Politics and entertainment

That same night, not coincidentally, Jon Stewart's swan song on The Daily Show attracted 3.5 million viewers, most of them millennials who had sworn off politics altogether until Stewart’s comedic “fake news” formula brought them back into the tent some 15 years ago.

It’s fashionable lately to lament the blurring of the line between politics and entertainment, as if such a line ever existed. “We now utterly conflate entertainment and politics, routinely confuse celebrity with authority and regularly lose sight of the difference between a cult of personality and a claim to leadership,” whined Frank Bruni in the July 31 New York Times. (Click here.)

Bruni traced the confusion back to 1962, “when Marilyn Monroe sidled onto a stage in what could have been mistaken for lingerie and warbled ‘Happy Birthday’ to John Kennedy, blurring any line between the presidential and the pulchritudinous, between show business and the nation’s business.” He cited Richard Nixon’s cameo appearance on Laugh-In in 1968 and Bill Clinton’s saxophone solo on The Arsenio Hall Show in 1992.

Terminator as governor

I have news for Frank Bruni. Al Franken, a Saturday Night Live comedian with no political experience, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2008, and he’s still there. Ronald Reagan, a movie actor and TV pitchman, was twice elected governor of California and president of the United States. Minnesota’s wrestler-turned-governor Jesse Ventura, California’s terminator-turned-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and California’s song-and-dance-man-turned senator George Murphy have mercifully been consigned to the political dustbin. But Franken and Reagan, at least, are now taken seriously as influential political figures — more influential, in fact, than highly respected but uncharismatic figures like Indiana’s former U.S. Senator Richard Lugar or Pennsylvania’s late Senator Richard Schweiker.

Why do you suppose that is? If politics is such a serious business — and it is — why is an adolescent blowhard like Donald Trump outpolling serious adults with substantial political résumés like, say, Jeb Bush and John Kasich? Why is a “fake news” anchorman like Jon Stewart more trusted than a real news anchorman like, say, Brian Williams?

The answer is that public policy is like medicine: It does no good unless people swallow it. Regardless of their qualifications, politicians can’t succeed unless they can attract and hold people’s attention. Franklin D. Roosevelt, with his fireside chats, seized on the promotional possibilities of radio in ways that escaped his dour predecessors like Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover.

Christie’s appeal

Some people possess a rare talent for attracting attention, but that’s all they’re good for. Many of the same folks who went belly-up for Sarah Palin as vice president subsequently forked over $10 a month to her video channel — until last month, when the channel was discontinued for lack of subscribers. The same people who support Trump or Chris Christie today would, I suspect, line up just as eagerly to dunk them at a carnival or watch them being shot out of a cannon.

Shakespeare (“All the world’s a stage…”) understood that we’re all putting on an act, which is another way of saying that politics is just a form of show biz. And some of us do it better than others. Some politicians — Reagan, say, or Clinton — approach their jobs as salesmen. Others —Obama, perhaps — are more like teachers. But the most successful politicians rely on the same sort of personal magnetism that you find on stage and in the movies. You need substance, of course. But you need gimmicks too.

Lincoln in Kansas

Things were different in the 19th century, when Americans flocked to see political speeches, debates, funeral orations, and lynchings for lack of any better entertainment. When Abraham Lincoln, then a likely presidential candidate, visited Atchison, Kansas, in December 1859, he walked into a hotbed of pro-slavery sentiment, yet the locals did not switch to another channel. Instead they welcomed Lincoln, if only because he was the biggest celebrity ever to set foot in that frontier town. A brass band escorted him to the local Methodist church, where Lincoln addressed a packed house as well as hundreds more who stood outside or hung from trees to hear him. After 90 minutes, Lincoln looked at his watch and suggested that perhaps he was speaking too long, but the crowd shouted, “Go on! Go on!”

Jon Stewart understood that the essence of mass appeal is drama, and the essence of drama is conflict. That insight enabled him to build a better mousetrap, and the world beat a path to his previously obscure door. (When Stewart took over in 1999, The Daily Show drew about 350,000 viewers nightly; at Stewart’s peak in 2008-09, it averaged 1.6 million.)

Stewart vs. Cheney

But Stewart owed his show’s longevity to his comedic ability. When Lynne Cheney visited The Daily Show in 2007 to promote her treacly Wyoming memoir, Blue Skies, No Fences, he did not pick a fight with a conservative matriarch by pointing out the obvious — that Cheney’s idyllic Wyoming was the place where a gentle gay college student had recently been murdered and strung up on a barbed wire fence. Instead, Stewart simply mentioned that he too was writing a book about his own home state, New Jersey. “I’m calling it, Grey Skies, and the Faint Smell of Urine,” Stewart informed the wife of the then-sitting vice president of the United States.

For all his brilliance, Jon Stewart is hardly an American original. On the contrary, he’s the latest incarnation of an illustrious line of political satirists that stretches back to Finley Peter Dunne (creator of Mr. Dooley), Will Rogers, and Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury), and beyond them to Voltaire, Jonathan Swift, Erasmus, and the first-century Roman poet Juvenal, who coined the term “bread and circuses” to deplore politicians who distract voters from serious issues. Jon Stewart’s well-deserved glowing eulogies notwithstanding, we shall see his like again. And that’s a good thing.

For Susan Beth Lehman's take on Stewart's legacy, click here.