Vice TV's Too Soon: Comedy After 9/11 reminds viewers how deeply the politics that grew out of 9/11 infiltrated comedic entertainment

The Atlantic

"It plays all the hits, including George Carlin on mindless consumerism ('go out and buy some jewelry and a new car, otherwise the terrorists win”) and The Simpsons on U.S. militarism ('war is not the answer, except to all of America’s problems')," says Sacha Cohen. "The documentary includes clips from Team America: World Police, Chappelle’s Show, and the 'Axis of Evil' comedy tour, featuring a troupe of Middle Eastern stand-ups who joked about the racial anxieties of white people during a time of frenzied jingoism and Islamophobia. This makes for a satisfying retrospective, even if the film omits some of the more biting, nihilistic humor (comic strips by Tom Tomorrow and Aaron McGruder, online memes about 9/11 truthers) that wouldn’t translate well to the screen. Although humor about 9/11 and the Bush administration’s foreign policy proliferated across multiple genres, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert most visibly transformed the comedy landscape during this era. Too Soon explains how The Daily Show, which Stewart had hosted since 1999, gained new credibility among young viewers as it found its political footing, adopting a wry skepticism toward the Iraq War and the media’s manufacturing of consent. As the comedian Scott Aukerman points out, the show invented the 'montage of hypocrisy,' an oft-imitated gotcha device highlighting the tendency of politicians to blatantly contradict themselves. Then came The Colbert Report, a satire of pundit programs that added truthiness to the national lexicon, a way of critiquing the steady American diet of political falsehoods disguised as facts. When these programs first intervened in the conversation, they offered a counterbalance to the blind hawkishness that had seized much of the populace, and for this, at the very least, they deserve credit. But it’s worth asking, to what end? And what happened afterward? Too Soon misses some larger context that satirical news, one of comedy’s most dominant forms in the post-9/11 world, was a part of—namely, the unintended consequences of the shift toward infotainment. In some ways, this broader shift intensified divisions between red states and blue states, and may have helped erode public trust in the media. Satire and slant further entrenched many Americans where they already stood, splitting television into warring (if also smirking) echo chambers and likely contributing to the well-documented political polarization of the past 20 years."