PRESENT TENSE:A GREAT MANY people are delirious over Barack Obama's victory. They include most of the chat show hosts and satirists in the US who have been rooting for him for months now. They should have been careful what they wished for, because one thing is clear: Obama will be a disaster for comedy. US satire will now be in danger of falling into a deep slumber from which it will only awaken when things go horribly wrong. Only disillusionment can bring back the fun, writes Shane Hegarty
Obama's election campaign was a challenge for comedians - one they failed to meet. Not only where they disarmed by his brilliance and affability, but they clearly found themselves unable to muster up the subversion needed to go against the mood for change. Added to that was the race factor. The chat shows' joke-writers clearly never figured out how their Wasp-ish hosts could mock this guy.
John Stewart's Daily Show realised that the only way to deal with the problem of white guys performing jokes about black people is to avoid it altogether. They have a couple of black performers do the black jokes instead. It has done this overtly, and brilliantly at times, but that they have to do it at all gives an insight into the rules that govern comedy and language on US television.
The Daily Show has been excellent during this campaign, if unrepentantly biased. It long ago gave up its already half-hearted attempts to satirise Obama (partly because its audience wouldn't laugh along) and instead became a cheerleader. In that, it joined most of the mainstream shows. Saturday Night Live's most successful joke about Obama was actually about how much the press were on his side, but it was interested only in exaggerating the press corps' submissiveness, but not in asking why.
Where comedians had been spoilt by the easy laughs given to them by the misadventures of George W Bush, many of them had initially struggled with the presidential candidates. The arrival of Sarah Palin was, as Stewart gleefully admitted, a gift. Her integrity has since been hacked up and served piece by piece in the one-liners of the late night chat shows. Of course, Palin's scars were largely self-inflicted. As with Bush, she was almost beyond caricature. Tina Fey's election-defining lampoon was initially so close to Palin's actual words that newspapers ran quizzes asking readers if they could tell the difference between the real and fake Palins.
However, some would argue that US television's relentless mocking of Palin wasn't true satire at all.
In his book Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy into a Joke, Russell L Peterson explains that "pseudo-satire is often embraced by its supposed victims, who are eager to get credit for their good sportsmanship and to show they are impervious to such 'criticism'." In the final weeks of the campaign, both Palin and John McCain appeared on Saturday Night Live. Whatever about the candidate's motives, it immediately invalidates any show's claim to be satirical if it so openly embraces its targets.
PETERSON ALSO COMPLAINS THAT chat shows make jokes about personalities rather than issues so as to avoid alienating sections of viewers. The Daily Show remains aloof from this attitude, being cheerfully cruel to conservative viewers. And its satire was genuine, fuelled by anger. It had no finer moment in this campaign than when it used New York's experience of 9/11 to rebuke Palin's appeals to a supposed "real America".
However, that the chief target has been toppled is not unprecedented. When Tony Blair swept to power in 1994, he was seen as a shining knight rescuing the country from the Conservative era. But those years had proved such a godsend for British satire that it arguably ushered in its golden age. Blair's win arrived not simply as a fresh voice, but as an extension of their voice. It silenced their jokes.
There was great satire at the time, notably through Chris Morris, but much of it was aimed at media and celebrity, at the medium rather than the message. It took time for comedians to get a handle on Blair. Things only really took off when disillusionment took hold. In his latter years as prime minister he rivalled Margaret Thatcher (a Bond girl, remember) in the number of screen portrayals. The actor, Michael Sheen, made his name on the back of his Blair. Rory Bremner used him to make impressionists fashionable again. Although it is without a tradition of nightly chat shows, the UK instead produced drama after drama based on Blair's supposed duplicity.
Central to all of this is how the sharpest humour, in both the UK and US, tends to come from the left, because the right has always been better at manufacturing outrage than jokes. It means that left-leaning politicians get the easier ride when there is a desperation for their success, but the bitterness sets in once idealism meets the realities of power. For satire to flourish under Obama, it will require him to be a disappointment. This may finally allow comedians to get around the discomfort posed by the race issue and allow them to find their sting once again. Unless, of course, they prefer to be distracted by the 2012 election, when Sarah Palin may once again step, gift-wrapped, into their lives.
shegarty@irish-times.ie