Opinion> Roger Simon> Can Stewart And Colbert Save Us

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Can Stewart and Colbert Save Us?

Disquiet grows. Fear reigns. Madness swirls.

In this election: A woman gets flung to the ground and stomped on the head. A candidate denies being a witch. Another is accused of worshipping idols. A reporter covering a Senate candidate is handcuffed by the candidate's private security guards. A gubernatorial candidate in New York jams his face up against a reporter and says, "I'll take you out, buddy." And he doesn't mean to lunch.

NBC's First Read nails it: "We've seen plenty of anger, frustration and high emotions in past campaigns. But the anger this cycle — culminating in Monday's stomping in Kentucky — feels so much more different."

It is different. More desperate. More depressing. More draining. More filled with despair than hope.

"Maybe our memories are too short," First Read says, "but the level of anger, disrespect and incivility seems to be at an all-time high right now."

Let me add my own memory and agree. For me, the realization came early: I noticed this was going to be a different kind of campaign when people began showing up at presidential speeches openly displaying loaded firearms. It was considered no big deal.

As far as I can determine, no lawmaker has introduced a bill banning such a practice. No lawmaker wants to get burned by the gun lobby. Not this year. And really, when you get down to it, what could go wrong with a few semiautomatics at a political rally? Especially when people are so calm and cool this year.

So it is very fitting for the last major event of the 2010 elections to be a rally by two professional comedians. I mean this. The political comedians have had their chance. Now let the pros take over.

The twin rally, the "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear," is scheduled to take place Saturday on the National Mall. One host is Jon Stewart, a liberal, and the other is Stephen Colbert, a liberal masquerading as an ultra-conservative to make ultra-conservatives appear (even more) foolish.

Both are influential men with daily "faux news" shows that feature un-faux news. They have considerable influence with younger voters, some of whom, we can be assume, get all their news from these two shows.

In an often-misquoted 2004 poll by the Pew Research Center, 21 percent of people ages 18 to 29 cited Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" and NBC's "Saturday Night Live" as a place where they regularly learned about presidential campaign news.

"A lot of them," Stewart said when he heard the poll results, "are probably high."

High or not, the trend lines seem to favor Stewart's demographic. In the same Pew poll, 16 percent fewer young people were watching the network news than four years earlier, while 12 percent more young people were watching comedy shows than four years earlier. This was the largest percentage increase in the survey, topping even Internet use, which was up only 7 percent.

In 2009, the median age of news viewers was 62.3 for all three evening newscasts, according to Nielsen, and that was a full year older than the year before. At that rate, the audience for mainstream news may be too old to operate the on/off control on their channel changers in just a few decades.

Can humor, even the somewhat dark humor of Stewart and Colbert, serve as an antidote to this year's election?

Maybe. Very little is actually known about the rally, what the two will say and how they will say it.

About a month ago, Colbert testified in front of a House subcommittee on immigration to make the very serious point that undocumented farm workers do not take jobs away from U.S. citizens. Colbert confused Capitol Hill with the Borscht Belt, however, and some of his jokes were not well received. "I don't want a tomato picked by a Mexican; I want it picked by an American, and sliced by a Guatemalan, and served by a Venezuelan, in a spa, where a Chilean gives me a Brazilian," he said.

And now you know why satire is called the "high-wire" act of writing. Nothing is more difficult to do successfully or fails more miserably when it fails. As playwright George S. Kaufman once said, "Satire is what closes Saturday night."

Colbert and Stewart open Saturday and play for one night only. And we will see if their satire can lift our spirits and make us forget, or at least tolerate, the campaign that has preceded it.

Could the rally actually affect the outcome of some races? I don't know. But I do know what Adlai Stevenson once said: "Your public servants serve you right."

Now that's funny.

To find out more about Roger Simon, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.