Why no conservative Jon Stewart?
The Atlantic has a fascinating article about why liberals (lefties) tend to dominate political comedy, while conservatives (right-wingers) dominate talk-radio. One of the money quotes:
Political humor, in particular, might have an inherently liberal bias. Alison Dagnes spent years looking into this question for her 2012 book A Conservative Walks Into a Bar. She spoke to dozens of working comedians who self-identified as liberals, and as many who identified as conservatives as she could find. One of the reasons she posits for a lack of conservative satire is that the genre has always been aimed at taking down the powerful, from the Revolutionary War through Vietnam and 9/11. “Conservatism supports institutions and satire aims to knock these institutions down a peg,” she wrote.
I suppose the way this works is that liberal comedians have a target no matter who is in power. If the right is in charge, they can target the personalities; if the left is in charge; they can target the institutions themselves, along with links to other (often conservative) institutions in a society.
But the same may not hold for conservative comedians. They have a clear target when the left is in charge, not no clear target when the right in charge – they like the institutions and they like the personalities in them. This can make conservative comedians – in general, not 100% of the time – look more nakedly partisan than their liberal counterparts.
Or, then again, it could just be that Stewart is funnier than Dennis Miller…
Th whole article is well worth a read.