Corporate Control of Comedy: A How-To

I was just watching a program on C-SPAN (no jokes, please; I was surfing), a video of a conference on political humor held at the University of Virginia on 4/15 of this year (it could've been 2002). The panelists were: Jim Downey of SNL; Matt Cooper, late of Talk Magazine; the EIC of The Daily Howler, and two political cartoonists.



Rather predictably, I heard something that made my blood pressure spike, and since nobody wants me to have a heart attack, I thought I would blog my thoughts instead. A rather grizzled audience member--an adult with the scruffiness of a student (just the type of malcontent who would break the pleasant decorum with a question like this) asked, in a rather fuzzy and roundabout way: in what way, if any, corporate ownership of things like SNL influenced the comedy that was produced.



The response was predictable: "Oh, no (hurrmph, hurrmph) as long as I've been working for (insert name of subsidiary of corporation here) nobody's come up to me and said, 'You can't run that.' All that (insert name of parent corporation) is interested in, is whether the ratings are good or not." Well, of course they haven't called you on to the carpet--that's not how it works, and anybody on the inside of these things knows it. (Except when the parent company loses its mind for a second and actually DOES censor you, as with GE's pulling of a cartoon by Robert Smigel several years ago. But of course the reason was that "it wasn't very funny." Listen, if GE pulled everything on SNL that wasn't very funny...but I digress.)



Whenever you write for a show, the goal is to get as much material on air as possible; in magazines, articles printed. To get on air/printed, your material has to go through one or more gatekeepers--editors or segment producers, or what have you. Usually, there's much more material than air time/page space, so the gatekeepers habitually look for reasons to exclude material, not include it. Stuff that is likely to draw the attention--not even necessarily piss off, just draw the attention--of somebody in the parent company is the first to get cut. "That's Writer's Room stuff" is the line I've heard--funny, but too raw for the general public. So what gets on the air is the stuff that's the funniest, with an important caveat: it's also the least likely to cause trouble. This is not some conspiracy theory, it's simply how people keep their jobs; the gatekeepers at big time magazines and TV shows are paid very nicely, and they won't imperil their six-figure salaries--and perhaps everybody else's--for the sake of one pointed joke. Furthermore, the way you get the gatekeeper job in the first place is by having a finely tuned ear for what is funny, yes, but just as importantly, what is the right kind of funny, the funny that won't get us into trouble with the people who can fire us.



Here's a glimpse from the trenches: in 1998 or '99, Jon and I wrote a piece for The New Yorker lampooning then-Secretary of the Treasury now-Harvard President Larry Summers. After the magazine published it, we heard that Mr. Summers froze the magazine out for several months--no interviews, quotes, nothing. Was it worth it to The New Yorker to incur the ire of such a powerful and useful guy, for the sake of a somewhat amusing 800 word humor piece? Did they come out ahead on that trade? No. Every bigtime media outlet is constantly doing this kind of algebra, and nobody should be surprised that they are. It's one of the things that keeps them in business, year in and year out. But we as audience members shouldn't be so naive to forget that part of getting, and keeping, the job of running Weekend Update (as Mr. Downey did for a long time), or the regular gig at Vanity Fair, or even a spot doing a political cartoon for AOL, is showing that you can be trusted not to screw everything up, simply for the sake of a funny joke.



This is a rant, sure, but this issue is coming to a head, my friends. As more and more of our daily life is being shaped by what big corporations like and don't like, do and don't do, understand and don't understand, it's becoming a fatter and fatter comedic target. And a more necessary one. But don't look to SNL, a wholly-owned subsidiary of GE, to talk about that. They have no obligation to tell the truth, only to make people laugh in a harmless way, and if we want different--better--it's up to us to create it, or find and support it. It's not fair to hold them to a standard they don't agree with. But don't you believe them either when they say that who owns the company doesn't change the comedy. It does, and their blindness or truth-shaving is exactly why they're in the position they're in. Del Close never ran Weekend Update.