If you haven’t seen the sci-fi horror flick The Faculty, you’re not alone. Not much is memorable about the 1998 film save for its colourful cast of characters, including Usher, Salma Hayek, Elijah Wood — oh, and Daily Show host Jon Stewart.
Before he took centre stage in Washington D.C. for the Rally to Restore Sanity on October 30, a clip of Stewart’s turn as a high school science teacher in the B-rated film was played for the crowd gathered on the National Mall.
No doubt included simply for a good laugh, the clip pinpointed a contrast with Stewart’s current cultural stature.
Before the sky-high ratings and presidential interviews, before the best-selling books and award show hosting gigs, Stewart was working as a busboy and making the rounds in run of the mill horror films and romantic comedies. Along with bit parts in Half Baked and Big Daddy, Stewart also hosted a series of forgettable shows on MTV and Comedy Central in the early 1990s.
So how does a guy who seemed doomed to play the role of comedic wingman wind up inspiring thousands — most estimates put the number well over 200,000 — to show up for a day of engagement in America’s capital?
One rally-goer’s hand-painted sign said it all: “It’s a sad day when our politicians are comical, and I have to take our comedians seriously.” Disenchanted with political and media elites in America, many have turned to Stewart and his self-described “fake news program” for the most honest portrayal of what’s taking shape in their country.
But an ability to cut through hysterical punditry isn’t the only thing the 47-year-old New Jersey native has going for him. His fearless, razor-sharp wit doesn’t hurt either. The particular brand of satire honed by Stewart and Daily Show correspondents attracts an average of 3.5 million viewers who tune in live and online at comedycentral.com. Only Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly pulls in a larger audience.
“Satire is all about challenging the status quo, and that’s what he’s doing, both in response to the media and to the political system,” explains Professor Lauren Feldman, who works in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C.
Feldman devotes much of her research to determining how less-traditional sources of political communication, like late-night comedy programs, shape the public’s political perspectives. “You can achieve something with satire that you can’t do with other forms,” she says. “Satire assumes that the audience is on the same level as the satirist. It doesn’t talk down, it doesn’t pander.”
Since taking over the fake news desk of the Daily Show in 1999, Stewart has spent much of his airtime lampooning fellow commentators. O’Reilly and fellow Fox News broadcaster Glenn Beck are frequent targets, but so are decidedly less conservative commentators, like former CNN anchor Rick Sanchez. This persona of an outsider to the media establishment is a key part of Stewart’s appeal — and his credibility.
In fact, when asked which journalist they most admired for a study by the Pew Research Center in 2007, Americans ranked Stewart number four. The likes of CNN’s Anderson Cooper, CBS’s Dan Rather, and NBC’s Brian Williams nabbed other top spots.
According to Nikki Schwab, a political columnist for the Washington Examiner, Stewart has the ear of so many because he personifies the increasingly marginalized political moderate. “Stewart tries to make the point that most of the country, they’re not the pundits that are in D.C. They’re not the Glenn Becks that are freaking out about the end of the world,” Schwab told The Varsity.
“His show is always about media criticism. In recent years, it has increasingly become a call for more reasoned political discourse,” echoes Feldman.
On October 30, that call to reasoned discourse — to “taking it down a notch” as Stewart put it — struck a chord on the National Mall.
A great deal of ink has been spilled over the size and motive of the crowd at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. To be sure, the number far exceeded the 60,000 estimate listed on the rally’s permit application to the National Park Service.
While NPS officials refused to provide any numbers, other third-party organizations used aerial photos to peg the crowd size at around 215,000. The same group determined that the Rally to Restore Honor, the brainchild of Glenn Beck, drew about 87,000 this past August. Ridership on the D.C. transit system set a new Saturday record, with more than 825,400 passengers packing into Metro trains on October 30. Compare that to ridership on August 28, the day of Beck’s rally, which clocked in at about 510,000 riders.
By any account, Stewart and fellow funny-man Stephen Colbert managed to coax a tidal wave of supporters into partaking in their highly-publicized, three-hour variety show. As predicted, one of Stewart’s main demographics attended in full force: college students.
“Younger on the whole, more politically knowledgeable, more interested in politics, higher levels of education, more left-leaning,” are the criteria Feldman uses to describe the demographic.
“It’s going to be the constituency that is Jon Stewart — the Obama voters, the young people, the more affluent and educated types,” Schwab forecast before the Rally. From South Carolina to Vancouver, from Illinois to Ottawa, young people reached the Mall by train, bus, and carpool, some even being forced to camp out because of a shortage of accommodation in the District.
Alex Lougheed, a recent graduate from the University of British Columbia, journeyed by both bus and train for 20 hours to reach D.C. from Ottawa. Asked why Canadians like himself were in attendance, Lougheed responded that “American politics are kind of Canada’s biggest pastime. We have this curiosity about American politics because America is the great experiment of the modern world.”
However, it wasn’t just college kids, but also costume-clad seniors and stroller-pushing families, that became part of the Million Moderate March.
Jan Richmond, 70, left Chapel Hill, North Carolina, at 4 a.m. to attend the rally. “The main reason is to send a message that I’m upset about things,” she explained as she stood waiting for the headliners to make their first appearance. “It’s extremism in general that’s upsetting to me,” said friend Paula Clark, 65.
Jason, a lawyer from Virginia, shared similar concerns, but took more direct aim at the conservative Tea Party movement. “This focuses on what’s ridiculous in politics, and there’s so much of that going on right now,” he said while sporting a t-shirt emblazoned with the words “Republicans for Voldemort.” “I’m looking to counteract the energy of the Tea Party with a more rational and perhaps progressive message.”
According to Feldman, many rally-goers shared this intention. “What was motivating a lot of people to show up was to be counted, and to have their count exceed what was at the Tea Party rally,” she said in an interview following the event. “I sensed not necessarily animosity towards the Tea Partiers, but definitely a need to be heard alongside them.”
Others were there simply to witness Comedy Central shtick firsthand. “We just want to have fun,” said Daphne Polichuk, a student who journeyed down from Université de Sherbrooke in Quebec. Polichuk and her fellow road-trippers showed up wearing banana costumes and carrying signs with slogans like “Sanity is a-peeling.”
But much of the ironic garb and signage faced criticism in media analysis. “Hipster Woodstock celebrating political apathy,” is how Washington Examiner columnist Gene Healy characterized the event. Washington Post op-ed writer Anne Applebaum called Stewart’s rally a “gloomy development” for anyone who takes the label of political “moderate” seriously.
And over at left-leaning blog the Huffington Post, UCLA professor Bob Samuels lamented that Stewart’s “type of humor undermines American politics by turning everything into a joke and a source of mockery.”
While supporters celebrated both the medium and the message of Stewart’s rally, these and other critics decried its ironic, not-altogether-clear goal. Even Stewart himself asked, in his closing monologue, “What exactly was this?”
The more striking question for the future media landscape is what exactly does this mean for Jon Stewart? In the rally’s aftermath, can Stewart still safely sit on the sidelines as a “fake” news anchor, or has he thrown himself into the ring of political activism?
According to Lougheed, Stewart is still constrained by his jokester persona. “He’s not really in the best position to be that voice either because he’s a comedian, he’s there to make jokes, he’s there to ridicule the status quo.”
For her part, Feldman takes issue with the distinction between entertainment and politics. “Why shouldn’t an entertainer or a comedian be able to talk about serious political issues?” she asks.
“What [the rally] really symbolizes is push-back against this need among certain members of our political and media elite to try force this very rigid distinction between entertainment on the one hand, and reasoned politics on the other.”
Reviewing Stewart’s track record over the past decade, the Rally to Restore Sanity is only the latest in a series of attempts to appeal for moderation — and to hold the media accountable. Take, for example, Stewart’s now-famous 2004 appearance on CNN’s debate program, Crossfire, in which the comedian called out the show’s “partisan hackery.” Within six weeks, Crossfire was cancelled. Another example is Stewart’s 2009 criticism of CNBC’s irresponsible financial reporting, which ultimately led to an on-air face-off with Mad Money’s Jim Cramer.
The “bipartisan” label attached to the rally by Stewart and Colbert has also drawn fire. “They were not issuing a call to go out and vote for specific candidates. They weren’t promoting a particular ideology,” points out Feldman. Still, she notes that “by and large, the people there tended to be left-leaning.”
Beck, who also claimed his Rally to Restore Honor was apolitical, faced similar criticism. As Schwab notes, “we know who watches [Stewart] and we know who watches Glenn Beck. The fact that either one of them thinks this is bipartisan is kind of a joke.”
“Jon Stewart is trying to keep a message that is ‘apolitical.’ It’s an impossible endeavour,” echoes Lougheed. “To try to claim that of something of this stature and this size, and the fact that a lot of people listen to him and believe what he says, is very naïve.”
While not necessarily endorsing any candidates, Feldman predicted that the rally could push apathetic Americans to the polls. “If anything, it’s going to motivate people to go and vote who might have otherwise not voted,” she said the day before America’s November 2 midterm elections.
If one considers Stewart’s target demographic, the sweeping victory by the Republicans — who recently picked up 60 seats, giving them a majority in the House of Representatives — suggests otherwise.
The Rally to Restore Sanity is largely what you make of it, and plenty did — both on the right and the left. What Stewart really seems to have accomplished is to provide a voice for those who speak but don’t scream, those who agree to disagree. While certainly overstepping the arbitrary entertainer-commentator boundaries of the media establishment, Stewart only reinforced his role as one of the few watchdogs left on television.
Standing on the National Mall before more than 200,000 admirers — or at least curious onlookers — Stewart himself declared, “I feel good. Strangely, calmly, good.” Maybe he was inspired by the sheer number of supporters, maybe he felt compelled to voice a shred of hope in desperate times, or maybe he too was reflecting on how far he had come since his role in The Faculty.
Whatever it was, Jon Stewart had finally reached his own moment of Zen.
