Palin keeps irony, comedy alive in US

Sarah Strickland

The British have long asserted that Americans have no sense of irony. Something about their can-do, earnest "have a nice day" approach and flag-waving, church-going lifestyle gives the impression that they simply don’t get it.

That and speaking in sentences that go up at the end? Irony is alive and kicking in the United States of America. Perhaps not in everyday life, but in razor-sharp, inventive and agonisingly funny form on its satirical TV news shows. With interest in the current election at fever pitch, record numbers are flocking to three shows in particular.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the Colbert Report, both on the cable channel Comedy Central, have seen huge increases in their viewing figures, while NBC’s Saturday Night Live is enjoying its highest ratings in 14 years. For SNL, Sarah Palin has been a God-send.

One of its former stars, comedian Tina Fey, happened to be the spitting image of the Republican vice-presidential candidate and agreed to return to the show to play her.

Appearing first alongside SNL’s Hillary Clinton, she responded to talk of foreign diplomacy with a perky "And I can see Russia from my house!"

More than five million people have gone online to watch Ms Fey’s impression of Ms Palin’s cringe-making CBS interview with Katie Couric.

"I had 15 to 20 false alarms in New York where I thought I saw Osama bin Laden driving’ a taxi," she confides with a wink. What was so clever, and damaging, about the parody was that much of it was almost verbatim.

Ms Palin’s answers were so hilariously incoherent, the script-writers didn’t need to embellish that much. Until, with a folksy gosh-darnit, Fey delivers the killer punch line.

"Katie, I’d like to use one of my lifelines," she chirps, stumped by a question on foreign policy. "I’d like to phone a friend".

With the real Palin withheld from the media for so long, the alternative version filled the gap — something that may have damaged her reputation for good.

"What political satire does is fix the political persona in peoples’ minds," said Alan Schroeder, associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University, Boston.

"The comedic version that gets established is very hard to counteract."

He puts the flourishing of satirical comedy down to the Bush administration.

"Things got so surreal over the last eight year that journalism was not providing the same check and balance to government any more," he said.

He recalls Steven Colbert, in his manic right-wing television pundit persona, mercilessly lampooning George Bush at the annual Whitehouse Correspondent’s Association dinner in 2006.

"It was illuminating, being in a room full of journalists whose job it was to provide that sceptical eye — and he was the one who got the job done. Comedians have always been the ones who have had license to speak truth to power.

In a time when dissent is not looked on favourably, comedy is one of the few outlets for acceptable political dissent."

Someone who has more or less escaped the satire is Mr Barack Obama — perhaps because he is African-American or maybe because he simply isn’t funny. "Maybe that’s what we need after eight years of Bush," says Mr Alan Schroeder. "But there’s a price to pay in entertainment value," he adds.

The writer, a British journalist based in Washington, will file a weekly feature on the US presidential election for this newspaper