Following this recently passed election the questions arise again – how could the polls be so far off? But for me it more brings to mind the question – how can the late-night programs continue to be so far off?
I’m not much for watching them – and it’s not just that I can’t stay up past nine anymore. Being in Korea, the late-night shows are all on in the early mornings when I’m just getting to work. So when the guys in my office have the TV on, I get to catch snippets of them before I dive for the headphones and try blocking them out with something more palatable and mentally challenging. I do that because it seems every single one of them is so unimaginative and blind to real life that they think the antics of the president are the only things people care about.
Here’s the thing: they aren’t. While Americans may care, it’s more a case of, “enough already!” I can’t fathom how the likes of Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel can immerse themselves so completely in the “Trump did that?!?!” pool of swill that they don’t realize their diatribes have been a broken record for years now. And who has the stamina to listen to a broken record repeatedly for that long? I mean, seriously, after the constant drubbing they think they’ve been giving Trump, you really have to question their mental health and judgment.
And yet, what really sets me off now is that it seems to have finally crept into the entirety of the genre. I used to be able to stomach Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show. I don’t really watch him – I find his style a bit immature – but he’s done some things that I’ve found creative and interesting at times. And his Trump jokes were the typical hit-and-run type of classical late night. But now I guess he got the memo: “Talk incessantly about Trump or you’ll fail.” His jokes, while still not as bad as the others’, are creeping in that direction. It would be alarming if I cared even a bit more than I do.
I just don’t get this burning desire in the late night crowd, but it does tell me something about the bubbles in which they live. I mean, how about something for the rest of us? Something for those who want to tune in and be entertained without being lectured to or reminded of the idiot in the White House for an entire monologue. I understand political humor is part of the landscape — late night hosts have been poking fun at presidents for decades. But it’s never been so relentless that you can’t tune it out for the few moments it shows up while you wait for the real show to start. Jokes of old might have been clever. They might even have caught your ear and brought a smile. But if they became the entirety of the show, there’s no way the show survives.
But like I say, this is part of the problem. We have a group of people in media and entertainment who, just because they themselves think a certain way, are unable to grasp that not everyone else does. They wrap themselves in their overly liberal, suburban/metro bubbles, where their only thought of flyover Americans is that “they’re wrong.” They see the polls and believe them simply because they say the things they want to hear, and then they pass that on to the American people through their programming because they’re convinced everyone else wants to hear it too.
And this is the self-perpetuating problem. As they drive normal, middle-of-the-road people away, and as their cliques become more concentrated within a single camp, they find the only way to appease their “target-audience” is to continue to hammer away on the single issue that made them their target audience. It seems they don’t realize that by doing this, they’re pigeon-holing themselves and their viewer – instead of broadening their audiences and appealing to more, they’re boiling them down with material that is unpalatable to anyone but the extremes who slobberingly laps it up. It’s a self-fulfilling loop.
And it’s just not funny anymore. Hasn’t been for a long time.
