Are comedians the political vanguard?

Last month, The Atlantic published an online piece by staff writer Megan Garber, “How Comedians Became Public Intellectuals.” The article documented how comedy today in both its standup and situational genres is expanding beyond its minutiae focus of the 1990s in favor of a harder-hitting, message-based style evident in the work of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Amy Schumer.

Comedians have become public intellectuals because of the co-existence of two interrelated comedic tendencies in American popular culture: “moral messaging” and “mass attention.” For Garber, the blending of these two types of comedy has produced social conditions conducive to a particular brand of cultural criticism designed to call forth laughter while at the same time pushing the audience beyond the joke towards its implications and significance in today’s contentious politics. “Comedians are fashioning themselves not just as joke-tellers, but as truth-tellers—as intellectual and moral guides through the cultural debates of the moment . . . Their most important function,” Garber argues, “is to stimulate debates among the rest of us.”

Writing for the New Republic less than a week later, staff writer Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig argued that comedians have no business being public intellectuals, because their chosen stock-in-trade is not conducive to politics but rather to entertainment. She also argued that individuals such as Stewart and Colbert are part of the reason young adults know so little about politics, traditionally understood as sites of legislation, elections, and policies. In this scenario, a quick laugh at your political nemesis’s expense takes the place of the dreary, dreadful business of politics. Like their cultural foremothers in the 1960s, these comedians rely entirely on culture in order to say something about politics and the country’s moral health from a slightly left-of-center political position.