Everyone's a Cynic

It's hard to think of a show that's ever had as good a year as The Colbert Report did in 2006. It was its first year of existence, and no one was really sure it was going to make it. The Daily Show didn't really seem like something you could spin off, let alone spin off with someone whose best-known bit was "This Week in God." Good stuff, but how is that a half-hour program?

Well, suffice to say the show justified its existence. By the time it broadcast its last episode in December, one devoted entirely to a guitar duel between Colbert and one of the Decemberists, the show managed to attract both a devoted fanbase that Colbert delighted in exploiting as well as guests of increasingly high stature. And they did all this without significantly changing their approach. They just waited for people to come to them, and it worked.

What is that approach? In a nutshell: effusive cynicism. The Colbert Report is undoubtedly the most cynical show in America, and it's paid off enormously for them. You realize just how cynical it is when you compare it to its sister program. The Daily Show promotes the image of a sane oasis in a crazy world, never content simply to show you what's wrong when they can also explain why it's wrong[1], albeit sarcastically, and they even go so far as to suggest alternate policies at times, again sarcastically. But sarcasm is a language we all speak now, so much so that it no longer sounds like a foreign tongue. The most sincere among us (left-wing college students, say) routinely use sarcasm as a way of belittling our opponents, and it's worked its way into modern usage enough that we hear the sincerity simultaneously with the sarcasm. There's no translation, only synonyms. Begin a sentence with "Yes"[2] and it's as sure a reversal as slapping "ne" and "pas" around a French verb.

The main exceptions are the correspondents / "experts," of which Colbert was one before he left. They deliver their reports with a straight face, and this is a big part of the humor. But after their segments, they almost always talk with Stewart, and here the "we are sanity" feeling comes back in: they make some outrageous statement that's recognizable as an exaggeration of what someone else has said, and then Stewart plays the straight man and asks them the questions we ourselves would ask them if we didn't know they were making a joke. It's effective, but it's giving the audience an out, making the correspondent into the object of ridicule before our eyes rather than requiring the audience to make that leap.

On Colbert's show, this almost never happens. The attitude seems to be that the things they're parodying are so obviously absurd that they don't need to hold the viewers' hands. There's no critique necessary, no explanation of why the things they're saying are wrong. The correspondent stands alone, with no one to question him except his guests, who rarely succeed. This is a bleak view of society, one that simply repeats what it hears, raises its eyebrows slightly, and waits for a laugh.

The thing is, the laughs didn't really come at first. If you watch those early programs, people don't really get it: jokes fall flat, and guests seem genuinely outraged at the things Colbert is saying, even though they're on a network called "Comedy Central." No one seemed to know quite how to handle him, whether they should play along or take him at face value. It's hard to say if they'd be funnier now, if the jokes simply weren't up to snuff, but in terms of approach, it was essentially the same. Did this mean that their cynicism was unwarranted, that in fact things weren't so bad that you could offer up a simple parody in place of show-and-tell jokes?

Well, yes and no. Certainly people are actually laughing now, and comedy does require passing a certain tipping point of laughter before people really feel comfortable braying along, so maybe it's just that momentum built enough for them to cross that barrier. But the cynicism has been validated in unexpected ways. People have noted the ways in which Colbert's show has come to resemble the shows it's parodying, like The O'Reilly Factor, particularly in regards to the devoted fanbase mentioned above. Colbert has built up a cult of personality around himself, so much so that he's able to get his fans to engage in coordinated collective action, and the ability he has to control his audience, down to the second he wants them to stop cheering, is a little scary.

This isn't a criticism of the show, though--it is the final proof of its cynicism. By managing to encourage this level of devotion, they've shown just how easy it is--so easy that a comedian can do it. And the appeal of this sort of rhetoric is so strong that even when it's being used sarcastically, it's incredibly effective. Colbert's fans read through the cynicism and take the sincerity they see on the other side just as fervently as O'Reilly's fans do. If this were The Daily Show, this might be something to discourage. But the genius of Colbert's show is that it's absolutely committed to its cynicism. It's ridiculous that people will do whatever Colbert asks them to do, it's ridiculous that he could get Henry Kissinger to introduce a guitar duel and the newly-elected governor of New York to judge it. They've created such a good imitation that it functions in exactly the same way as what it's making fun of, and that's spectacular.

It's still cynical, though, and that's important to keep in mind. As effective a piece of performance art as The Colbert Report is--utilizing mixed media, enabling interaction, drawing power to itself and using that power without restraint, just as its subject would--it all springs from a fundamentally cynical point of view. This rings false: cynicism seems to encourage a disassociation with the corrupted world, so devoted to its criticism that it is unable to engage with the things it's criticizing, and when it's criticizing society, the cynic sits outside it. Colbert has shown that you can be incredibly cynical (completely aware of the ways in which the object of study fails, clear-eyed in your evaluation of its faults) and yet use that knowledge, not simply throw it out there to prove your own superiority. They've seen exactly what's wrong with these sorts of shows and gone and pranked the world, making their points but also so cynical that they don't care if they cause exactly the same ill effects as the original. Why not? Doesn't it just prove their point more? And if you don't get the point, don't you deserve what you get? That's one way in which cynicism can be a productive force.

This is sorta-kinda the subject of an essay by Geert Lovink (!) entitled "Blogging, the nihilist impulse." It's not the greatest read in the world, full of the autistic shorthand that's infested academia, and prone to statements like "there are 100 million blogs worldwide, and it is nearly impossible to make general statements about their 'nature' and divide them into proper genres. I will nonetheless attempt to do this." Don't mess with Lovink, man, that dude can do the nearly impossible!

Anyway, this is a problem for me because there's no passage I can really quote to highlight what I'm interested in without subjecting you all to sentences like "It is constituted by cold enlightenment and by confession described by Michael Foucault." So, to summarize, Lovink[3] notes that blogging came about in this millennium, and the tenor of blogs is primarily cynical. This isn't an indictment, just an observation, and the consequence has been that there aren't grand movements (which are inherently suspicious), but the aggregation of lots of individual opinions, all of which can still think they're precious unique snowflakes, into a received wisdom.

He's right, and it's useful to acknowledge the inherently cynical nature of blogs. When I try to explain that, say, the Gawker sites aren't necessarily expressing a firmly-held and well-thought-out opinion, they're just paid to mock everything, being able to cite cynicism will help. It's also a frustrating tendency of internet culture these days, one that leads to things like blogs being thought of as worthless even by their creators and so not worth the effort to make into art rather than brands, but that's for another time; for now, it's just nice to have a name.

His point about this cynicism being useful is a good one, I think. The example of The Colbert Report highlight one strategy for utilization, but might there be others? I think so. Take pop music, for example. Almost no one involved in pop isn't cynical about it, and yet it still inspires devotion. You can see the machinery behind the music--the product placement, the obvious marketing plans, the unmistakable demographic targeting, the record company's tracklist calculus, the parade of new talent--and still enjoy the music for what it is. No one doesn't become cynical about pop, so much so that this is now a standard part of the life of a pop fan, even if fans generally won't admit it. (It's understandable--part of the pleasure of rejecting pop is thinking you see what other people don't, even if millions of people have seen it before you--but it's still unfortunate.) But people still listen to pop, still like pop, still make pop out of a love for the music. You can be cynical about something without invalidating it.

This is merely cynicism counterbalanced, though. What's interesting about pop is the ways in which cynicism can actually increase your admiration for the music. Once you're aware of the way the machine works, you can follow it and use your knowledge to become a better listener, by doing things like noticing and following particular producers and songwriters. Moreover, by being aware of the commercial obstacles that pop faces on its way to a finished CD--a condition unique to pop these days, since only pop musicians need to worry about getting someone else's approval for what they release, whereas everyone else can just burn a few thousand discs in their basement--you can gain a greater appreciation for the difficulties the artists face, and this often leads to a deeper enjoyment of their music.

Lovink said something else in there, though, something else that's notably wrong. He thinks this cynicism is a post-bubble thing, a reaction to the repudiation of the net's early utopian promises and grand schemes; like an embittered failure, so burned by his unrealized hopes that he thinks the world is shit. Well, something else happened in 2001--or, rather, two something elses happened. We got a new President, and…well, you know.

An article recently mentioned the 1999 anti-globalization protests in Seattle, and it was like suddenly remembering a dream you'd had. This used to be an inspirational moment for the left, and while I'm sure it's still an inspirational moment to some, it seems impossibly distant now. Fighting over trade policy instead of occupying armies: it's almost hard to imagine. This isn't an indictment of Seattle--far from it--but an illustration of why the mood's shifted since the end of 2000. There's no reason to think the internet couldn't have been dominated by a bunch of Googles, modest start-ups that still had a gleam in their eye, but with reduced expectations and more realistic business plans. But, as I've said elsewhere, we all went a little crazy after 9/11, on all sides, and it's produced a range of reactions. But certainly there's little choice but to react to the right's version of going crazy with cynicism; there's simply no other option, given how shameless they've become. If the tenor of our times is cynical, well, there are quite legitimate reasons for that.

Point is, we don't pick the conditions under which we make art any more than we pick our upbringing or our talents. Maybe it'd be nice to have some more non-cynical art, but that's not the reality we live in right now. Pointing out the usefulness of cynicism is really just a way of pointing out the usefulness of anything that's imposed upon us from outside, be it totalitarianism or boundless prosperity or an excess of penguins.[4] Art is creative but also reactive, and since you don't get to choose what there is to react against, it's necessary to find ways to work with anything, and those ways always exist. As long as we're going to view art through the context of its times--and that's forever--this will be a concern, and not an unimportant one, either. But as Colbert demonstrates, you need to bring yourself back into the world, to use those forces to make art within it and around it and, maybe, to contain it.


[1] There's even a common moment now where Jon Stewart turns to a particular camera and addresses a newsmaker directly, with humor but without irony.
[2] "Yes, throwing yourself off a cliff would be a great idea." "Yes, democracy certainly is on the march in the Middle East!" Tone matters, but not that much.
[3] I'm giggling every time I type that, by the way.
[4] This, obviously, leads to penguin sculptures, penguin ballets, etc.

Labels: colbert, comedy, cynicism, daily show, politics, pop, theory

posted by Mike B. @ 12:30 AM