“I really don’t think that it’s appropriate to attack comedians,” said ABC’s “The View” host Joy Behar this week. “We’re on the right side of things . . . We’re important people right now.”
Behar was making a defensible claim poorly. Somewhere in that superiority complex was a reasonable defense of her fellow comics from the censure of liberals who feigned offense at those who would dare joke about serial abuser Harvey Weinstein. Behar has a point. In the heat of the Weinstein scandal and its fallout, professional stand-ups, comedy writers, and television hosts were taking flak from all angles. To observe silence was cowardice; to speak up was insensitive.
Behar’s pomposity here was a byproduct of earnest and largely justified indignation. Her lament also exposed a logical fallacy. She has the sequence of events backward. Satirists don’t become “important people” until they are elevated to prominence by “important people.”
One of Behar’s VIPs, ABC late night host Jimmy Kimmel, has already rejected his colleague’s claim that “comedians are there to say the emperor has no clothes.” Kimmel recently insisted he’d never actually called himself “the moral conscience of America.” This was a label imposed on him, but it was also one he didn’t explicitly reject until he began to take criticism for failing to address the Weinstein controversy. Speaking out against injustice when it is difficult and when it will cost you professionally and personally is not why this particular late night host was dubbed the moral voice of a nation. That honor was bestowed upon him by those who made use of his ability to articulate liberal policy imperatives with undeniable passion.
Kimmel became a substitute spokesperson for Democratic politicians in early May when he delivered a compelling monologue expressing his earnest fear that the GOP’s Obamacare replacement bill would put the life of his young son in jeopardy. But while Kimmel’s monologue made headlines, it wasn’t until policymakers in Washington transformed him into a political fulcrum that he ascended to Olympian moral heights.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee read from Kimmel’s monologue on the floor of the House. Hillary Clinton commended the comedian for “reminding us what’s at stake [with] health care.” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand cited Kimmel’s monologue as a source of health-care policy expertise. Republican Senator Bill Cassidy insisted that any Republican health-care replacement bill must pass what he dubbed “the Jimmy Kimmel test,” a yardstick that Kimmel subsequently adopted and has applied to a number of GOP bills (all of which failed to meet his standards). Cassidy jumped at the opportunity to appear on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” to demonstrate his capacity for empathy, though that did not spare his Obamacare replacement bill from receiving the comedian’s thumbs down.
As happens, Kimmel was not a health-care policy savant; he was receiving guidance on the details of various policy particulars from Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Kimmel’s comments were so in line with Democratic messaging, in fact, that the party’s senatorial campaign committee used them in a digital ad attacking 12 vulnerable Republican incumbents.
Democrats’ unique outpouring of interest in a late-night comedy host’s opinion on a matter of health-care policy stands in stark contrast with their utter disinterest in his thoughts on another public policy matter: gun control.
In the wake of a massacre at an open-air concert in Las Vegas, Kimmel delivered yet another emotionally charged monologue demanding new gun-control legislation. He singled out Republican congressional leaders Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan and tore into White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders for dismissing gun control-related questions from the press. “I want this to be a comedy show,” he said, “but that (is) becoming increasingly difficult lately. It feels like someone has opened a window into hell.”
Already primed to react positively to Kimmel’s emotional display of “conscience,” his words were touted as morally weighty in the television section of New York Times and a Washington Post op-ed, but there was no Greek chorus of affirmations from Capitol Hill. Democratic lawmakers who never miss an opportunity to attack the National Rifle Association or to preen moralistic in the wake of mass act of gun violence made no mention of Kimmel’s tearful appeal for action. Kimmel’s response to this atrocity was no less gut-wrenching than his fearful response to Republican health-care legislation. The conspicuous silence among Democratic lawmakers was possibly due to the fact that Kimmel veered far off the Democratic script.
Kimmel contended that Republicans backed laws that allow loophole purchases at gun shows and made it easier for the mentally ill to purchase firearms, neither of which is true. He insisted that Ryan and McConnell’s are in the unsavory grip of the NRA and that they should be praying for God’s forgiveness for allowing that condition to continue. A day later, Kimmel attacked individual gun-owning “nuts” who “bear some responsibility” for objecting to new gun regulations.
Democratic politicians who attack either the individual 5 million NRA members–as opposed to the organization itself–or the estimated 55 million gun-owners in America quickly find themselves abandoned by their fellow party members. Savvy Democrats know attacking voters is a losing message. Kimmel went off-roading, and the politicians who had found his righteousness so useful when it came to health care suddenly had little interest in this comedian’s moral indignation.
We are left to conclude that comedians do not themselves wield immense cultural and political power, but they occasionally prove useful to those who do. No artist should feel they have to moderate their behavior to suit a contrived political agenda. Down that way lies stilted art and short careers. A little humility, however, would go a long way to help comics know when they’re being used.
