So, what is Hitchens' problem with Stewart? Well, actually with Al Franken too. With the idea that these are satirists. Because, to Hitchens, a satirist has to be like Jonathan Swift.
“Al Franken for Senator” is one thing (especially when the alternative is or was “Norm Coleman for Senator”). But Jon Stewart for Samuel Langhorne Clemens is quite another. What next? Stephen Colbert for Zola? Al Franken for Swift?I would never want to argue with Hitchens. He is like an uncle I had--the guy could quote verbatim from poems, religious texts, whatever, was fantastic with his repartee, but he was not the most loved person in the room either. But, no denying how smart that uncle was, and even smarter Hitchens is. And usually correct, as in his parting remarks:Franken very often refers to himself as a “satirist,” which is a piece of hubris that comes to him too glibly and naturally. One wants to say, on hearing or reading such a claim, “Actually, sunshine, we’ll be the judge of that.” Swift famously compared satire to a mirror in which people could see every face but their own: if Franken desires to be considered a connoisseur of the satirical, he might want to paste that line into his hat.
Almost everything that I have quoted was printed or broadcast at a time when the Democrats were in opposition in both chambers and many state houses, excluded from the White House, and in a minority on the Supreme Court. The rebel humor on offer was rather lame even then. Shall we now be witnesses to a further decline? (This year’s African American lesbian comedian at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner broke bravely with tradition and chose to roast the absent Rush Limbaugh rather than the incumbent chief executive, to roars of complicit and knowing applause.) A liberal joke, at present, is no laughing matter.
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