Is Late Night Political Comedy a Joke?
By Stephen Silver As the 2008 general election campaign gets underway, way too many Americans once again will gain the bulk of their political news not from newspapers, news anchors or even the Internet but rather from late-night comics. A new book analyzes this phenomenon and the nexus of politics and television comedy in general, and raises some fascinating questions about where one ends and the other begins. Strange Bedfellows was written by University of Iowa professor Russell L. Peterson. Subtitled How Late Night Comedy Turns Democracy Into a Joke, it was published earlier this spring by the Princeton University Press. In it the author, a former political cartoonist, asks whether late-night comics are overstepping their bounds in poking fun at politicians and politics itself. If nothing else, Peterson´s book demonstrates just how awful and unfunny the whole Leno/Letterman brand of “political humor” is. As Peterson points out, these comics and their writing staffs find one aspect o
