Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Doing Satire Differently

I’ve been kicking the idea of writing about John Oliver’s new show, Last Week Tonight, for a while now, so it might as well make its way to the blog.  Because I am currently teaching Intercultural Communication, Oliver’s recent episodes on Immigration have almost become regular contributions to our in-class discussions.  Almost every week, I find something in the show worth talking about, arguing with, or expanding upon.

If you aren’t familiar with the show, you should be.  Go “borrow” your friend’s HBOGO password and catch the hell up.  I’ll wait.



All caught up?  Good.  If not you can also find most of the main segments on Youtube (see below).  Also, you should probably find some better friends.


For the uninitiated, John Oliver earned his stripes on The Daily Show as the “senior British /White House/Catholic/ETC correspondent” for the Best F@cking News Team Ever.  While at The Daily Show, he was also afforded the oh-so-rare opportunity to fill in behind the anchor’s desk while the show’s host, Jon Stewart, spent the summer in the Jordan growing a beard.

 
He also may or may not have directed the film Rosewater.  Either way, he grew a beard, so I’m choosing to focus on that.  It’s my blog.

After spending the summer pretending to be Stewart, Oliver was offered a contract by HBO to do a Daily Show-esque program that provided satirical commentary on the news and politics, but with more exposed breasts and expletives.


Since that time, Oliver has received quite a bit of critical attention and praise: John Oliver is outdoing The Daily Show or John Oliver's First Year on HBO was Unquestioned Success or John Oliver Usurped a Genre (of course, the Harvard Political Review used the word "usurped" in their title)

Given that Oliver’s show was thrust into a small dark corner of the TV landscape already occupied to by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert--two of the most prominent figures in American comedy (and, arguably, politics)--it is surprising that his program has been as successful as it has.  One reason for this success is that his transition from Comedy Central to HBO did not simply attempt to re-create The Daily Show without the bleeps. 

The Daily Show mines much of its laughter by sending up the newsmedia. Last Week Tonight, on the other hand, is not a parody program.  To be sure, many of the conventions of news programming--OTS graphics, the news desk, current events topics--have slipped into Oliver’s show, but where Stewart often makes jokes about the conventions themselves, Oliver engages the tropes of news to make jokes about issues.  Sure, he pokes Fox News and CNN, but by and large he takes news production conventions at face value.  In this way, he’s more like a pundit than a parodist.  Think British Bill O’Reilly, not British Stephen Colbert.

Instead of parodying the media, Oliver satirizes the issues.  His comedy, to paraphrase Horace, tells the truth through laughter.  This is not to suggest that The Daily Show is not satirical because it certainly has its moments.  Instead, it is to suggest that the form that organizes each program is markedly different.  To be overly reductive (again, my blog), Last Week Tonight is a satire and The Daily Show is a parody.  Parody can be satirical, but only insofar is it satirizes that which it imitates or at least uses the imitation as a vehicle for satirical critique.  For Stewart, this means that the formic emphasis on news parody limits his ability to satirize events beyond the boundaries of news coverage.  From a rhetorical perspective, this restricts his ability to invent arguments because any argument that he invents is necessarily understood in the context of the parody that provides the form for his discourse.

Oliver, on the other hand, has much more leeway in discovering arguments.  As long as he’s funny, he can more or less create and structure his satirical arguments as he pleases.  This means that his satire tends to be more focused on making clearly defined arguments.  Unlike Stewart, Oliver compels his audience to take specific actions (for instance, email the FCC about Net Neutrality).  He also has more time (by roughly 8 minutes an episode) because HBO doesn’t interrupt his satirical ranting with commercials for Doritos, Mountain Dew, and Call of Duty 4,971.

Admittedly, Oliver, like Stewart, makes his share of dick jokes and wildly unrelated asides, but the formic differences, I think, are telling.  Even in light of his penchant for adolescent humor, Oliver’s truth-telling cuts cleaner than Stewart’s because he is not burdened with the requirement to satirize through parody.  Last Week Tonight, in this way, has been successful at least in part due to the fact that it is satire without parodic form.  Thus, Oliver has greater latitude to invent argument because his only formic requirement is that he satirize.