Late Night Comedy Stopped Punching at Power and Started Lecturing

A joke is a tiny machine with one moving part: surprise. You build a small expectation, you let the audience lean into it, and then you pull the chair out. The laugh is the sound of a person falling a short distance and discovering they were not hurt. That is why a good joke cannot be assigned in advance. If the audience knows where the punch line is going, and knows who it will land on, and knows that the host will look into the camera with the right expression when it arrives, then you do not have a joke. You have a sermon with a drum rimshot.

I want to argue that this is what happened to a large part of late-night television, and that the cure is old and simple: aim at everybody. Let me define the terms, because a fair argument needs them.

What we are talking about

By late-night comedy I mean the network and cable talk-and-monologue shows that air after the local news and open with a host telling topical jokes. By punching at power I mean the oldest job in comedy: laughing at whoever currently holds office, money or influence, regardless of party. By lecturing I mean a joke whose real function is to tell the audience what to believe, with the laugh serving as a reward for agreeing.

I am not saying comedians cannot have opinions. They always had them. I am saying that a monologue whose targets are chosen by the host's politics is a different product from one whose targets are chosen by the news, and that the audience can tell the difference even when it cannot say how.

I should also say what I am not claiming. I will not cite ratings, because ratings change and I do not want to hand anyone an easy rebuttal that is a quarter out of date. This argument stands on the structure of the craft and on the record of how the form began.

The Carson model

For three decades, from 1962 to 1992, Johnny Carson opened The Tonight Show with a monologue about the day's news. It was understood by his writers and by his audience that the president of the United States was a target, and that this was true whoever the president was. Carson joked about Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush. The political jokes were a small part of the show, which also had guests, sketches and a desk to lean on, and the point is that none of the jokes asked the audience to join a team. A viewer in Ohio and a viewer in Oregon could laugh at the same line, because the line was about the office or the man's public foibles, not about the viewer's side.

The monologue tradition continued after Carson. Through the 1990s the hosts who followed him built long runs on topical jokes about the president of the day, and when a scandal broke in the Clinton years, the joke supply was nearly inexhaustible. Nobody had to be told that Clinton jokes were a Democratic problem. The jokes were about the scandal. The audience laughed because it was funny, and the target happened to be a Democrat. A decade or so earlier, the same audience had laughed at the same kind of jokes about a Republican.

Saturday Night Live, which began in 1975, kept the habit for a long time. The early impression of President Gerald Ford as a man who tripped over furniture was among the best-known bits of its first seasons, and it was grossly unfair to a former college football player. In later years the show gave us comic versions of the first President Bush, of Bill Clinton and of the second President Bush. Many of those sketches were pointed, and some were savage. But they were portraits, built on the man's mannerisms and on events of the week, and they could be enjoyed by people who did not share the performer's votes.

The tradition is older than television. Benjamin Franklin published a satire in 1773, "An Edict by the King of Prussia," pretending that Frederick the Great had claimed authority over Britain on the same grounds that Britain claimed authority over the colonies. It was a joke at the expense of the people who held power over the colonists, and it worked because it turned their own logic back on them. The form has always been one thing: the governed laughing at the governing.

The steelman, and it is not a bad one

Before I argue, let me give the other side its best case, in words its defenders would accept.

Comedy has always had a point of view. The Smothers Brothers were taken off CBS in 1969 after fights with the network over their anti-war material and their political edge, and they are remembered as heroes of the form. Satire has historically leaned toward the side that felt shut out of power. And in an age when a few powerful interests shape the news, a comic who takes a side is simply being honest, as a columnist is honest about being a columnist. If a host believes that one party is dangerous, why should he pretend to a symmetry he does not feel? Moreover, the audience is self-selecting, because anyone who dislikes the show can change the channel. Seen this way, a late-night host with a strong view is a citizen speaking, and conservatives who wish to be left alone to say what they believe should be generous about it.

I agree with every word of that except the conclusion. Here is why, in numbered points.

The argument

1. A joke needs a target who can fight back, or at least shrug. Satire's moral licence comes from its aim. Mocking the strong is brave. Mocking the weak is a bully's work. When a show spends its monologue on the same party night after night, while the other party's failures produce a quick, apologetic gag at the end of the segment, the audience smells something. The laughs get thinner because the risk has gone out of the room.

1. Predictability is the death of surprise. I said at the top that a joke runs on surprise. A host who always reaches the same conclusion has turned each monologue into an announcement. The viewer who agrees nods. The viewer who disagrees leaves, and the room gets more uniform with every departure. Over time the show is addressed to the people who need the least persuading, which is a poor business and a poorer comedy.

1. A monoculture in the writers' room narrows the jokes. Think about how a monologue is produced. A staff of writers, working fast, pitches hundreds of lines a day, and a handful survive. The survivors are the ones that make the room laugh. If the room shares a politics, then jokes that cut against that politics will be pitched less, will get fewer laughs when pitched, and will be cut sooner. Nobody has to give an order. Each writer learns, quickly, what gets a laugh in that room. This is not a conspiracy, and I will not pretend it is one. It is a selection mechanism, as ordinary as a sports team that recruits only from a single high school. The product tilts, and the people inside it feel, honestly, that they are being edgy.

1. The lecture displaces the observation. The best jokes notice something true that you had not noticed. A joke that merely repeats a view you already hold is flattery. When a host stops making observations and starts making arguments, the audience is paying to be told it is right. That is not comedy's job, and it is not good at it.

1. Trust is a function of balance. A viewer who learns that the host will never turn on his own side stops giving the host credit as an honest broker. He may still enjoy the show, but he stops treating the jokes as a read on the world. A comic who wants to be believed, and whose jokes carry any news at all, spends that trust every night.

The rebuttal to the honesty defence

The strongest form of the defence is the honesty one: a comic should say what he thinks. I do not dispute the right. I dispute the craft claim that it makes better comedy.

Look at the comics who are admired across the divide. They are almost always the ones whose targets are unpredictable. The comedian who can skewer a president of his own party, and then skewer the opposition in the same set, earns a licence nobody else has. The audience trusts that the next line is unrehearsed. That licence is the whole asset. A show that has tied itself to one side has sold it.

There is also the matter of what happens when the host's side wins. Satire is supposed to be an opposition sport. When the same people who spent years mocking the powerful discover that they now admire the powerful, the jokes go soft. It is a truth of the trade that comedians do their best work in opposition, which is one reason satire so often ends up on the right when the culture's institutions lean the other way. I made the longer version of that case in Satire From Aristophanes to Swift Has Always Been the Weapon of the Underdog.

Why this belongs in a conservative's column

Because the comedy in question is a cultural institution, and institutions matter. Late-night television was one of the few places where a nation, tired from the day, laughed at the same news at roughly the same time. When that stops being true, the culture loses a little of its common ground. I made a similar point about live performers in When Comedians Avoid Campus Crowds, the Whole Culture Gets Less Funny, where the problem was audiences who would not tolerate risk. Here the problem is hosts who will not take it.

It also matters because a free society argues with itself through humour. A culture that can laugh at its leaders is a culture in which leaders are not too frightened or too revered to be corrected. The Founders understood this. The press of the early republic was savage and partisan, and the First Amendment made no promise that it would be polite. The text says only that Congress shall make no law abridging "the freedom of speech, or of the press." It does not say the speech must be balanced. It does say the speech must be free, and that includes the freedom to be one-sided, tedious and wrong. A conservative should defend that freedom for late-night hosts as readily as for anyone else. If a host wants to be a pundit, he has every right. The point is only that the audience has every right to notice that he stopped being funny.

I do not want government anywhere near this. It would be the wrong remedy, and the history of broadcast regulation, which I discuss in FCC v. Pacifica and the Seven Dirty Words That Still Shape Broadcast Rules, is a warning about how quickly an agency turns a cultural complaint into a licensing threat. The remedy for one-sided comedy is competition. Hosts who want the whole country can have it. Writers who can make both sides laugh can write for both. And viewers who want a real joke can turn the dial, as they have always been free to do.

What the other side gets wrong about "balance"

Here is where the usual objection lands. The critic says: you are asking comics to pretend that both sides are equally ridiculous. No. I am asking them to notice that both sides provide material. Nobody is required to find a false equivalence. Different failures deserve different jokes, and a joke about a bad policy is better than a joke about a bad person. But a show that cannot find a single joke about its own side across a year of news is not finding facts, it is filtering them.

The cleverest comedy has always come from the discipline of turning on the people you like. Satirists who spare their friends are courtiers. And a court jester who only laughs at the king's enemies has a different name: a flatterer.

A short test for any monologue

If you want to check a show for yourself, try this. It needs no ratings and no Nielsen data, only a week of your attention.

1. Count the targets. Over a week, how many different public figures does the host mock, and from how many parties?
2. Watch the end of the segment. Does the host ever land a joke on his own side's mistake, or does it vanish into a quick aside?
3. Listen for the laugh. Does the audience laugh at the joke, or at the reference? A cheer for a name is a rally. A laugh at a phrase is comedy.
4. Ask whether a person of a different politics could laugh without feeling insulted as a person.

A show that passes is doing the old job. A show that fails can still be popular, but it is something else.

The case in brief

1. Comedy's moral licence comes from aiming at the powerful, whoever they are, and the Carson-era monologue did that for a generation.
2. A host who always reaches the same conclusion removes surprise, which is the engine of a joke.
3. A monoculture in the writers' room narrows the jokes through ordinary selection, with no one giving an order.
4. One-sided comedy spends the trust that makes a comic believable, while comedy aimed at everyone keeps it.
5. The remedy is competition and a better product, not regulation.

What you can do: for one week, watch or read the monologue of a show you normally avoid and one you normally enjoy, count the targets in each, and tell a friend which one made you laugh more.