberal consensus dominating TV started to explore new mediums such as podcasts: The Joe Rogan Experience, launched in 2009.

Superiority feeds complacency. When the world you deal in can be contained safely within the borders of a TV screen, it’s easy to begin to believe that you really do have all the answers — especially when you have a tame audience constantly affirming that you’re all on the right side of history together. As Oliver said, in a recent segment on Robert F Kennedy Jr, “it does show just how easy it is to reel people in when you’re spouting self-assured bullshit on an unchallenged platform”. Presumably, this was never intended as a self-own, but it perfectly describes the situation of the late-night host, grown flabby on endless audience affirmation untempered by responsibility.

Is it really a surprise that, as political comedy stopped even notionally attempting to be funny, politics in America was overtaken by Trump, who treats his rallies like stand-up gigs? Trump was a gift to late night in the Obama years: a foe with all the belligerence and bizarreness that had characterised the best targets of the George W Bush government. The late-night shows thought he was safe to promote to the level of unofficial opposition, because they couldn’t imagine anyone taking him seriously. They had lost contact with the part of the country that did.

The late-night shows don’t have the force they used to have. The biggest broadcasting moment of this presidential election was Trump going on Rogan’s podcast and spitballing about becoming a “whale psychiatrist”: the alternative media is just the media now, and it’s more spectacularly absurd than anything Colbert imagined. Even those, like me, who are depressed at the prospect of another Trump term have to admit that this is a lot more entertaining than being hectored by a man at a desk.

The next generation of liberal media will probably be born the same way the Republican media was, out of the glare of the TV lights, where you have to do more than turn on the APPLAUSE sign to bring your audience with you. “The resistance” isn’t on NBC, CBS, HBO or Comedy Central. All you’ll find there are some has-beens working their tired schtick, telling a shrinking circle of people feel-good untruths with pauses for applause. Jesters should never be confused with moral authorities.

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Sarah Ditum is a columnist, critic and feature writer.

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