What journalists can learn from truth-telling comedians
That was a bummer. Just as I sat down to write about how comedians have been the greatest source of inspiration in my journalistic career, the genre of comedy was pronounced dead. Worse, in fact: turns out it wasn’t the first time this year that satire had died.
It must have something to do with Donald Trump being president. What’s the point of making jokes once reality itself has become a farce, many a comedian will have asked herself lately. A narcissistic multi-billionaire real estate mogul turned reality TV star famous for fake-firing C-list celebrities secured the presidency on a platform promising to bring back jobs and put America first by draining the swamp of out-of-touch elites?
Yeah, try turning that into satire.
But maybe the arrow also points the other way. As reality increasingly manifested as satire, satire evolved into an increasingly serious source of information and social criticism. A trend roundly used by The Daily Show, the fake news show that under Jon Stewart’s reign grew into one of the most trusted sources of news among young Americans. Which is, of course, a little ironic: while more and more Americans are decrying real news as fake, actual fake news has become the real thing.
Why all my journalistic heroes are comedians
It’s been three years since Jon Stewart stepped down as the host of The Daily Show, but that hasn’t tarnished his legacy one bit. Many of his proteges have gotten their own shows: from Full Frontal with Samantha Bee to Last Week Tonight with John Oliver to Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas. And coming soon to Netflix: Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act.
You might even call Oliver the spiritual father of a whole new comedy genre: investigative satire. Where we used to be dependent on newspapers or the nightly news for in-depth research into current events, now a British comedian with funny glasses and a YouTube channel is filling the role with verve.
And indeed, it’s not a coincidence that as a journalist for 17 years, I’ve always turned to comedians for inspiration. Hours and hours I spent watching George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Ricky Gervais — the great social critics of our time. I binge-watched Correspondents’ Dinners with Stephen Colbert, Larry Willmore, Michelle Wolf. I even got a Netflix account just so I could endlessly rewatch Bill Burr, Chris Rock, and Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee with Jerry Seinfeld.
So, I’m hardly exaggerating also when I say that De Correspondent, the crowdfunding world-record-breaking Dutch journalism platform I founded five years ago as a counterweight to the sensational and superficial daily news, was largely inspired by comedians too. From “fake news anchor” Jon Stewart to his British parallel Charlie Brooker to the gone-much-too-soon Bill Hicks: none of my journalistic heroes is a journalist. All of them are comics.
The more comedy I watched, the more existential my doubts about journalism became
The way each of these comedic geniuses shaped my view of journalism differs, but one thing they all share is the way their merciless criticism of the contemporary news media permeates their comedy.
A perfect illustration of this is a sketch by Bill Hicks, who once christened himself “Noam Chomsky with dick jokes,” that has attained cult status over the years. In the sketch, Hicks lambasts the one-sided nature of news reports on drugs. Pretty much every Bill Hicks fan can recite his suggestion — to highlight the positive aspects of drug use for a change — word for word:
“Today a young man on acid realized all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration; that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively; there’s no such thing as death; life is only a dream and we’re the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather.”
It was this very sentence that got me thinking early on: what is news really? Could this be news? And if not, why? My search for answers to these questions became the foundation of my later news philosophy: that we fundamentally need to redefine what news is about if it is to live up to its promise of telling us ‘what’s going on’ in the world.
And of course Stewart’s and Brooker’s whole careers have essentially been one long critique of the news media as well. Who doesn’t know Brooker’s hilarious news piece in which he mocks just how those pieces are made. Or Stewart’s merciless takedowns of Fox News, better known as Bullshit Mountain.
Few satirists lay bare the shortcomings of the modern media machine as expertly as they have. Simplistic sensationalism, bizarre breaking news, hype-driven hyperventilation: the more often I watched Newswipe or The Daily Show, the more existential my doubts grew regarding the profession I’d chosen.
News is not an event. It’s a choice
That the 24-hour news industry is a nonstop source of sensation and trivia is, thanks in part to comedians like Stewart, Brooker, and Oliver, a realization that’s sunk deep into our collective consciousness. But the main thing all their criticism of the media taught me is just how much the news that we consume day in, day out is a choice.
News is not simply “what’s happening in the world.” No, it’s the outcome of a gigantic number of large and small, deliberate and accidental decisions that the producers of news make before rolling their product out the door. From headline writer to editor in chief, they all play a role in the production of the most influential information in our society.
The meta-gaze shared by Stewart and his fellow comedians is a constant reminder that every medium that pretends to be simply a messenger of what’s going on in the world is feeding its audience a fundamental lie. That’s why one of De Correspondent’s founding principles is the idea that honest journalism begins with transparency about the journalist’s own assumptions, moral stances, and political stripe. We call that telling you where we’re coming from.
What journalists can learn from comedians
It’s an honesty that journalists oddly enough don’t often permit themselves, because they’re scared they’ll be accused of “having an agenda.” Journalists, the traditional mantra goes, must be neutral and unbiased. But that mantra is precisely what in growing measure keeps journalists from telling the truth. And why comedians often are much more effective and credible truth-tellers these days.
Because satirists can afford that kind of honesty. They are, in many respects, journalists without the baggage of journalism. Without rules like “present all sides” and templates such as “who, what, where, when, and why,” the comedian can directly name and belittle societal injustice, human failure, or simply the ironies of life. No false balance, no he-said-she-said; just honest storytelling.
The troubling role of commerce in journalism
This honesty, of course, is also largely dependent on the business model behind the information source. He who pays the piper calls the tune, after all. It is why I was adamant from the start that De Correspondent must and would be fully ad-free. And I almost certainly had the voice of my comedic hero Bill Hicks in the back of my mind, who once famously said, “If anyone here is in advertising or marketing: kill yourself.”
Not that I was urging advertisers to take their own life — but I knew that journalism can only truly be free, fearless, and independent if it’s paid for by its rightful customer: the reader, viewer, or listener. For those who think that sounds a wee bit dramatic, I heartily recommend you watch this devastating sketch by John Oliver about the influence advertisers have on the American media. And then segue right into this confronting sketch on the destructive effects of corporate influence on local journalism in America.
What’s at the heart of good satire (and journalism)
But perhaps, even more than the honesty and autonomy that satire enjoys, as a journalist I’m most envious of the moral conviction that characterizes the best comedy.
When I was still in drama school, in the hope of someday becoming a cabaret performer myself (a hope that died a quick death during my first singing lesson), I learned that a comedian can’t make good jokes about things he doesn’t truly care about.
That’s precisely why, even more than penetrating to a seed of truth, good satire is able to penetrate to an issue’s heart. To its moral core. Through their perfect pitch for irony and their flawless bullshit detectors, comedians confront us not only with lies and hypocrisy, but also with what it means to be human.
Such as how it feels to be discriminated against by anti-homosexuality laws. Or how it’s possible that we still view women as pieces of meat. Or how you’re a countryman when you win, but a foreigner when you lose.
It is that spirit, journalism too can never have too much of.
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Rob Wijnberg (1982) is the founder of De Correspondent, an ad free journalism platform in The Netherlands with more than 60,000 paying members. Rob, who’s both American and Dutch, moved to the United States in 2017 to prepare the launch of The Correspondent, the English language platform for Unbreaking News.
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