Stephen Colbert & Jon Stewart's "Restore Sanity" D.C. Rally: A New Merge of Satire with Reality

Never before has the grounds of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial had so much political emotion filling its space within a shorter period of time. Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally might be considered the height of emotion if it hadn't been lambasted and parodied to the point of losing sight of its original intention in bringing us back to our spiritual foundations. And that intention was sullied further with the thought that we needed a cable news talk show host to be the Pied Piper of getting America to join together in this restoration. It also didn't help when not every American was there to make it a legitimate American event.

Call it a slippage of what should be serious and into unknown territory where it's basically left to be torn apart by those who live within the straddled line of the serious.

There likely isn't any argument that the best representations today of the serious being permanently seized by satire are Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. No other comedians in the history of comedy have been embraced by the American public as effective interpreters of all the disturbing news around us. Equally precedent-making is that they can manage to sustain a high level of guffaws while still staying within the parameters of a legitimate news show.

At the same time, it's such a high bar of satire that there must be a certain hell Stewart and Colbert have imposed on themselves when dealing with the real world. Perhaps it goes beyond Colbert entering the walls of Congress to testify about farming to help as a semi-serious intention of repairing the economy. Stewart must have it better since he can easily break character to interact with the world around him without being treated like a character.

Colbert, though, seldom if ever breaks character, even when being interviewed on other shows. Someone should produce a reality show on Stephen Colbert's real life to see if people in the real world interact with him as Colbert the conservative talk show host parody or Colbert the likely more liberal talk show host satirist pretending to be a mirror image of Bill O'Reilly.

Even though Colbert and Stewart aren't the only ones who've taken satire across the border over to near reality in the 21^st century, they'll ultimately be the first satirists to hold a rally in Washington, D.C. with possible thousands attending. What's more fascinating than their mocking title of "Restoring Sanity" (and "Fear" from Colbert's side) will be asking why all those thousands of people turned out for what has to be branded as a satiric event. In the end, it's going to either profoundly change satire or reality into the near term.

And with Oprah Winfrey getting involved, reality may never be the same again. Or, the insanities of the recent political and cable news world may end up becoming a polar opposite of what they think they really are.
_____

Along with everything else in the 2000's, satire has been on a fast track evolution toward something different. Once the most misunderstood art form there is, even I wrote here several years ago that it may take as long as satire has been alive for everybody in the populace to get on the same satiric page. All it took, though, was the technique of making satire as straight as possible so that it gave a razor sharp image of reality to take off into mainstream understanding. That's something never done in a magazine issue of Mad Magazine during its pre-eminence as the ne plus ultra satiric source. There, you were in perpetual awareness of being in satiric territory while still enjoying the frying of their chosen subjects.

Now you can go on The Onion's website, watch one of their news broadcasts and swear you're watching any respectable, real cable news channel. The only thing that breaks the satiric illusion and breaking some people's mouths agape with a guffaw is the use of various, chosen profanities. Conversely, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert go for the obvious big laughs, though with reportedly many loyal viewers sitting down to watch it as a serious follow of news. It wouldn't surprise me that some of the newcomers to deeper satire sit and watch their shows with a sudden outburst of understanding, even if they don't outwardly laugh.

Yes, a writing art form that was so long ago misunderstood has now blended enough with reality to become almost a way to assuage the pain of reality. The thought of people gathering near the Lincoln Memorial for issues that pain every American can be made more tolerable while attending with a little jest involved. However, what might be bad for satire is that new satirists will have a much larger precedent to outdo if they want to truly reach their audiences on a level Colbert, Stewart and The Onion are setting.

Or maybe it's another one of those situations that can set up yet another twist to how humanity views the world.

Imagine the setting in America one year after the Colbert and Stewart "Restore Sanity" rally happens. Prior, the rally shocked everybody in its attendance record. Oprah Winfrey brings her chosen studio audience with her, despite many of them throwing a different kind of patriotic spastic fit when they find out their tax bill on their airfare and hotel costs for attending the event. To keep the feeling of half-jest still fresh, Colbert and Stewart offer to pay the collective tax bill.

At that one-year later mark, cable news is securely confident in the demographics they've cornered. For decades, this demographic has been faithful in their political beliefs and temperament while giving faithful daily viewings of various cable news shows. One day, someone walks into a bar that's showing the Colbert Report and The Daily Show on the giant hi-def TV. Everybody around the bar watches both shows stoically and reverently as the old faithful viewers of network news used to be.

The sound of laughter can be heard through the brick wall next door where another bar is. Inside, a crowd of people are gathered and guffawing around the TV while someone flips from cable news channels Fox News to CNN to MSNBC showing the usual late afternoon/prime-time news show lineups. All guffaws have nothing to do with having too many libations.

Satire becomes a serious news business and the past targets of the satirists become laughing riot parodies of themselves. Reality ultimately gets even easier to take for those who consume it on a nightly basis.