MEDIA

INTERACT

COMMENTS

12/07/07

Text: Anthony Layser

While speaking to veterans in August of this year, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld drew parallels between critics of the administration’s strategies and those who looked to appease Adolf Hitler before World War II. This calculated attempt to silence his and his cohorts’ numerous detractors was more than a bit hyperbolic. In 1938, Germany had the world’s most powerful armed forces. Its industrial base was ranked second only to the United States, whose military at the time was smaller than that of Finland’s. Rummy’s request that Americans view a dispersed network of terrorist cells with the same concern one would give a global power with massive reserves of wealth and firepower was, quite frankly, laughable. Without hesitation, programs like The Daily Show, Colbert Report and Real Time with Bill Maher began utilizing the defense secretary’s statements as comedic fodder. It was business as usual, employing a little derisive wit to deflate a balloon carrying so much hot air.

Sitting in his New York apartment a day after Rumsfeld’s fascism speech, Daily Show contributor and stand-up comedian Lewis Black shared his thoughts on critics of the administration being aligned with those who appeased Hitler. “He’s insane. He’s completely insane,” lamented Black in an unusually sedate fashion, completely opposite to his stage persona. “His enemy is Osama Bin Laden, and now he’s yelling at me.”

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Only a few years ago, audiences that sensed something was amiss with the Bush administration's agenda, but found little resistance in commercially driven mediums like television and radio, rallied around stand-up comedians who infused their acts with pointed political commentary. With a stool and a microphone instead of an acoustic guitar, comics like David Cross, Patton Oswalt and Lewis Black became the new folk singers. If music was the art form speaking truth to power in the turbulent 1960s, stand-up comedy seemed poised to become the preeminent voice representing the disillusioned in the early years of the 21st century.

Power and the politicians who wield it have been lampooned throughout our history. From Jonathan Swift to Mark Twain, the comedic voice has long been a subversive force, but it’s commonly accepted that the confrontational stand-up of today has its roots in America’s post-WW II counterculture.

It was during this time that the legendary Lenny Bruce abandoned the rigid “setup-punch line” structure of traditional stand-up and developed a free-form style of improvisational riffing that combined the poetry of the Beats with the stream-of-conscience approach of bebop musicians. Crass, uninhibited and frequently employing personal experiences and imitations of stodgy authority figures, Bruce took society’s hypocrisies and made them his predominant motif. “All my humor is based upon destruction and despair,” he famously said.