Has Daily Show host Jon Stewart become too “hostile” and rant-prone? Does he overuse the (bleeped) F-word? Aaron Hanlon doesn’t think so. Hanlon, a visiting assistant professor of English at Georgetown, argued in a Friday article for Salon that Stewart’s frequent anger and foul language are perfectly proper ways to deal with right-wing nonsense.
“When a smirking Fox News host makes fun of the president for saluting with a cup of coffee in his hand, or a professional provocateur calls rape victims ‘girls trying to get attention,’” wrote Hanlon, “is it better to explain cleverly or methodically the flaws in that thinking? Or is it better to brusquely disengage from bullshitters with a pointed ‘fuck you’?”
To Hanlon, if Stewart responded calmly and wittily to obnoxious conservatives, he’d just be casting his pearls before swine: “Stewart tilts his chin to the ceiling and screams obscenity in the middle of what appears a tactless rant because his objects of critique aren’t interested in reasoned dialogue, clever jabs or unveiled truths.”
From Hanlon’s article, headlined “Jon Stewart’s Brilliant ‘F**k You’: Why Sputtering Obscenity Is Sometimes the Best Response to Fox News Insanity” (emphasis added):
Because it’s so difficult…to engage with someone who just talks bullshit without any concern for the truth of their words, I sometimes wonder whether Jon Stewart’s exasperated “fuck you” retorts on “The Daily Show” are actually more appropriate than they at first seem. When a smirking Fox News host makes fun of the president for saluting with a cup of coffee in his hand, or a professional provocateur calls rape victims “girls trying to get attention,” is it better to explain cleverly or methodically the flaws in that thinking? Or is it better to brusquely disengage from bullshitters with a pointed “fuck you”? After all, as Stewart noted — perfectly characterizing the bullshitter — on one of the several occasions he’s told pundits to fuck themselves: “You have no principle about this. You’re just trying to score points in a game no one else is playing…”
You might have noticed that, over the past few years, Stewart has been increasingly exasperated and hostile on “The Daily Show,” doing his routine with little variation, and in some cases simply dropping his trademark cleverness to launch into a rant. As a consequence, Stewart has drawn criticism from people who think his shtick is stale or that he’s phoning it in, who think he’s a distraction from direct action and real political change, and who think he’s too circumscribed by the for-profit media machine to be truly subversive. But I think what Stewart’s satire has become in recent years is actually an apt response to a media landscape abounding with bullshit and bullshitters…
…[B]y taking a more historical view of satire, we learn that different circumstances call for different satirical modes. Juvenal’s invectives often grew out of a sense that an older and better way of doing things had fallen so far out of fashion that his society had become, in so many ways, unbearable. Jon Stewart tilts his chin to the ceiling and screams obscenity in the middle of what appears a tactless rant because his objects of critique aren’t interested in reasoned dialogue, clever jabs or unveiled truths. Sometimes, in other words, the satire we need is blunt and unsavory. In those situations — frequent, though fortunately not perpetual — when bullshit is the only thing on the menu, it doesn’t always make sense to bring your fine wine to the table.
