The Good, The Bad and the Smugly
Caitlin Flanagan’s piece in The Atlantic is the latest in a long line of articles
berating American liberals for their condescending attitude towards their more
conservative fellow citizens, and suggesting that this attitude may have
contributed to the coronation of President Trump. A thread running through
these articles has been the role of satire, and in particular the late-night
talk-show monologues of John Oliver, Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah et al. As Emmett Rensin put it in a
widely-discussed piece from last year,
Over 20 years, an
industry arose to cater to the smug style [of American liberals]. It began in
humor, and culminated for a time in The Daily Show, a program that more
than any other thing advanced the idea that liberal orthodoxy was a kind of
educated savvy and that its opponents were, before anything else, stupid.
He also correctly predicted the wages of this style:
Faced with the prospect of an election between Donald Trump and Hillary
Clinton, the smug will reach a fever pitch: six straight months of a sure
thing, an opportunity to mock and scoff and ask, How could anybody vote
for this guy? until a morning in November when they ask, What the
fuck happened?
Quite.
There are points in both Rensin and Flanagan’s pieces with which one
could take issue. For instance, one could certainly question whether, as
Flanagan suggests, the late-night hosts decided en masse during the election to criticise not just Trump and his
retinue, but anyone considering voting for him. But it is hard to deny the
thought that for someone inclined to support Trump, it was reasonable to feel
that their views were being dismissed; or that the perceived smugness of
late-night comics and their liberal fans provides a convenient way of capturing
the liberal media and the whole liberal elite’s disdain, as more conservative
Americans see it, for Trump and his supporters.
Smugness is a term which is hard to pin down, but which
feels right in certain circumstances – and as someone who watches a fair bit of
these late-night comics, I have to say that they often do come across as smug.
This is not so much a matter of what they say but as how it is said: it is a
question of tone, a sense of being overly satisfied with one’s own correctness
and of talking down to those who might disagree.[i]
Flanagan picks out the following clip from John Oliver as epitomising this:
When John Oliver
told viewers that if they opposed abortion they had to change the channel until
the last minute of the program, when they would be shown “an adorable bucket of
sloths,” he perfectly encapsulated the tone of these shows: one imbued with the
conviction that they and their fans are intellectually and morally superior to
those who espouse any of the beliefs of the political right.[ii]
Something which has not been much discussed in many of these
articles is the possibility that a certain format may contribute towards the
sense of smugness. All of the shows that Flanagan mentions involve their hosts
performing straight-to-camera monologues. Their styles
vary (Samantha Bee often comes across as irritated, verging on furious; Stephen
Colbert as trying to be suavely above it all; Seth Meyers as a little goofy)
but in each case the set-up involves the host assuming a position of authority.
They know what’s going on, they use this knowledge to expose the stupidity,
ignorance or hypocrisy of others (preferably Republican others), and they
invite you to follow their direction in laughing at the target. This is not a
format which tends to convey much self-doubt, even if the host acknowledges
that a particular issue is complicated or that different viewpoints are
legitimate; by acknowledging this, they are often implicitly contrasting their open-mindedness
with the dogmatism of others.
Of course, any form of
satire will involve poking fun at a target, and will implicitly set up the
satirist (and the audience) as above the butt of the joke. But not all satire
conveys a sense of superiority, even if it is predicated on it. For instance,
Stephen Colbert rose to fame playing right-wing wing-nut ‘Stephen Colbert’,
delivering straight-to-camera monologues eviscerating spineless liberals, while
of course really sending up the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.
Insofar as Colbert’s persona was modelled on right-wing talk-show hosts and
commentators, he was implicitly claiming superiority over them in order to heap
scorn upon them. But this sense of superiority isn’t manifest in his
performance.
This may be as simple a
matter as Colbert’s not talking down to his targets, but rather enacting their
hot air-fuelled rhetorical flourishes. The joke is still at their expense, but it’s
not spelled out. Colbert, in his old persona, showed the ridiculousness of
right-wing blow-hards rather than stating it. In contrast, a format in which the comedian is
constantly telling the audience just how wrong-headed certain people are can
hardly help being smug, whatever political stance the comedian is adopting.
[i]
Rensin subsequently pointed out that he was not so much concerned with liberal
smugness as with what he termed the ‘Smug Style. This phrase is somewhat
misleading: as Rensin defines it, the Smug Style is not really a style but a
set of beliefs about politics, liberals and conservatives. In any case, what I
am more interested in is what is properly termed ‘style’, a style of comedy
which conveys a sense of smugness. This style may in part be rooted in the
beliefs which Rensin identifies, but it is not a matter of having those beliefs
but rather of how they are conveyed.
[ii]
Actually, I found this example unconvincing. Oliver’s segment on abortion is
predicated on the assumption that abortion is a legitimate option for a
pregnant woman, at least in some circumstances. The people he was advising to
switch over were those opposed to allowing abortion in any circumstances
whatsoever. Given the particularly divisive nature of this issue, it is hardly
the epitome of liberal smugness to suggest that those holding such a view would
get little of value out of what was to follow.
