SATIRE AND PUBLIC OPINION

If you haven’t seen Colbert’s roast at the White House Correspondent’s dinner, watch it at C&L. TMV has a good rundown of the various blogohedron responses to the performance- mostly positive, with much praise lavished on Colbert’s balls, and a smattering of “wow he totally bombed” comments from the right.

But Bloggledygook has one comment worth discussing, I think, apart from the political aspects of the roast. He says, in response to a comment on his (rather abstract) post:

BTW, if by poll standards 65% of Americans view Bush in a dark light, Colbert’s flame is burning at the wrong end. Scathing satire works against overwhelming public opinion, not with it.

I don’t think its at all clear, regardless of poll numbers, that Colbert is just giving voice to ‘overwhelming public opinion’. It surely isn’t the overwhelming opinion of the Washington media and various political hangers-on, who weren’t laughing much during the act. And if there is such a vast discrepancy between the media and ‘overwhelming public opinion’, then Colbert’s satire was exactly on target. Satire doesn’t just work against public opinion, it works against any established, dominant opinion, and in this case that opinion is the MSM’s, which happened to be represented by everyone in the room.

People forget that the novelty of TDS and TCR doesn’t come from mere topical and political comedy; people have been doing that for ages. The novelty is that these shows aim their satire at the media, which is a rather novel phenomena itself in its current incarnation. Almost all of Colbert’s jokes hit the government indirectly through attacks on the media; the policies themselves serve as throw-away punchlines to garnish the real target of his satire. And thats why people are so impressed with Colbert’s performance. It exposes both how much the government’s power rests on its control and influence over the media, and how willingly the media plays into the hands of the powerful.

Humor isn’t a numbers game. Its probably one of the few things left that isn’t. You can’t judge a joke by the number of laughs, and successful satire is not proportional to those who accept its sting.

Update: Colbert has been at the Correspondent’s dinner before. But Laura stole that show.