AT THE CONFLUENCE OF AMERICAN ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM AND ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Comedy Right-of-Central: What the Tea Party learned from The Daily Show (Lee Siegel, October 19, 2010, NY Observer)

Consider the affinity between Tea Party laughter and Comedy Central laughter.

Invented by Jon Stewart and refined into its purest form by Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central laughter attains its peak of perfection when it encounters a figure representing authority or expertise. The premise of both comedians' shows is that such figures are responsible for most of the world's folly. The worst authority figures are the politicians, who by definition are stupid and venal in proportion to the amount of power they possess. Right behind them are the experts, who are almost always the authors of books, and whose theories about life woefully pale when playfully pushed. Confronted by such asses, who are pompous enough to expect other people to abide by their ideas, Mr. Stewart and Mr. Colbert mock, taunt, outrage and ironize until the expert or authoritative guest liquefies like metal in a forge. Of course, liberal guests get a kind of complicitous wink at the end of their ordeal, but only after they've been de-expertized and un-authoritied and returned to the common mass of couch-dwelling humanity.

Returned, in other words, to the couch alongside Carl Paladino, Christine O'Donnell, Sharron Angle and all the other Tea Party candidates who publicly excoriate the United Nations, the Department of Education, any type of tax legislation and the entire collection of experts and authority figures who, together, make up what is known as modern-day "government."

Yes, yes, I know, the comedians ultimately rely on rationality to expose the irrational ideas and sentiments that influence public mores, while the mad Tea Partiers are themselves the very spirit of irrationality. But a single fact remains. Both cultural forces spring from democracy's latent pathology, which is the belief that in the name of democracy, expertise and authority must not be allowed to serve as social levers elevating certain individuals over others.