Taking Political Humor Seriously

Peter Robinson Believes Laughs Can Influence Votes

In Squaring Off, Zócalo invites authors into the public square to answer five questions about the essence of their books. For this round, we pose questions to Peter M. Robinson, associate professor of history at the College of Mount St. Joseph, and the author of The Dance of the Comedians: The People, the President, and the Performance of Political Standup Comedy in America.

To help explain how Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart influence political discourse today, Robinson reminds us of the decisive “Dance of the Comedians” scene in the opera “The Bartered Bride,” in which a ringmaster presents an ensemble of circus performers who simultaneously make the opera’s plot more chaotic and help to resolve it. That, he says, is the role of political comedians, who throughout history have played a critical role in our democracy—redefining Americans’ perception of the presidency, and shaping public attitudes and behaviors.

  1. You open your book with a warning: We should never confuse the “the comical with the trivial. The laughter and good cheer accompanying humor belie its political and cultural potency. In fact, political comedy has often been where the serious work of democracy is done.” Should we really take humor seriously?

    In fact, we do take humor seriously, very seriously; we simply choose not to admit it much of the time. Humor and the laughter surrounding it are among the most serious expressions of personal politics available to us. Mark Twain knew this. Appalled by the injustices of what he called the “Gilded Age” of the later 1800s, he called laughter the “one really effective weapon” available to those wishing to address those injustices. Humor can be used strategically to affect the body politic in significant ways, and Americans and their elected leaders have begun to catch on.
  2. Can you cite any election cycles in which a comedian materially influenced the political discourse—and thus outcome of a race?

    It’s difficult to prove that any one performer or “performance” determined the outcome of an election. Nevertheless, comedians and presidents—along with their audiences—have produced humorous performances that reverberated so strongly between popular and political culture that they could not help but influence the electorate. Three presidential elections come immediately to mind. [The 1976] campaign season coincided with the debut and sensational rise of Saturday Night Live and its first star, Chevy Chase, imitated Gerald Ford simply by falling down. Much had been made of Ford’s slipping down the steps of Air Force One during a trip overseas, but Chase made the image stick. By making the accidental president so accident-prone, Chase telegraphed that Ford was too clumsy (and perhaps too stupid) to be a legitimate president. Many Americans could not avoid carrying this with them into the voting booth. Four years later, Ronald Reagan turned the tables and managed to harness the political power of humor by becoming something of a comedian himself. He was masterful at using self-effacing jokes to win support for his policies even as he disarmed detractors (“Sometimes our right hand doesn’t know what our far-right hand is doing.”). When he ran for re-election, he famously got a huge laugh and undoubtedly swayed voters worried about his ability to serve as president at age 73 when he pledged during a televised debate not to exploit Walter Mondale’s “youth and experience” (Mondale was 56). The hall erupted in laughter, and even Mondale couldn’t disguise his appreciation of the moment. The joke was on him, and Reagan won by a landslide two weeks later. Finally, the election of 2008 was famous (infamous?) for its humor, and the laughs made a real difference. More Americans—particularly the young—admitted to getting most of their political news from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, but it was Tina Fey who probably had the greatest influence, defining Sarah Palin for much of the electorate.
  3. You argue that comedians like Chevy Chase and Tina Fey are powerful because they act as a mediator between the presidency or candidates and the people. Does that have any impact on actual public policy or levels of civic participation?

    Whether all this has affected public policy in any significant way is arguable. Are we joking and laughing as citizens, wielding humor to heighten accountability and bring about significant change as Twain urged? Or are we merely laughing consumers hooked on the next joke by cynical producers simply trying to sell us something? For the most part, the latter description is the more accurate, but humor’s value as a legitimate political tool is still high. Jon Stewart is probably the closest thing we have to Twain and Will Rogers today. Stewart has waged an effective assault of laughter on not only presidents’ verbal or physical pratfalls, which is relatively easy to do, but he also critiques their policies hilariously in ways that require his audience to learn something about them.
  4. Is a president’s ability to crack a joke—and willingness to appear on late-night comedy shows—always a plus? In 2008, McCain slammed Obama for being too much of a “celebrity,” and this year, Obama is once again besting Romney when it comes to late-night TV show appearances. During this era of fiscal austerity and anemic economic recovery, will Americans still gravitate toward the funnier candidate—or could they be turned off by excessive jocularity?

    Using humor—actually seeking out the joke—is definitely a delicate balance. Presidents and candidates have to weigh the national mood and their own capabilities, but humor’s political value can’t be ignored. Yes, John McCain derided Obama’s celebrity, but he’s appeared many times on late night TV: In fact, he announced his candidacy in 2007 on The Late Show with David Letterman. Obama’s appearances during an economic crisis constitute a gamble, but a closely calculated one. I believe he sees them as akin to FDR’s fireside chats. Roosevelt utilized the popular medium of his time, radio, to talk openly to the American people during the hardest of times, and to confront fear with a buoyant sense of good cheer. FDR’s chats were heard by a much larger percentage of the country, but the late-night circuit offers the best alternative in today’s highly fragmented media landscape.
  5. Your book was published before the 2012 presidential race began. If you were writing it today, would you in any way alter your central argument or your description of the comedians’ dance?

    If anything, I believe the current election cycle has made the book more timely. The “dance” has accelerated further and become even more high-stakes as political humor plays an increasingly prominent role in our economic, popular, and political cultures. We will continue to debate whether all this laughter is fundamentally radical in its ability to effect change or conservative in its preservation of the status quo, but to the extent that humor remains an endlessly fascinating articulation of free democratic expression, it will continue to hold political potency.