Trevor Noah recently surprised fans (and, according to some accounts, also Comedy Central management) when he announced plans to leave “The Daily Show”. His departure is one of many notable personnel changes in late-night television: James Corden will leave “The Late Late Show” next year; TBS cancelled “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee”; and Desus and Mero broke up with each other and their hugely successful Showtime late-night show beloved by a diverse viewership of millennials.
Prominent entertainers leave jobs all the time, but media watchers see something more systemic in the recent spate of departures. In Puck, Matthew Belloni wrote: “The eight-figure late-night host increasingly doesn’t match the new economics of the late-night business.” The economics used to look like big advertisers paying for a captive audience that tuned in for pulpy takes on mainstream American culture.
But audiences have not been flocking to late-night television for some time. Advertisers have continued to support the time slot, not necessarily because it works but because there was little else competing for the late night audience. Throwing good money after bad, as it were. That cannot last forever.
This is an economic problem, but I suspect the underlying issue is cultural: Americans don’t want to share a living room with one another. We prefer to live and be entertained in ideological encampments.
A study using cross-national data found that Americans have become so tied to party identity that race and class polarise us less than politics. We don’t just want personalised content. We want personalised content that affirms and does not challenge our political identities.
Liberals appear to dominate the late-night TV show genre. The reason for that dominance is complex. Audiences have different orientations toward humour and political talk. Those orientations have some underlying psychological needs. And styles of comedy have political and cultural histories. Bluntly, scholars who study political communication and humour often find that liberals are ironic smart alecks and conservatives are outraged moralists. Some of us are a bit of both, but most of us have a psychological need to be one over the other.
In terms of humour, you can think of this as “you know you’re a redneck if” on one end of the spectrum and George Carlin on the other. In the 1990s, satirical political infotainment evolved into the late-night television style that we have today. Two things brought politics and infotainment together: the internet and “The Daily Show”.
With Jon Stewart as host, “The Daily Show” innovated a formula for liberal satire infotainment. A director and a supervising producer of “The Daily Show”, David Paul Meyer, said that when Noah took over in 2015, he embraced a more holistic style. “Trevor doesn’t necessarily use the edgier form of satire, irony and outrage to drive his approach to the show,” Meyer told me. Noah’s willingness to drop the routine to tackle a subject seriously is good political education.
Unfortunately, outrage makes more money, and today’s conservative media is much better at outrage. Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, a communication professor at the University of Delaware, wrote “Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States”. She said that “The Daily Show” is an exemplar of what political media became in the 1990s. “Entertainment wasn’t expected to ‘stay in its lane’. It was expected — encouraged even — to blur the lines between fact and fiction, entertainment and politics, art and social justice,” she writes. The show’s mockumentary style and satirical stance updated 1960s counterculture critique for the postmodern, post-internet age.
Young pulls together a lot of research on psychology, history and media to explain why we find funny what we do. The need for closure is a big one. If you have a high need for clear-cut moral rules, then satire, which asks us to skewer our own beliefs, is going to make you pretty anxious. Ouchie stuff if “us versus them” makes you feel safest.
As it turns out, political messages play on some similar psychological needs. One that tells you who are bad and, even better, how to punish them satisfies the same need as good old-fashioned outrage. Think how Donald Trump and his audience co-wrote one of the most enduring outrage political messages of 21st-century politics: “Lock her up.”
Liberals may be drawn to ironic humor like satire because it reflects their antagonism toward the status quo. But outrage plays better to the political psychology of conservatives. As outrage has become a more viable media model than satire, it has gotten harder to sell liberal politics. “All of our political, cultural and economic messages risk being filtered through an identity-driven ecosystem that proportionally rewards not just conservatism and Republicanism,” Young told me, “but also conservative populism on the far right.”
The irony isn’t lost on me that conservative audiences complain about how vilified they are in popular culture. Conservative media seems to be doing quite well. Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro are two of the most popular podcast hosts in the nation. There is no liberal counterpart to either. Fox News lost some of its big names when Megyn Kelly and Bill O’Reilly left in 2017. But while MSNBC looks for its footing after Rachel Maddow’s exit on most weeknights and as CNN pivots to centrism, Fox is beating them both in ratings.
When you look across media platforms, it is easier to see how conservative psychological preference for outrage bodes better for their growth in satellite radio, lifestyle media and, of course, social media. My New York Times colleague Zeynep Tufekci is one of many scholars who have documented how social media’s economic models reward outrage-driven content. Conservative social media platforms like Parler are duds. But conservative personalities like Shapiro are hugely popular across Facebook and YouTube. And Elon Musk has promised to turn Twitter into his idea of a free-speech platform. Some observers suspect that means reinstating accounts banned for violating Twitter’s terms of service. Outrage comedy has for the most part never found its late-night mojo, but outrage content is doing just fine in every other sector of infotainment.
If satirical political content is the liberal audience’s way to stick it to the man, why isn’t the genre exploding right now? Young said the thing about satire is that it asks the audience to take risks. Getting the layered meaning of ironic humour requires a little, well, faith that the payoff will be worth it. “It is hard to be hopeful, even ironically, when everything seems to be going so bad,” she said. The Dobbs decision has radicalised and terrified millions of voters. Many Americans think the Supreme Court is partisan, if not outright corrupt. President Joe Biden’s policy achievements do not seem to be capturing voters’ imagination. And he has several significant policy wins. Large swaths of the Republican Party have embraced white identitarian violence. We are too scared to laugh.
Whether infotainment should matter to the way politics is communicated is a separate issue from the fact that it does matter. In the meantime, Republicans are set to take over the House and perhaps the Senate with next week’s midterm elections. Many expect Trump to run again in 2024. Election deniers are legitimate GOP candidates. Outrage is the mainstream GOP brand, from the top of the ticket to the bottom. We are heading into a dangerous election cycle with a contracting liberal media ecosystem and a conservative media machine optimised for outrage.
All of this is funny only in a laugh-to-keep-from-crying kind of way.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Tressie McMillan Cottom is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow.
