Stewart, South Park and satire

Political junkies who haven't completed their rehab are abuzz today over the tangle between right-wing pretty boy Tucker Carlson and The Daily Show's Jon Stewart, who went on Crossfire and found that Carlson wasn't receptive to being lectured on journalism.</p>

Stewart is, of course, absolutely right. Crossfire was the first step down into the abyss for cable news, reducing the medium into a shoutfest of pundits and occasional politicians. (Begala has taken some justified grief for serving two masters, Kerry and CNN, at the same time.)

But this was the wrong time and place to make the point. Stewart's show does a masterful job of skewering the media, particularly the cable blowhards who give half their time to political spin doctors and the other half to the Carlsons and Begalas of the world, who just spin things even more rather than delving into any meaningful analysis. He does it with devastating satire. So why go fight the devils on their own turf?

(Update: Jen saw it live and says the audience was laughing with Stewart. We love Lisa de Moraes' TV column in general, but maybe she was presenting Stewart as a bit more sullen than he actually came across on the show.)

One possibility: Perhaps Stewart is thinking that his viewers are missing the point of the satire. That seems to be a problem for Hank Stuever, the Post reviewer assigned to Team America: World Police, the puppet show from the creators of South Park. (Hank, incidentally, isn't normally a film reviewer.) Here's his conclusion:

Stunned by all the fun, I am almost moved to salute Parker and Stone for their nuanced and careful takedown of American jingoism and the seemingly disastrous foreign policy that Team America stands for.

Only that isn't quite how it played to an audience on Tuesday night, at one of those free-ticket radio station giveaway previews in a packed cineplex in Northwest Washington. The biggest laughs came when Team America assaulted any and all concepts of ethnicity, or when the joke was on gays, Michael Moore or a vast left-wing idiocy.

The movie feels like an elaborate inside joke on the very Americans laughing hardest at its easiest gags, oblivious to the sly, allegorical digs at a USA brand of bravado. What I took as a lampoon of Bushworld seemed to be received, in the seats around me, as a triumph of Bushworld. Pollsters and campaign workers, take note: Team America will only further confound your election-year data.

A couple of possible conclusions:

• People aren't smart enough to get satire, which is why Stewart felt compelled to spell it out by beating up Tucker Carlson.
• People who are dumb enough to listen to commercial radio long enough to win tickets to a Team America preview aren't smart enough to get satire.
• Stuever failed to notice that Matt and Trey, the South Park folks, are equal-opportunity offenders who seem to be Libertarian if they're anything. That's one reason why they're able to get away with as much as they do, and thank goodness for that.

So how would Matt and Trey feel if they noticed that the yahoos were in control of the audience at the preview?

My guess is they wouldn't care. One reason may be that they're simply too naive to deconstruct the audience reaction -- witness their remarkably ignorant take on the tobacco industry in the Rob Reiner episode of South Park. But another reason may be that they are content to let the art -- and yes, this is art, as juvenile as it may seem -- speak for itself. They're undoubtedly better at communicating ideas through satire than through essay or argument.

Maybe Stewart can handle himself on Crossfire or on an op-ed page as well as he handles himself on The Daily Show. But there's really no reason for him to prove it. He's brilliant at what he does. If Tucker Carlson or the Tuesday night crowd at Team America doesn't get it, so what? It may sink in at some point, or those people may be unreachable. Don't diminish the message for the rest of us.