If you were to ask a group of moderately politically attentive Americans to name the foremost political comedian today, you would likely get a variety of answers. A broad group would point to Stephen Colbert, and not without reason: His easy affability and his show’s relatively inoffensive nature have made it the second most-watched late-night television show currently running. A more conservative crowd may point to Greg Gutfeld, whose eponymous program on Fox News was panned upon premiere but now tops Colbert as the most watched on late-night TV. The more politically astute may reference John Oliver or Seth Meyers. The older might point to Stewart. The worldly to Noah. The insufferable to Crowder or Maher.
One likely would not hear the names Andy Borowitz, Peter McIndoe, or Chad Nackers. Their jobs — writer and creator of The Borowitz Report hosted by the New Yorker, founder of Birds Aren’t Real, and editor-in-chief of The Onion, respectively — somewhat require their anonymity and do not garner much public acclaim. Why? Let’s just say the popularity of satirical journalism is not what it used to be.
But this is a regrettable fact: These writers’ contributions to political comedy in the Biden era have become exceedingly important, not just because their satire is brilliant (it is) but because their dissection of how we receive the news incisively interrogates the state of both our comedy and our reality.
Before anything else, we must acknowledge that these publications are not news organizations, even if they are parodying them. Each informs their audience of this in different ways: Borowitz is most explicit, calling his column page “Satire from The Borowitz Report.” The phrase appears on all his articles in small print above their titles, subtitled “Not the news” for good measure. Birds Aren’t Real takes the opposite approach, officially insisting that it is a sincere organization founded out of genuine concern in 1976 rather than an extended public satire campaign founded out of genuine concern in 2017. Both The Onion and The Babylon Bee take a more middle-of-the-road approach: not telling the reader openly that they are satire while banking on the fact the audience either already knows or will figure it out.
But inherent in all of these approaches is a doublethink required of the reader. Even as they are telling you — implicitly or explicitly — that they are satirical articles and not to be taken literally, they still have the look and feel of actual news sites. Visually, the only thing separating a Borowitz article from any other in The New Yorker is small print. The Onion and The Babylon Bee’s front pages take inspiration and influence from those of popular tabloids like the New York Post and The Daily Mail, whose dramatic, repeated use of images and crowded textual space is as iconic as it is painful to the eye. It’s a one-to-one comparison.
Birds Aren’t Real deserves special recognition for how far their straight-faced satire goes. From the website to the merch to their public interview videos and McIndoe’s talk show (for which easy connections can be made to Alex Jones’s Info Wars and Stephen Crowder’s talk show), the level of the facsimile is so exact, so all-encompassing, and so realistic that many who first encountered the organization took it at face value.
But all of this is relatively obvious. If you’re going to satirize the news or poke fun at conspiracy theories, you should attempt to resemble a newspaper or a conspiracy website. It’s an exceedingly old trick, one many encountered reading Jonathan Swift’s 1729 essay, “A Modest Proposal,” in high school English class. But where Swift’s cannibalistic content is so outrageous that its facetiousness is obvious, today’s satire faces a unique challenge: Somehow, real life has caught up.
We talk about how American politics has always been crazy (see: the caning affair), but we are actually at a point where the petulance and craziness of politics as usual often outpaces what a satirist can comfortably create without sounding insane. And these writers know this; Nackers has spoken openly about the difficulty of creating satirical content in the Trump era, though it is an issue his counterparts on television don’t seem to have a problem with.
To match the creeping insanity and perhaps capitulate to an increasingly digital and celebrity-focused world, traditional news has also seen shifts in how and what it reports, especially regarding its dissection of public figures. While this is not entirely new nor necessarily a bad thing, you cannot deny that articles about the unusual name of a billionaire’s child, the personal lives and marriages of political advisors, or the president’s thoughts on his own obesity are quite personal in a way that would not have been published in high-brow papers like the New York Times or the Washington Post as little as 20 years ago.
This combination — increasing absurdity in politics combined with a willingness by mainstream papers to “go there” — results in a peculiar conflation of fact and fiction in the satirical pieces we’ve discussed that is not found elsewhere. When Borowitz writes that Kari Lake had a breakdown after she didn’t win the lottery or that Lauren Boebert argued against student debt cancelation because it’d encourage more people to learn, you may be laughing at the portrayal of the characters in question or patently concerned about how long it took you to figure out that it was fake. It’s still satire, sure, but it’s a satire barely more extreme than real life and deeply unsettling in a way that raises serious questions about both the actions of these real-world people and the processes by which we report them. Even recent articles in both The Onion and The Babylon Bee have just been cheeky ways of relaying the actual news rather than making anything up.
The complexity of this type of humor, in which the joke is simultaneously pointed at the politician, the journalists covering them, and arguably even the reader, is uniquely well-suited to the written word. For one, late-night television comedians like Colbert, Oliver, and others have a joke structure and absurdist sense of humor that purposely keeps the real and false distinct. And when they do try to intermix actual analysis with parody — as arguably Maher, Gutfeld, and Crowder all do — the results are inconsistent. Furthermore, there is no critique of the style, method, and medium of cable news inherent in these shows, at least not on purpose (Maher and Crowder) or without hefty cringe (Gutfeld). The bulk of their criticism is of the politics and rarely of the form.
There is, of course, an exception to this rule: Stephen Colbert’s old show “The Colbert Report” was itself a parody of how reactionary conservative anchors, namely on Fox, were becoming rising stars. It was popular, well-received, and a genuine critique of the medium of news in a way now mainly seen in written satire. But we should not be surprised by this. After all, the show’s co-creator is Ben Karlin: comedian, screenwriter, television producer, and former editor of The Onion.
In the streaming era, it’s easy to see how and why TV comedians became the superstars they did. Politics was crazy, more people were watching than ever, and every variation on the Late Show stepped up to the plate. But the work literary comedians do as we put down our magazines and turn on the television is more than funny; it asks fundamental questions about the way we receive, interpret, and internalize news and politics. Their work is critical, in every sense of the word. To read it is not just to read a slanted version of the news. To read it is to read ourselves shown starkly clearer.
