Social Engineering

Last week we went to a taping of the Daily Show. Rob commented while we waited in line outside that it was peculiar that such a large agglomeration of liberals didn't attract panhandlers or proselytizers of any sort: after all, we were essentially captive in that location for an hour or two, and there was no one to stop people from working the line. But maybe the audience weren't such flaming liberals after all.

Once we had been seated by a cast of cheerful minions (Disney Park-happy, if Disney Parks permitted slacker haircuts and jeans and T-shirts), it was time for the self-described "warm-up monkey," who said his name was Paul. He began by making us cheer and shout as loudly as we could, over and over, and then the same for laughter, repeating that it was important that we were loud once the taping began. We practiced cheering and then laughing until we were just short of hoarse.

Then commenced the comedic warm-up, in the form of patter with the audience. There were jokes about a frat guy in the front row, Jon Stewart's height--nothing original. Then Paul said, "Hey, a black guy!" and proceeded to indulge in a series of stereotypes about black men. When someone pointed out that there was another black man in the audience (yeah, so-called liberal gatherings do tend to be mighty white, but Paul didn't do anything with that potentially rich satirical point, one that I expect Jon Stewart would have done a great deal with), he went on in the same vein: black guys prefer white chicks, black guys like to have lots of them, blah blah blah. "Uncoooomfortable!" Rob whispered.

Thing was, though, no one appeared to be uncomfortable. Pretty much everyone laughed.

The jokes weren't funny, but we'd been pretrained to laugh, and laugh a lot. We'd spent the previous few minutes learning that loud laughter earns praise.

The humor was offensive, but we'd been told to laugh. And if you don't laugh, you're left out of the fun.

The black guys who were the focus of these remarks laughed, so that made it okay for us white liberals to laugh.

And come on, this is the milieu of Alpha Liberal Jon Stewart: nothing anti-liberal could be happening here, right?

(There was a black woman in the audience too, but Paul the Warm-up Monkey never took note of her. She too laughed.)

Maybe those gentlemen genuinely enjoyed the racial humor at their expense; I have no way of knowing. But were Rob and I the only people in the place who did find it a bit skeevy? Either Jon Stewart's program isn't the liberal bastian it has been portrayed as (seems implausible, given the content of the show), or it's pretty easy to get us all to check our values at the door.

Which would be a fascinating social experiment, and one ripe for Stewart's pointed wit. But alas, I don't think it was that knowing. More likely that at the Daily Show they're just thoughtless idiots like the rest of the world.