Moments of Zen

My favorite TV viewing is provided by "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." Stewart is better than anyone at inserting the skewer with a smile as he comments on the day's political (for the most part) events. The show always ends with Stewart's "Now, your moment of Zen." This is a replay of the most absurd news clip or sound bite of the day. Once each week, Lewis Black appears in the segment—"Back In Black"—that is the ultimate in iconoclasm. Give me "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" anytime over the babble on the cable and broadcast news programs. There is more truth with Jon Stewart than anywhere else in the media. Give me the "Daily Show's" correspondents: Steven Colbert, Ed Helms, Rob Corddry, and Samantha Bee anytime. They provide my moments of Zen. If this is (fair & balanced) veracity, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
America (The Book): Last Comic Standing
By Tom Carson
Review—AMERICA (THE BOOK): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction.
By Jon Stewart, Ben Karlin and David Javerbaum.
Illustrated. 244 pp. Warner Books. $24.95.


Jon Stewart appears Monday through Thursday on the "Daily Show with Jon Stewart" at 10:00 pm Central Time on Cox Cable Channel 48. 

IN 9/11's wake, millions of Americans felt rallied -- or were told they had been, anyhow -- by President Bush's bullhorn address at ground zero. As much as I wanted to be moved, I wasn't one of them. I got my upsurge of patriotic defiance from another source -- the famous 9/11 issue of The Onion, which rose to the almost unimaginable challenge of satirizing the attacks before the rubble stopped smoking. Under the circumstances, making jokes was heroic, which is why the Pulitzer judge who lobbied his colleagues to include The Onion's mock coverage among 2001's finalists wasn't kidding.

Meanwhile, on the first post-attack faux newscast of ''The Daily Show,'' Comedy Central's Jon Stewart disconcerted everybody by weeping on camera. His utterly human reaction, far more spontaneous than Dan Rather's provoking himself to choke up by reciting ''America the Beautiful'' on David Letterman's show, had the effect of reminding us that ''Jon Stewart'' was a persona -- one as yet unable to fit authenticity in, something that took Letterman himself years.

Even so, since its finest hour The Onion has often amused me, but its humor seems quaint -- locked into a funhouse-mirror formula. And Stewart, who might have been mistaken for a real Sept. 10 kind of guy, has turned into the Bush years' sharpest jester, a satirist who doubles for his fans as a goofy, imperturbable reality check. Nobody better demonstrates how those post-9/11 reports on the death of irony turned out to be, well, ironic. Bush's excesses have restored irony from its decadence in Letterman's salad days, when it came to mean adopting a winky superciliousness as your default reaction to everything, to its best purpose, which is as a coping strategy with a moral value.

Stewart's originality lies in how he fuses two very different American humor traditions: self-deprecating Jewish wit and Ivy League nattiness. He comes by one literally and the other figuratively: Jonathan Stewart Leibowitz, as he was at birth, is William and Mary's best-known graduate since Thomas Jefferson. Jerry Seinfeld, the most yuppified, least ''ethnic'' Jewish comic ever, is his obvious predecessor, but while ''Seinfeld'' was, famously, a show ''about nothing,'' ''The Daily Show'' at its best plays like a show about everything, which proves how far a modest curiosity about who's running the store -- just what Seinfeld lacked -- can take you. What makes Stewart perfect for these times is that, while Ivy League humor is essentially suave, the basic ingredient of Jewish comedy is toughness. Thanks to John Ashcroft and Halliburton, he's invented something new: collegiate gallows humor.

Of course, ''The Daily Show'' is also part of a phenomenon that has some pundits wringing their hands: the number of Americans who now treat late-night television comedy as their primary news source. I've never been able to get too panicked by this particular rush over civilization's cliff, partly because I suspect the alarmism is based on an absurdly reductive premise. In our infomanic age, it would take a determined effort to get your news exclusively from late-night TV, and determined effort just isn't your average couch potato's bag.

Another reason is that they could do worse -- and by worse, I don't mean just Bill O'Reilly, but Ted Koppel. The host of ''Nightline'' is Stewart's true foil, today's reigning example of the ultra-establishmentarian television journalist whose authority comes at the expense of any identification with his audience. While I'd still take Koppel over Jay Leno, that's less because Leno is a comic than because he's a dumb one. Never risking an original perception, his topical jokes are gag recyclings of the conventional wisdom, making him indistinguishable at times from a Republican Party shill even when he isn't playing Arnold Schwarzenegger's media butler.

Mind, when John Kerry appeared on ''The Daily Show,'' Stewart wasn't much less egregious, too plainly eager to boost his guest's nonexistent hipness quotient. But the bottom line is that he does far better at being informed by Beltway standards than Koppel does at pretending he's heard of Kid Rock. That means ''The Daily Show'' is almost guaranteed to be more insightful.

In fact, ''America (The Book),'' produced by Stewart in tandem with no fewer than 18 collaborators -- you were wondering when I'd get to it, weren't you? -- contains an admirably succinct definition of the news media's job in a democracy: ''The role of a free press is to be the people's eyes and ears, providing not just information but access, insight and most importantly context.'' While ''Nightline'' can provide all four, who'd dream of calling Koppel the people's eyes and ears? (The people's rug, maybe.) Within obvious limits -- it's a safe guess he'd go unrecognized at a Nascar rally, both before and after they beat him up -- Stewart comes closer to fitting the bill. One proof is that the paragraph in America (The Book) whose opening I just quoted ends by directing the reader to a flip-book of an exciting car chase at bottom right.

In miniature, that's how the whole of this inspired parody civics textbook works. With ''Democracy Before America,'' the founders, the presidency, ''Congress: Quagmire of Freedom,'' the judiciary, elections, the media, ''The Future of Democracy'' and ''The Rest of the World'' each rating a chapter, the main text's affectation of seriousness, which occasionally smuggles in the real thing, keeps dissipating into bonkers digressions, choleric sputters and shrugs of despair. Simultaneously, it's being swamped by a fabulous slew of snazzy sidebars, deep captions, graphics (one favorite: a chart depicting ''Growth in Misleading Charts'') and other visual hoo-ha ranging from Whoopi Goldberg in a time capsule to a pullout boxing poster featuring ''Skull vs. Bones'' -- Kerry and Bush, facing off for ''the Thrilla in Vanilla.''

I admit that I did not, like a responsible reviewer, sit down and read ''America (The Book)'' straight through from its ''Foreword by Thomas Jefferson'' -- ''Is it true Halle Berry is once again single?'' -- to the end. Instead, I did what any sane consumer would: jumped in at random and let the book have its way with me until the candy-store shelves were empty. That's how I can confirm that plenty of things in it will make you snort on second or even third reading. I became especially fond of Samantha Bee, author of Would You Mind if I Told You How We Do It in Canada?, and her obsessively timid explanations of how they do things up north. Then there's the map of a future Washington, in which the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has been made cheerier by adding the plot summaries of all 224 episodes of ''Friends.'' Or this comparison between executive and legislative branches, which has the extra merit of being perfectly accurate: ''If the president is the head of the American body politic, Congress is its gastrointestinal tract.''

As with ''The Daily Show'' itself, the book's artfulness is in maintaining a balance between pointed satire of the political travesties and media bamboozling Americans should be fed up with and the sort of sublime silliness that implies equanimity. Nothing here is as savage as David Rees's comic strip, ''Get Your War On,'' that glorious excoriation of our post-9/11 loony bin. Nor does the book include anything as oddly beautiful as the coda to The Onion's compendium ''Our Dumb Century,'' a superficially cruel, inexplicably touching news item fantasizing a nursing-home squabble between Ronald Reagan and Muhammad Ali. But the book's satiric comprehensiveness is unequaled -- it really is a parody survey of the whole ball of wax -- and the silliness is often a joy. What looks like one of its most puerile jokes is actually among its most profound: color photographs (presumably fabricated, but we can dream) of all nine Supreme Court justices naked.

Deeper in the woodwork, it's hard not to dote on all the allusions that, as good Americans, we're expected to spot without nudging, of which the funniest is the tribute to The Godfather that places ''Barzini, a legitimate craftsman from Rhode Island,'' among the Constitution's framers. The zaniest is the tip that what we know as the Supreme Court was originally named Trimalchio in West Egg' (Fitzgerald's working title for The Great Gatsby). The sweetest is the discreet shout-out to the legendary jazz eccentric Bob Dorough, beloved by unwitting millions for the educational ditties on ''Schoolhouse Rock.''

Dorough also belongs here, because the book's ultimate joke -- on our educational system, if not us in general -- is that it's not only more informative about how American government and culture work than the textbooks it burlesques, but gives us a keener sense of having a stake in both. So what if it's by a TV comic and his stable of wiseacre cronies? Dan Rather has been my favorite comedian for decades, and while I'd have to give him the edge over Stewart on laughs, he isn't nearly as perceptive. Not to sound like Samantha Bee, but could I please be the first to nominate America (The Book) for this year's history Pulitzer?

Tom Carson is GQ's television and movie columnist and the author of Gilligan's Wake, a novel.

Copyright © 2004 New York Times