Without late-night, candidates get a pass
The news broke in straitlaced political circles last week, but seemed to beg for satire: Rudy Giuliani, as mayor of New York, used taxpayer-funded security for trysts with his girlfriend in the Hamptons. The late-night-TV-monologue jokes could have practically written themselves.
But they didn't, of course. As the Writers Guild of America's strike enters its second month, this presidential race is the first in recent memory with no one on hand to reprocess the news for late-night comedy shtick. Comedy Central's "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report" are mired in reruns, as are Jay Leno and David Letterman. Conan O'Brien is out indefinitely. "Saturday Night Live" is dark.
Now, in uncharted comedic territory, political analysts are scrambling to sort out what this could mean for the candidates themselves, and suggesting that the humor void could change the way the public views the still-wide-open race. Hillary Clinton, some believe, could benefit from the absence of jokes about her pantsuits and purportedly cold nature: The Center for Media and Public Affairs, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group, found that by early October this year, Clinton was the subject of nearly as many late-night jokes as her Democratic opponents combined.
Other candidates, mired in negative news, could profit from the strike, as well: Without a late-night amplifier, damaging news is likely to slip by more quickly, said Daniel Kurtzman, an author and former Washington correspondent who edits the political humor page on About.com, and has tracked political jokes on TV since the 2000 presidential cycle. Giuliani likely escaped a harsher hammering this week, Kurtzman said. And Mitt Romney could be getting off easy on news that illegal immigrants cleared debris from his tennis court.
"If you're a presidential candidate, it's a great time to make a gaffe or engage in full-scale hypocrisy," Kurtzman said, "because it's not going to echo as loudly."
But top-tier candidates could also suffer from a lack of late-night exposure, which makes them seem both relevant and accessible, said Josh Compton, a communications professor at Missouri's Southwest Baptist University. Compton has written about what he calls the "inoculation theory" of late-night comedy. A high-profile drubbing "raises their profile and it actually humanizes them," he said of presidential candidates. "If you see somebody mocked, there's a natural tendency to defend."
At any rate, the lack of late-night jokes leave a palpable void in the political process. Campaigns, once wary of self-mocking have come to accept late-night shows as part of the process, says Frank Donatelli, a longtime GOP consultant who is working for Republican contender John McCain.
"The rite of passage is when a political figure breaks in to popular culture," Donatelli said. "And that normally happens when you become the butt - or the subject - of somebody's jokes on the 'Letterman' show or the 'Leno' show or 'Saturday Night Live.' "
Voters use the jokes as both an introduction to the process and a benchmark as the race goes on. For voters who don't seek out political news, Letterman and Leno can define the presidential campaign, signaling the candidates who are most relevant, said Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs.
For lesser-known candidates, Lichter said, a lack of noise about the frontrunners could mean an opportunity to break through the clutter: "As long as the media aren't reinforcing people's attention patterns, you have a better chance of changing them."
Late-night talk shows went dark when the Writers Guild went on strike in early November - just as the heavily contested presidential primary entered its frantic final stretch. In the weeks since the strike, ratings have risen for "Nightline," ABC's 11:30 p.m. newsmagazine.
Other likely beneficiaries of the strike include the online outlets that are aiming to fill the political-humor void. Traffic has been rising, for instance, on the satiric news website The Onion.com, which now draws 5 million unique visitors each month, compared to 3 million at this time last year. (One recent political headline: "Americans Announce They're Dropping Out of Presidential Race.")
That attention, said Onion president Sean Mills, has dovetailed with the site's recent foray into video. The "Onion News Network" launched in April, and its popularity has also been steadily growing: Satiric video newscasts drew 500,000 views per week in June, and now get 1.3 million views per week. And in early January, the Onion will launch its own election coverage, dubbed "War for the White House."
The jokes, Mills acknowledge, attract a particular type of viewer, who tends to know something about the news to begin with. "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" attract a similar crowd, some have found: A study last spring by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press found that viewers of the Comedy Central shows tend to be more informed about current events than the general public. But without the incentive of getting late-night jokes, some wonder if the appetite for news might drop.
Letterman and Leno, which aim at the mainstream, tend to repeat basic perceptions of the candidates, said Scott Keeter, director of survey research for the Pew Research Center. But Comedy Central's more pointed satire "helps to keep a little bit of a flow of information going to younger people," Keeter said. "Then that feeds back on their newsgathering habits in more traditional sources. That feedback loop might be broken right now."
Indeed, some young "Daily Show" devotees already report feeling cut off from current events. Margaret McGill, 19, a Danvers native studying industrial design at Syracuse University, says she pays scant attention to traditional news sources, which seem fixed on celebrity news and disaster coverage. And without Jon Stewart's guidance, she said, she's lost track of political news.
"I feel like the world has stopped, when it hasn't," she said.
Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. For more on TV, go to viewerdiscretion.net. 