David Berry on late-night TV’s political jesters.
WHAT’S HAPPENING WITH LATE-NIGHT TELEVISION A YEAR AFTER JON STEWART LEFT THE DAILY SHOW?
In his tribute to Larry Wilmore and The Nightly Show, Jon Stewart promised the recently cancelled host that he would be leaving a legacy. “You started a conversation that was not on television,” said Stewart. “That conversation doesn’t end. All the people you have worked with are going to take what they learned here and what they learned from you … and you’re going to start to see them doing things in the business … and you’re going to watch that flourish, and that’s going to have you on it.”
The potential truth of this message was apparent just a few minutes earlier, when Wilmore ran down the list of gifts he had received from his fellow late night political jesters: liquor from Sam Bee, Stephen Colbert and John Oliver, and a bit of a disappointing pastry tray from The Daily Show (we’ ll let the metaphor there sit gently).
Wilmore’s Nightly Show is obviously not the institution that The Daily Show — Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, off now for almost exactly a year — was. Its best shot at a legacy is probably as a niche inspiration, a show that people who make shows like it cite as formative, loved more in the rearview than it ever was in front of us. Even that is a long shot, frankly, but the chance remains because of the first part of Stewart’s eulogy: over the 20 months his show was on air, Wilmore earnestly and successfully strove to give voice to ideas and people outside the usual media bubble.
As he put it in his closing explanation of the “upside down” map behind him, “As a culture we’ve all agreed with the opinion that the world should be seen in a certain way … our chief mission was to disagree with that premise and to see the world in a way that may not make everybody comfortable and present it with a cast of people who don’t always get to have a voice on that.”
That idea is so effusively onpoint with the current climate — well, a slice of the current climate, but surely the same slice that makes up the target audience of Stewart’s successors — it is worth pondering why it never quite managed to capture it in a meaningful way. Certainly a fair number of people have insinuated that it might be that we are not quite so eager to hear diverse messages and voices as we claim. Never underestimate the potent hypocrisy of only looking like you care, but The Nightly Show didn’t resonate in all kinds of constituencies, so that’s a partial explanation at best.
More likely, it seems to me, is that Wilmore isn’t quite built for the excess — of brashness, of dismissiveness, of outrage, of sentiment — that political comedy, in the Stewart mould or not, requires. That is, I think, a compliment as much as a detriment.
Though he started as a standup act, Wilmore has never been the most comfortable or charismatic of presenters. Even as The Daily Show’s Senior Black Correspondent, he frequently sounded about a half- beat too slow, a touch too contained to really sell his jokes. Though he improved as it went on, that largely carried over to his show: he has none of the showy verbal tricks of a Stewart or an Oliver or a Bee, nor their expressiveness. Rising and falling out of his normal timbre and cadence never feels quite natural.
What he does have, though, is an incisive mind: if he talks too much like a writer, he also writes like one. A lot of Wilmore’s jokes, or at least his observations, don’t really need any selling. They are honed and quick and vicious on the right target. That was on display at his maligned, though sorely underappreciated, White House Correspondents Dinner performance, where he openly prodded the president about drones — “I saw you hanging out with NBA players like Steph Curry from the Golden State Warriors. It kinda makes sense, because both of you like raining down bombs on people from long distances” — and turned Obama’s greying hair into a joke about white cluelessness — “The president’s hair is so white it keeps saying ‘All lives matter.’”
That is the sort of voice that not only helps Wilmore compensate for his subdued nature, but will be missing now that he’s of the air. It’s snotty and funny, sure, but it can cause discomfort in a remarkably simple and direct way ( for all talk of courage that attended Colbert’s own presidential roasting, he was at least speaking to a guy that most of his audience didn’t like one bit). That was the sort of attitude often on display in Wilmore’s monologues as much as his roundtables, a feature that never quite found its footing, but which was often more subtle and thoughtful than any of his con- temporaries — Bill Maher, sure, but even the Stewart-ites — really ever try to be.
If that was his tweak to the Stewart formula, his lower profile may say something about what we actually want in our political comedy. Stewart’s other progeny have stayed closer on tone, even as they have tried other things.
The most successful is probably Oliver, who at least found a new container for that brashness. The day- after race to crown his latest swath of annihilation long ago grew tired, but his deeper dives into specific issues are unlike anything else funny people are currently doing. Oliver is not always as up-to-the-minute as the others, but he has grown the style, and there is a marked cleverness in using Stewart-y asides, incredulousness and spun-out metaphors to actually drill into subjects, as opposed to just tossing stones at surfaces. With Oliver, the jokes are stringing you along to a larger point, not just prodding your sensibilities for a knowing chuckle.
Bee has taken some of that steam, though to my eyes she is the one hewing closest to the Daily Show template. Her talent for straight- facedly confronting people whom she (and her audience) think are ridiculous gives her more of an ability to wander out into the field, and she has so far kept those more on theme than The Daily Show’s cavalcade of oddballs segments did. She is also the best at mining palpable anger in her monologues, whether for humour or pathos: her response to the Orlando shooting walked a remarkably delicate line exceedingly well, with none of the mawkishness that could sometimes creep into Stewart.
Colbert, meanwhile, has been so neutered that the recent chatter about him and James Corden switching jobs actually seems welcome: let the Englishman have a puppy- dogoff with Jimmy Kimmel, and let Colbert stretch out in the later slot. Colbert’s actual show has gotten better — he is a great conversationalist, when he is allowed to be — but the Late Night slot seems to be too anodyne for him to say much of anything, as his silly but soft performances at the national conventions showed.
Colbert would benefit from the freedom to express himself that Seth Meyers currently has. Meyers is, of course, the product of the, ahem, other great source of late night satire, Saturday Night Live, and, a bit like Wilmore, tends to prefer knowing groans to clapter, the word he coined to describe the Jon Stewart phenomenon of jokes designed to make you feel good about what you already believe. Meyers is not quite as incisive as — well, as really any of the other people mentioned here, but he has at least grown from his SNL days, and he’s had flashes of real sharpness, especially in dealing with Donald Trump, whose pure ridiculousness can drown in the comic hyperbole of the Stewartian style.
Which brings us to the new Daily Show. There has been speculation — including from Wilmore himself — that a betterperforming Daily Show might have kept The Nightly Show on air. It may have. As with everyone, Trevor Noah has settled more into his voice as his year in the chair has progressed. He is plainly not quite as good with the theatrics as the more experienced Stewartites — the strongest point in the “Why didn’t they just give it to Sam Bee?” argument — but unlike Wilmore, he hasn’t matched it with anything like a subtle or unique read on what’s actually going on around him.
More than before, The Daily Show feels like a roundup, like just another late- night show ticking off the day’s events with a chuckle or two. Brought on to, according to executives, give The Daily Show a new focus, and perhaps reach an audience it wasn’t before, Noah is still largely undefined, a list of the best jokes his staff could come up with, with no particular point of view, other than maybe “Daily Show-y.”
That is probably the ultimate shame of Wilmore’s last bow: if neither Daily or Nightly has managed to grab our attention since Stewart left, Wilmore at least followed an ethos, and displayed it on the screen every night. Wilmore’s unifying principles were the magnetic north that helped him go further each night, and though we didn’t exactly follow, it’s at least possible to imagine that we might have caught on, given enough time.
His best compatriots, Oliver and Bee, also have that, even if it is more fulsomely borrowed from Stewart. For Wilmore, it can only ever be a legacy, but it is at least there, pointing a way forward if anyone comes looking.