Why the Rise in Satire Means the Joke’s on the Mass Media
BY AMINA ZAINELDINE
@A_ZAINELDIN
Parody and satire are again proving themselves a magnet luring viewers to programs like OSN’s new show Saturday Night Live Bil Arabi.
The Arabic version of the world-renowned American comedy show has already brought together some of the region’s best-known stars such as Mona Zaki from Egypt and Hend Sabry from Tunisia, quickly gaining popularity in the region.
The show’s producer Abdullah Mohamed has said that there will be no political content in SNL Bil Arabi, even though two of its permanent hosts, Khalid Mansour and Shadi Alfons, are alumni of Al Bernameg, the political satire show hosted by the immensely popular comedy trailblazer Bassem Youssef.
Youssef has been absent from the scene since his show was abruptly cancelled in 2014.
While political satire is roughly as old as politics itself – what with court jesters mocking monarchs in ancient Egypt, China and medieval Europe – Youssef’s show was of a very particular brand that took shape in the United States a decade and a half ago and has since taken the world by storm.
American comedian Jon Stewart, who most say created this brand, called it ‘fake news’.
And while mocking politicians was obviously one of its main purposes, the message behind humorously recreating the set of a serious news show was not lost on Stewart’s viewers: Mainstream news media was his other main object of ridicule.
Stewart, who hosted the enormously successful Daily Show from 1999 until 2015, guided to success other comedians such as The Late Show host Stephen Colbert and Last Week Tonight host John Oliver, and with their acerbic wit, they joked their way to position of intellectual power, challenging the credibility of mainstream news delivery.
Now, if anyone were to ask Stewart, Colbert or Oliver – and many did – whether they consider themselves journalists, they would deny it categorically.
However, the fact remains that studies have shown that they are among the most trusted news sources in America, and that their viewers are often better informed about current events than those of traditional news networks.
Despite their persistence in understating their credibility, commentators have capitalized on the instances in which their popularity put them in positions of power to affect change.
Most famously, Stewart took as a personal cause supporting the first responders to the September 11 attacks, who suffered illness due to their presence in the wreckage, and pushing congress to approve
a bill that “pledged federal funds for the health care” of the responders.
Though Stewart was one of the few to address this issue, news media figures and politicians alike later came out in praise of Stewart’s insistence on discussing it.
In an interview with journalist Jorge Ramos, Oliver said that the credibility they gained “is more of an insult to the current state of journalism than it is a compliment to the state of comedy.”
Nevertheless, Oliver’s work – whether he likes it or not – is being referred to as ‘investigative comedy’, or even investigative journalism.
His in-depth coverage of the Miss America Beauty Pageant, and of the politics of the FIFA World Cup and other topics, exposed details that are not only not reported by the mainstream news media, but also rather difficult to discover.
In many ways Stewart, Colbert and Oliver came therefore to fill voids created by the shortcomings of the traditional news media. One of those voids Jon Stewart made his name by filling lay in his coverage of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
When the traditional news media almost uniformly repeated the official narrative of a military campaign, which was later proved to be based on entirely inaccurate claims, Stewart adamantly criticized the invasion, adequately labeling the fiasco “Mess O’Potamia”.
Assistant professor of communication studies at the university of Montreal Ian Reilly believes that the fourth estate has failed in this respect and thereby has opened the door to other venues through which corruption and inconsistencies are exposed.
He uses the term coined by political communications experts to describe this – the fifth estate – and among other practices such as citizen journalists, NGOs and bloggers, he names ‘fake news’ political satire as one of the players that has been effective in that arena.
Their strength, according to Reilly, lies in the fact that they cover the issues that are ignored by the mainstream news organizations.
Reilly describes “satirical fake news as an emergent form of political discourse that questions, above all, the logic and integrity of contemporary journalistic practices.”
In Stewart’s famous monologue in his final episode as host of The Daily Show in August of 2015, he spoke of the different types of “institutionalized bull***t”, as he phrased it, that infiltrate society through media and political discourse.
He left his final legacy to all those who watched the show: “If you smell something, say something.”
There has yet to be a show to replace Al Bernameg occupied in its heyday where it was at one point the most watched television segment in Egypt.
However, SNL Bil Arabi is not the only post-Al Bernameg comedy show that has poked fun at contemporary Egyptian social attitudes – with scathing flare.
Akram Hosni’s As’ad Allahu Masa’ukum and the Abla Fahita’s El Duplex have also scratched the surface of political satire.
However, while court jesters enjoy an almost inexplicable immunity in societies where dissent is punishable, satirists in Egypt worry that they won’t have the last laugh.
