Keith Olbermann's Countdown and the one-two Comedy Central punch of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert -- with their nightly back-to-back The Daily Show and The Colbert Report -- are how I keep sane in a world gone way off track. These guys reassure me that, at the very least, I am not alone in my disdain for the bulldinky of politicians and the inanities of the mainstream media. And on the nights when I miss their shows, usually because I'm out at press screenings for upcoming films, I do feel that I've missed a phone call to reality, that I've missed touching base with sanity.

So while I'm delighted to see that the angrier Olbermann gets, the more his ratings seem to climb -- damn, he's practically shaking with rage these days as he goes off on his wonderful, carefully considered tirades -- I fear that Rolling Stone magazine's bestowing of a cover and a long interview upon Stewart and Colbert is a mark of doom. Look at the has-beens who've been on covers in 2006 alone: Eddie Vedder? Mariah Carey? Red Hot Chili Peppers? Keifer Sutherland? Sorry, but 24 is sooo 2004.

And sure enough, the interview, conducted by Maureen Dowd, almost entirely -- and seemingly deliberately -- misses or at best downplays the importance of what the popularity of Stewart and Colbert indicates: that the watchdog mission of a formerly free and independent (and noncomedic) media has been abandoned and left for the likes of Stewart and Colbert to pick up. "Oh, these court jesters! Aren't they hilarious with their japes and their jokes?" is pretty much where the piece goes. There is little sense of a society so off course that the jesters literally are the only ones speaking truth to power, as if we were living in a medieval autocracy. Look how the piece starts:

I thought Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert might be a little nervous to meet with me. I was the real news commentator, after all, and they were the mock. They threw spitballs at presidents; I interviewed presidents before throwing spitballs at them. I had crisscrossed the globe to cover news stories, while these guys just put on dark suits and threw up imported backgrounds on a green screen.

After all, Dowd is the "real" journalist, the one who represents a system that has completely fallen down on the job (whether or not she has on an individual basis), and Stewart and Colbert are the "fake" ones -- they don't really "count," even if all the kids are into them these days. It's infuriating, this tone of ... not disdain, but condescension, like Stewart and Colbert may be adorable in their adolescent rabble-rousing, but they don't really count, not really. Dowd throws in little strokes like, "They're the Cronkite and Murrow for an ironic millennium," but then there's stuff like this:

While real network news withers, Stewart's show has become the hot destination for anyone who wants to sell books or seem hip, from presidential candidates to military dictators.

As if all that Stewart and Colbert are about is dismissable hipness and selling crappy books. Stewart calls the reality he pokes with funny sadness "a comic box lined with sadness," but Dowd can say:

A recent Indiana University study found that The Daily Show was just as substantive as network television news during the 2004 election. I'm not surprised that young people who watch it are well-informed. I read about ten newspapers a day and three newsmagazines a week, and I have my TV tuned to cable news all day, and I still find myself taking notes from The Daily Show.

She says this without seeming to cop onto the fact that absolutely everything Stewart and Colbert represent is a fundamental breakdown of American public life. "Oh, ha ha," Dowd seems to say, "these guys -- it's so cute how they throw water balloons at the grownups." She seems to misunderstand the melancholy authenticity of something that Stewart says, that seems to sum up the entire situation. She doesn't get it. He says:

I don't understand how anyone can consider jokes about this stuff worse than the reality of it. We're not out to provoke. We're not out to shock. There is no joy in stepping over a line. I don't think there's any way to possibly offend in a comedic sense when reality has such a desperate foundation to it.

If Stewart and Colbert are so funny -- and they are -- why do they make me wanna cry?

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
MaryAnn Johanson
author of The Totally Geeky Guide to The Princess Bride
minder of FlickFilosopher.com

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