Chill Out: Humor Isn't Dead

(And Hyperbole CERTAINLY isn't).

There's an echoing meme making its way through the collective consiousness (or at least, through the media) that the election of Barack Obama has killed political comedy.

Now, I supposed Time magazine (this week, the latest to weigh in on the phenomenon, and I must admit I've only skimmed the start of the article, so I don't know what conclusions they come to) has to fill column inches to stay alive, but c'mon...

Every time there's a new administration, people question whether it's going to be bad for late night shows and comedians, apparently on the mistaken assumption that there actually exists a politician who won't have any scandals, who won't after the ubiquity of the Presidency have ticks and foibles to make fun of and who will never be seen as anything but serious and low-key.

Here's a thought: A new President is GOOD for political comedy. Yes, it makes the job a little harder, but that refreshes the humor for a while! How many more times can we watch Jon Stewart of the Daily Show (and I pick on him because he's still one of the best) do his snarky little Bush laugh or his "Dick Cheney as the Penguin"? He, at least, finds ways to keep the CONTENT of the routine fresh and funny, but how much more comedic gold is there to be wrung out of the recurring Dick Cheney segment "You don't know D*CK"?

Every four or eight years, it's time for the political comedians to get off of their asses and do their jobs, stop riffing on years-old material and actually come up with something new and funny to say. The good ones do it without trouble, to give props where I previously dinged, I have no question the Daily Show will continue to serve up good offerings under this or any other administration.

But the bad ones... the ones who have been feeding us a diet of Iraq jokes and malapropisms and "Dick Cheney is Darth Vader" for the last 5 years. This will be hard on them, but GOOD for comedy, and thus GOOD for us.

I wanted to close this with a call back to an essay I wrote about 4 months back on how there was no "death of the Republican party" as some where saying, any more than there was a "permanent Republican majority" as Tom DeLay and Karl Rove were claiming prior to the 1996 elections... but then I realized that I wrote that one on a business trip and I don't think I ever posted it, and one of the things they teach you about writing is that a call back is really only effective if there's a good chance your readers have READ the thing you're calling back to.

So instead I'll just say that superlatives are rarely accurate and hyperbole is not the greatest thing ever. Tired political comedy will return with familiarity. The Republican party will return with the contempt that familiarity breeds.

In the words of a picture that was going around the internet last November and December, but with Obama replaced by Father Time: Chill out, MF-ers, I got this.