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.
My class spent a good 3 hours one night comparing the differences in form and content of the programs.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of satire and parody, we came to the conclusion that, while labels in the end have little value when they're just labels, determining something as satire or parody is often done in terms of relation to similar texts. So between TDS and TCR, TDS is easily satire and TCR is clearly parody. But when LWT was brought in, TDS appears much more like satiric parody than satire alone.
Back to what LWT is doing, I find it much more compelling than TDS. While I have little evidence to argue that it is having a greater impact than the Stewart/Colbert universe (and is LWT part of it...I don't know), saying so feels right (there's a truthiness to it for certain). As viewers, most of my class seemed to feel that the greater length afforded to Oliver to address topics permitted him to be more detailed. Obviously. But this may be the thing that allows him to, as you point out, go after issues instead of institutions. And this is important because this, again, appears to be having some real world impact (like net neutrality).
BUT just as Oliver is given more time per episode, he's given less episodes. So while Stewart or Colbert (for a few more weeks) can break down an issue slowly over time, Oliver really only gets 1-2 shots at a topic before his time is up. Here may afford an opportunity to look into the strengths and limitations of tackling issues hard all at once or slowly over time.
One place where the formic difference is especially clear is in topic selection. TDS is more or less restricted to the topoi of the most recent news cycle. LWT, on the other hand, draws on whatever Oliver sees fit from whenever he feels appropriate. He is still topical satire, but the topical nature of satire isn't bound up in the 24 hour news cycle in the same way that Stewart and Colbert's is.
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