It would be an extreme understatement to say we are living through troubled times. Although, sadly, horrific events are common, the past few months have offered up more than their fair share. During the news coverage of the Boston Marathon Bombing, I was transported back to December - remembering the hours I spent crying over the Newtown Shooting. (I had just given birth to my second child; I watched the coverage with her in my arms unable to imagine what the parents of those lost children were going through). Hours after I had this stream-of-consciousness string of memories (linking the violence of the bombing to that of the shooting), I learned that the gun control legislation had failed to pass in any real form. Suddenly my sadness was turned to anger. And when I find that I'm angry about something news worthy, I know I have an entertainment outlet that makes me feel a little bit better: infotainment programming.
The visibility and growth of the infotainment genre on television during the 21st century has, as of late, begun to spark academic discussion. An online poll conducted by TIME magazine in June of 2009 reported that Jon Stewart, the host Comedy Central’s The Daily Show (1996-present), was named the most trusted televised newscaster since Walter Cronkite. The following year, People reported that he had been voted the “most influential man of 2010.” This title was given to him just days before his political event, The Rally to Restore Sanity, drew over a quarter million people to the National Mall in Washington D.C. on October 30th, 2010. This suggests that such programming, originally designed for comedic/entertainment purposes, is beginning to supplant traditional news media in interesting ways.
I’m particularly interested in this televisual genre’s evolution post-9/11 and how it connects to affect theory (the study of emotion). I argue that its popularity is largely due to the audience’s need to laugh through (or to displace) their anger toward the political powers-that-be during the first decade of the 21stcentury. I also suggest that viewers may be drawn to such programming as a way of being enticed to actually experience negative affect and/or to feel emotionally bonded as part of an imagined community of sorts. Finally, in regard to The Daily Show specifically, I’m also interested in Stewart’s “performance” of anger, his satirical critiques of the media industry at large, and the implications of both.
It would be incorrect to credit 9/11 alone with the rise in popularity of the infotainment genre as it has a history that stretches far beyond the date of the national tragedy and results from over half a century of systematic changes in the news industry. Neil Postman first stimulated this conversation among academics with his seminal work, Amusing Ourselves to Death which highlighted how public discourse in the U.S. was assuming the form of entertainment programming. Reece Schonfeld, CNN’s first president, notes that in today’s television network world everything “has become worldwide and skin deep… Coverage splashes over everything and saturates nothing.” In a desperate attempt to reverse declining viewership rates, news itself has become “entertainment.” And while news was becoming entertainment… entertainment decided to get into the news business. Often with a heavy helping of satire to assist in this quest.
Amber Day, author of Satire & Dissent:
Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate, goes as far as stating that
programs like The
Daily Show are contributing to a renaissance taking place in the realm of
political satire (1). She argues that “the political discourse taking place in
satiric register currently appears far more vibrant than any of the traditional
outlets for serious political dialogue (Day 1). And the public seems to agree
with these scholars. This might account for the fact that The Daily Show
has not only won countless Emmys, but has received a Television Critics
Association award, not for comedy, but for outstanding achievement in news and
information, as well as two Peabody Awards for its election coverage, “Indecision
2000” and “Indecision 2004.”
Ratings can easily prove that the show is popular. My
question moves beyond its popularity and asks what The Daily Show
(or this genre more generally) does to/for viewers emotionally? Arguably, we
all flock to TV to manipulate or modulate our emotions in some way or another.
Larger powers try to do this for viewers, of course, as well, but I’d argue
viewers themselves are using certain entertainment outlets to control their
emotional states. This is not a profound or novel argument as everything we do
for entertainment, arguably, is to modulate emotion (or more simply, usually,
to create or maintain positive emotion). Arguments have been made in terms of
other media along this line: people flock to the weepies (melodramas) to
experience an emotional catharsis through viewing such sad films; adolescents
rid themselves of aggression by playing violent video games; etc. My point is
not to defend such claims, but to acknowledge that such have been made in the
past and the basic tenet they rest upon – that we use entertainment objects for
our own purposes (and often emotion-centered purposes) – seems sound. What I am
arguing when analyzing popular televisual genres of the 21stcentury
is that they are linked in part to the cultural climate that has been created
post-9/11. So here are a few theories on what The Daily Show, in
particular, does for viewers’ emotional states.Theory One: The Humor Relief Theory
The first way in which the program may be utilized aligns with a specific theory of humor: the relief theory. Psychologists have previously suggested that humor is a defense mechanism and that humor provokes a relief in one's fears. (I would say it provides a relief from any number of negative affects more broadly). Laughter has the power to convert negative affect into positive affect; comedic texts have the ability to act as affectual registers - altering emotional states at the consumer's will. The strategic consumption of certain comedic televisual genres could then be seen as a coping mechanism wherein viewers choose to engage in humor to rid themselves of negative affects such as fear or anger.
In the case of The Daily Show, viewers are presented with images from the mainstream media that may spark the affects of fear and/or anger (among others). These images are delivered in a satiric fashion (often cross-compared to other clips to point out absurdities and inconsistencies); sandwiched between Jon Stewart's comedic commentary; and preceded and followed by a humorous still image and pun-filled caption that boils the news story down to one witty punch line. The negative affect as the laughter created from Stewart's delivery of it diffuses and displaces the original fear or anger.
Theory Two: Affect Mimicry
My second explanation for why viewers tune into The Daily Show rests on research which suggests we often mirror the affects that we come into contact with. We smile when others smile. In fact, we often put ourselves into positive social situations in order to "catch" positive moods. In episodes of The Daily Show, Stewart's expressions of anger are often seen in differing degrees. Most of his satire is delivered with a sarcastic bent, his angry rants exaggerated for comedic purposes. The issues that enrage Stewart the most, seemingly, receive the greatest amount of airtime and are often the targets for his most amplified performances of emotion. An example of this would be the song and dance number titled "Fox News, Go Fuck Yourselves" he did after a back-and-forth media war with Fox News pundit, Bernard Goldberg. (Goldberg went on air telling Stewart: "if you want to be a funny man who talks to a crowd who will laugh at anything you say, that's fine by me - no problem. But clearly you want to be a social commentator more than just a comedian. But if you want to be a good one you're going to have to grow some guts... you're not nearly as edgy as you think you are." Goldberg was criticizing Stewart for not being as hard on his liberal guests (in terms of generalizing statements about the opposing political camp) as he was on Fox news and the conservative base). Stewart clearly wanted to give this issue attention, as the 11-minute muscial number (including a full gospel choir) indicates. Skits like this aim to grab the viewer's attention -- getting them to attend not just to his comical performances but to the issue at hand that inspired it. The more "visible" his anger, the more it appears he wants the viewer to share in it. But at times, the comdey and performance aspects of the show drop away and viewers see a moment of non-performative, real anger from the host. In these rare times when he is truly enraged, and visibly angry, his straight man persona is dropped and he often addresses the camera in fiery earnest. Witnessing these varying levels of anger arguably produces comparable levels of anger within the viewing audience at home who empathizes with Stewart.
My argument would be that while some may turn to The Daily Show and other infotainment programs to be distracted from their fear or anger - to rid themselves of such negative affect - that some may very well turn to the program in order to feel these very same negative feelings. In a time that might be desensitizing us to such emotions, to a degree, through the constant bombardment of negative imagery and fearful rhetoric, viewers may turn to a show like The Daily Show in order to be enticed to feel something whatsoever. They may be drawn to the text in the hope that they will encounter moments of such "real" anger; they may long to find someone expressing the anger that they are not.
Theory Three: Imagined Communities
A third emotion-driven reason that viewers may turn to infotainment is to be part of an imagined community joined by the same opinions and feelings about the current cultural climate. Benedict Anderson first coined this term, conceptualizing how imagined communities helped to form "a deep, horizontal comradeship" that sustained the nation-state. He argued that the advent of newspaper publications complete with the date in the upper corner provided people with a connection to one another. People would pick up the newspaer and know that somewhere in their country, millions of others were sharing in that particular moment, in the shared experience of reading that same newspaper edition. In a different way, this may be at work for television viewers today. In many ways viewers of The Daily Show know who other viewers of the program are - or they assume they do: like minded individuals, likely liberal leaning democrats. They expect that the viewership will share their own opinions (and those of Stewart's likely) as well as their own emotions. Part of the draw of watching a program such as this is being part of a specific in-group; it allows one not to feel alone in times that might otherwise seem isolating. Unlike Anderson's readers who were all reading the newspaper at the same time, Stewart's viewers are not necessarily watching at the same time or even through the same medium (as many will watch the show on delay, view it through YouTube or Hulu clips, or download it off of Comedy Central's own website), but they still can imagine someone else sitting somewhere (before a flatscreen television, a computer terminal, a smartphone) viewing the same materials and feeling the same way: laughing at the same media images, being angered by the same political misdoings, and so forth.
Conclusion
In the days following the September 11th attacks, a variety of people - such as Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, and Roger Rosenblatt of Time Magazine - lined up to declare the end of the age of irony. People believed that irony would have to die in order for the seriousness of this current situation to be fully comprehended. But irony did not die. On the contrary, irony - criticized as it often is for its political inefficiency - seems to have saved the day, working toward surprising political aims. Irony also seems to have risen to another task; as the choice form of news dissemination for a large number of people, it has become a way of having control over the emotions that such news content sparks within them - especially in a time when viewers feel they have rather little control over the cultural climate that news stems from. This explains my love for the show. When the world provides news that makes me especially angry, I can work through it by watching it reenacted and critiqued by Jon Stewart and his crew.
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