The End of This Great Awakening

Jon Stewart is retiring. No one will notice after the first week, but the usual suspects will make a big deal of it in the run-up. For a long time now, Stewart has been the source of confirmation for the American Left. I’m fond of pointing out that the Left took over the American Protestant movement in the 19th century and has followed their rhythms ever since. The Great Awakenings are now Progressive Awakenings. It’s not an accident that Jon Stewart got famous in the early 1990’s, when this Progressive Awakening began.

Similarly, it is not an accident that he is leaving the stage as this Great Awakening draws to a close. It’s not hard to see that things are fizzling out with the Left. Their party is a mess, run by broken down old people left over from the 1960’s. Their savior is on his last legs, ready to stagger out of office without  bringing about the promised Utopia. At last check the seas are right where he found them six years ago. Stewart is a smart guy and he knows when to leave the stage.

Another reason to leave is he has an army of imitators now. The reason for that is his shtick is easy. Dave Letterman worked out the exaggerated irony-face bit in the 80’s. Comics have always used cues to let the audience know it is OK to laugh. Letterman, a journeyman comic, got very good at this as a guest host for Johnny Carson. He latter combined it with liberal politics to titillate the typical NYC audience.

Stewart’s innovation was to take Letterman’s act and base it on a fake news show. That way he was free to pound away at liberal themes in a way that made the audience feel special and privileged. They got the jokes so they must be smart. His act is flatire, satire intended to flatter the audience. Greg Gutfeld call it the mirror that laughed.

Now there are a bunch of guys doing it and some doing it even better. John Oliver, who is just Jon Stewart with an accent, hits the younger crowd because he can freely curse in his act. Steve Colbert has found he can keep his liberal base, but attract the less crazy too. In a way, exaggerated irony-face is a commodity. The bit has been perfected and it is now a low cost comedy option. The value in Jon Stewart is now heading down and he is wise to leave before he becomes a hack.

The strange thing about Jon Stewart is he was never all that funny. More important, he was never all that hip and groovy. That was just the bullshit middle-aged cosmopolitans and wannabe beautiful people sold themselves. The Weekly Standard has a piece on the real numbers behind Stewart’s show.

As a “millennial” (roughly speaking, someone between the ages of 18 and 29), I’ve grown used to being tarred with fallacious accusations. We millennials are spoiled and mollycoddled! (Nope.) We’re tech-obsessives who would never even think of picking up something as fuddy duddy as a book! (Wrong again.) We’re irredeemable narcissists! (‘Fraid not.)

Today’s meme is that we millennials are utterly devastated by Jon Stewart’s announcement that he will be leaving The Daily Show next year. “What Walter Cronkite was to an earlier generation — an utterly trusted voice — Stewart has been to millennials,” writes Don Aucoin of the Boston Globe.  Stewart has “hordes of millennial fans,” reports CNN. “For people under 30,” says the Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty, “Jon Stewart leaving the Daily Show is the equivalent of the Beatles breaking up.” (And Tumulty should know – she was born in 1955.)

Now one thing we millennials supposedly love is “data journalism.” So let’s back up and see whether there exists any data to back up Tumulty et al.’s claims that we millennials have just suffered a loss on par with the demise of the Lennon-McCartney partnership.

As of 2013, TheDaily Show was bringing in approximately 2 million nightly viewers. And according to an exhaustive Pew Survey from 2012, 39 percent of TheDaily Show’s regular viewers are between the ages of 18 and 29. That means that approximately 780,000 millennials are regular Daily Show watchers. In the United States, there are 53 million people between the ages of 18 and 29. That means that a whopping 1.5 percent of millennials watch the Daily Show regularly! Let’s be generous and assume that, say, 5 million people watch The Daily Show even occasionally. That would still mean a paltry 1.95 million out of 53 million millennials are Stewart fans.

That’s not all. According to Bill Carter, then of the New York Times, the average Daily Show viewer is 41 years old. Considering other cable shows alone, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Archer, American Horror Story, and Louie all have significantly younger audiences than does Stewart. And here’s my favorite nugget: 9 percent of the regular viewers of the nightly evening news – long derided as the news source of the geriatric set – are between the ages of 18 and 29. About 22 million people watch the nightly news. Thus, nearly 2 million millennials are regular viewers of the nightly evening news. That’s right: more than twice as many millennials watch Brian Williams, Scott Pelley, et al, than watch The Daily Show.

In other words, the great millennial following of The Daily Show is a total myth.

Reality, of course, is not of much interest to the Cult of Modern Liberalism. This piece in the Moonbat Review is what we’ll be hearing until Stewart finally quits. Again, the tone and choice of language is what you would expect from a religious cult. Calling a TV comic a “prophet” is not the sort of thing rational people tend to do. The Christian overtones are unmistakable, for those who know their history and Bible. Steve Almond sounds like one of the disciples sorting through his options after the Ascension.

This is consistent with end cycle Progressive Awakenings. Unlike UFO cults or apocalyptic cults, American Progressives handle disconfirmation by going dormant for a period. The New Left went dormant in the mid-70’s and remained so until the early-90’s. Look back at those dormant years and the movies, music and television were big on reminiscence of the 60’s. There was a certain sadness to it all in the early years until it became full-blown nostalgia in the late 80’s.

Steve Almond is speaking to that growing ennui on the Left that the party is over, for now.

10 thoughts on “The End of This Great Awakening

  1. Huh, so people exaggerate in eulogies? Weird.

    Look, it is indisputable that Jon Stewart is an extremely influential figure. We all know his name and schtick. Liking the Daily Show has become a synecdoche for a political stance and you don’t need to have watched the show more than a handful of times to know what that stance is. He represents something in the same way that Bill O’Reilly and Brian Williams do and it’s asinine to suggest otherwise based on nightly viewership statistics. You ordinarily don’t have much patience for obtuse data nerds. I wonder why this is an exception?

    Flatire is a good portmanteau word, but the content of your criticism is so trite that silly Buzzfeed-loving twentysomethings have been saying more or less the same thing for years: I don’t like the Daily Show because people who can’t even answer first round Jeopardy questions watch it in order to feel smart and superior. What Stewart is up to is common knowledge, but you have to admire the skill with which he pulls it off.

  2. Maher is right about Islam. I don’t think he’s that bad, or at least not a bad as a typical Salon writer. He tends to look at things from a perspective of left-leaning spectator, making mockery of the absurdities of politicians and ideological zealots and the weird beliefs many of them hold. The fact liberals frequently criticize Maher suggests he’s doing something right.

  3. “In 2012 Bill Maher made a personal donation of one million dollars to Obama’s Super PAC, Priorities USA Action. His explained that having a country governed by Barack Obama rather than any of the Republican candidates is “worth a million dollars” and that in his own financial interests, “this is the wisest investment I think I could make.” He also encouraged other wealthy liberals to do the same and give until it hurts.”

    Act or not, he went all in with real money…
    That makes him a persona non grata at my house.

    He also thinks gravity is a Jewish plot to steal pennies…

    • Don’t get me wrong. Maher is a kook and a dirtbag. I have a good story about him and a hooker in Miami.

      I just meant he creates his routine to titillate the lunatics. Chris Hitchens called his crowd barking seals, I think, and said Maher was feeding them fish.

  4. It’s funny how nobody in the MSM describes Stewart as a liberal commentator, progressive advocate or anything like that.

    In fact, as of this moment there are zero hits for the word “liberal” on Jon Stewarts wikipedia entry, while El Rushbo, as a counter example, has “conservative political commentator” in the very first sentence!

    Stewart would probably smack you if you called him biased, again from the wiki entry: “Stewart denied the show has any intentional political agenda”.

    • I’ve never been a Stewart fan, but I have sensible friends who think he is funny. I’m told his stand up is not very political and very good. I’m not going to knock anyone for their tastes. I suspect Stewart knew the score from the start. He’s probably a natural liberal, but he also figured out that there was gold in patting liberals on the head every night. I know Bill Maher deliberately plays the crazy lefty routine on purpose. It’s all an act with him. He’s not a right winger or anything like that, but he knows he is offering up boob bait for the bobos.

      The best thing I saw with regard to Stewart was his first interview with O’Reilly. Bill is a blowhard, but he is shrewd. He knew Stewart had become a hothouse flower so the setup was perfect. I honestly thought Stewart was going to pass out or maybe have a stroke. O’Reilly set the trap perfectly.

  5. First Brian Williams, Professional Prevaricator, leaves then King of Snark Jon Stewart. What will people who want fake news do? I guess there’s always MSNBC.

  6. “In other words, the great millennial following of The Daily Show is a total myth.”

    Of course it is. Stewart’s overall viewership peaked in early 2013, with about 2.5 million viewers, and it’s been all downhill ever since. Lately he’s struggled to break 1.5 million; the last few broadcasts, post retirement announcement, when you’d expect Stewart’s bereft, emotionally devastated progressive fan base to come running back for the last tongue bath, have only produced numbers around 1.6-1.7 million. To put this in perspective, Huckabee managed to pull in 1.7 million viewers on his old Fox show; O’Reilly regularly tops 3 million; Robot Chicken beats Stewart both in total viewers and in the adult demo.

    The simple fact is that Stewart’s show is not satire, is not intelligent, and is not funny. Stewart mugs, preens, bellows, and pops his eyes; he seems to be channeling Mantan Moreland keeling over at the sight of ghosties in some old Bowery Boy flick, except that Stewart is now keeling over at the sight of conservatives. This guy is no Tom Leher.

    Of course, Jon Stewart is not paid $25 million a year to attract viewers; Matt Lauer, who pulls in 4 times as many, and whose show, Today, is keeping NBC afloat, is paid the same. Nor is Stewart paid to reinforce and advance the narrative – that was Brian Williams’s job, and he got paid half as much. Rather, Stewart is paid, as Kevin Williams and John Nolte have pointed out, to destroy – to lambast and ridicule conservatives as people, to make them appear dumb, oafish, evil, hypocritical, and cloddish, so that their arguments don’t have to be addressed. Stewart is perfect for this because, as a comedian, he is not restrained by the phony gravitas that burdens Williams and his ilk. Stewart can go all out on a buffoonish limb, in the process providing short, simple, cartoonish, ready-to-go-viral YouTube-ready video clips that the wider media can refer to whenever a conservative or conservative argument needs to be slapped down. Whenever a guy like Jonathan Gruber spills the beans on Obamacare, they can cut to Stewart dropping his pants and choking on his latte while Sarah Palin rants about Death Panels. Score!

    No wonder the entire Progressive apparatus, both government and media, is wailing like a dead terrorist’s mother at the announcement of Stewart’s retirement. Like Fake Indian tweeted, it’s because he spoke truth to power…

    My guess is the guy runs for President.

  7. “His act is flatire, satire intended to flatter the audience”

    Well played, Sir. With your permission, I will steal that someday.

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