A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The White House
(John P. Filo/CBS)
When you run for president, you more or less commit to showing up at a series of events (some candidates come to think of them as Stations of the Cross).
You have to go to the Iowa State Fair and eat porkchops on a stick and other artery-clogging food. You have to go to pancake breakfasts in New Hampshire, and ingest pancakes heavy with maple syrup.
And, more and more it seems, these days you have to show up on one of Comedy Central’s late-night political chats: Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” and Stephen Colbert’s "Colbert Report."
Sen. Barack Obama was on Wednesday night—as Jon Stewart asked him if, to gain some experience, he thought about running a smaller country for a while.
Mike Huckabee did “Colbert” last week—where he credited the show with giving him his Iowa Straw Poll second place finish, and suggested Colbert as a running mate.
Sen. John McCain has done “the Daily Show” 10 times since 2000—and he observed about his campaign woes, “it’s always darkest just before it gets completely black.”
The attraction of the shows is obvious: they draw upwards (Stewart) or close to (Colbert) a million younger viewers, most of them male—the most elusive audience for advertisers. And they tend to be more affluent and better-educated.
And, while politicians may be looking for votes, advertisers are looking for eyeballs attached to such viewers — which is why, says Comedy Central Vice President Michele Gaels, “it’s big business for us now. The franchise of ‘Indecision 2008’ [the branded logo for the networks’ political coverage] has been one of our biggest success stories of advertisers.”
Companies like Volkswagen, which has committed several million dollars to the coverage, have turned on its head the traditional advertiser reluctance to be identified with controversial political material. It’s exactly such “edgy” coverage, in the phrase of an ad agency executive, that makes the franchises so appealing.
For candidates, there’s a dual appeal. “Jon is able to break through a lot of the silliness of campaign season," Obama told me in an interview, "and in a way you actually end up being more truthful and end up talking more substance on a show like this than you do sometime on some of these other shows. The other thing is, you’ve got a different audience and part of our campaign is getting people who haven’t been involved in the process.”
But there’s a price to be paid for such exposure. Back in 1960, when John Kennedy went n Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show,” he was treated reverentially,
“May I call you..Jack?” Paar asked nervously.
Today…not so much.
“I mean this in the most respectable way," Colbert asked Huckabee. ”Who the hell are you?”
Stewart lambasted Biden for his awkward comments about Obama as an “articulate” candidate.
And not every candidate appears to find the Comedy Central turf attractive. Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, and Rudy Giuliani have thus far failed to show up.
But at the least, the network seems to be disproving Broadway playwright George S. Kaufman’s old lament that “satire is what closes on Saturday night.” Today, at least on one network, comedy is what fattens the bottom line.
