Why There Will Never Be a “Conservative” Jon Stewart

The central ethic at the heart of the satirist’s work is not political in nature, but rhetorical.

By WILLIAM DUFFY

Tonight, Jon Stewart steps down as host of The Daily Show (1996- ). As a result, we’re seeing many retrospectives on Stewart’s tenure, e.g., his best moments, the funniest correspondents, how the host evolved. But of all the pieces floating around, I’m still thinking about Oliver Morrison’s “Waiting for the Conservative Jon Stewart,” published last February in The Atlantic.

In his essay, Morrison wonders why, given the success of satirical news programs like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report (2005–14), and Last Week Tonight (2014- ), there are no “conservative” versions of these popular television shows. The author’s curiosity is relatively straightforward: few satirists are conservative, and those who come to mind, like Dennis Miller and The Flipside’s Michael Loftus, aren’t all that funny. This leads Morrison to wonder, quite generally, “What is it about political satire that makes it so hard for conservatives to get it right?”

But Morrison’s attempt to answer this overly generalized question relies on, well, generalizations. First, he writes, most comedians tend to be liberal, or as he puts it, “One explanation is simply that proportionately fewer people with broadly conservative sensibilities choose to become comedians.” I can’t imagine a claim like this one can be supported with any hard data, not only because it would require a comprehensive definition of what it means to be a comedian, but also because it presupposes that a comedian’s political identifications are somehow integral to the actual work of doing comedy.

Morrison’s second suggestion, while also a generalization, is nevertheless a bit more theoretical: “political humor,” he writes, “might have an inherently liberal bias.” Referencing the work of a political scientist who has studied the subject in addition to offering nods to Plato, Freud, and Hegel, Morrison suggests that certain forms of humor, satire especially, explicitly function to question the status quo.

It is certainly interesting to speculate about the general mechanics of satire, but Morrison ends up misrepresenting his subject. The problem arises in the central question animating his inquiry — which is, again, why are there are no “conservative” versions of Stewart?

This question presupposes that Jon Stewart’s success has something to do with his politics, and, moreover, it assumes that The Daily Show is a “liberal” program in the same ways that, say, The O’Reilly Factor (1996- ) is a “conservative” one. But it’s not.