Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Follow-up: The Lockbox Strategery

Jokes and Positive Perceptions
I ran across some more news today that ties in directly with what I talked about in my last post. The Center for Media and Public Affairs, which has tracked late-night jokes made about presidential candidates since 1988, reported that from September 1, 2008 through last Friday, October 24, the Republican ticket has been the butt of 475 jokes, while the Democratic ticket was mocked only 69 times. That is nearly a 7:1 ratio (6.88:1, to be more precise), and is a thorough trouncing that no previous elections have come anywhere near.

This is, of course, reflective of the larger trend in benevolent comments about Barack Obama. Since the party conventions, evening news shows have been 65% positive. This is based on data from ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News and Fox Special Report. To McCain, the shows have only been 36% positive, and he (impressively?) falls behind even Sarah Palin's positive-comment percentage of 42%. (Evidently, Joe Biden gets talked about so little there isn't enough data for "meaningful analysis.")

As always, an addendum:
On Fox News Channel, by contrast, Obama's press has been only 28% positive during the general election, even worse than the 38% positive evaluations of McCain. Palin's coverage has been 49% positive on Fox, slightly higher than on the three networks.
Stay classy, Fox News. 

Punchlines Punching Back
Back in August, the CMPA released a list of the top joked-about public figures, and Obama was number four (behind W., Hillary Clinton, and John McCain, respectively). Jon Stewart told the most Obama jokes and Stephen Colbert told the most McCain ones, while Jay Leno joshed Hillary more than any other comics.  

Unfortunately, what this measurement doesn't weigh is what exactly about the candidate the comics make fun of. For example, Obama jokes in August were things like "The big story is Obama's world tour. Today, he made history by being the first man to travel around the world in a plane propelled by the media's flash photography." (Colbert) and "The tour may strike some a presumptuous. In fact, I joked that Obama would be stopping in Bethlehem to visit the manger where he was born." (Stewart). Those punchlines are built on public perception and veneration of Obama, not who he is as a person. This is a more accessible kind of humor for people of diverse political leanings, and funny in a both hey-that's-true and self-deprecation-of-the-media way. Nuanced! Of course, the ever-classy Leno writing room turned out one-note, candidate-specific gems like "Obama said he'll visit Iraq and Afghanistan because he wants to see an area overrun by violent extremists. So it sounds like he already misses his old church." Let's hope Conan takes all of his writers with him when he moves into that slot and doesn't have to inherit that kind of crap.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

The Lockbox Strategery

My, Spit Takes has been a busy girl! A month and no blogging action...I suppose I've just been caught up in election fever. Haven't we all? 

Well, the only thing the New York Times is more obsessed with than the election is coverage of and reaction TO the election. Hence today's article about how late-night comedy has seen a huge uptick in ratings and viewings recently. A run-down of some of their facts:
  • Ratings for SNL are up 50%
  • The Daily Show averaged 2 million viewers in September (that's huge for cable), and more viewers per episode than Conan
  • Number of internet viewings of the Tina Fey/Amy Poehler Palin-Couric sketch have surpassed the nearly 10 million people who watched it when it originally aired on 9/27
A big part of the success for SNL, of course, is the guest-starring of Tina Fey as Sarah Palin. A soon as Palin was announced, people started clamoring for Tina to take her on. We (and Seth Meyer's writers' room) are lucky she did. Another part of the success--for all programs, comedy and actual news--is that people really are paying attention. Seth points out, 
It's best for a writer when 70 million people see a debate...we did 11.5 minutes on that debate sketch last week [Sarah Palin/Joe Biden, with Tina Fey and Jason Sudeikis]. We couldn't do that if everybody hadn't watched it.
As far as the Daily Show and the Colbert Report go, they've been beating Leno, Conan, Dave, Craig, and Jimmy Kimmel in the coveted "men from 18-34" bracket pretty regularly...by several hundreds of thousands viewers per episode. Oof! In the big picture that is ratings, however, that isn't huge: the Daily Show averages 1.45 to 1.6 million viewers nightly, which is high for cable but nothing compared to, say, CSI's 18.6 million. However, in the big picture that is "the youth vote," however that might be defined, is spending more time listening to what Jon and Stephen have to say and less to the network boys. Conan puts it pretty well:
For some of the shows politics is their bread and butter. Shows like mine and Jay's and Dave's also do different things. Sometimes I have to move on to something silly, like me jumping in a vat of cheddar cheese.
I think Conan sells himself short. His impressions of Bush ("Uh-huuuuh?!") and Schwarzenegger ("Baargh!!") are some of the best out there. Though of course Conan + vat of anything = awesome.

So how much sway does Conan (or Jon, or Jay) have over public opinion? Since the Clinton years, presidential politics have started cropping up more and more in "nontraditional" media outlets, and people have been trying to parse the effects. An article published in the March 2004 Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media studied the influence of late-night comedy on the 2000 election, and it had some interesting points that still apply today. In regards to jokes made during the 2000 election, 
Among those subjects who did not watch late-night, Democrats rated Bush less knowledgeable over time and Republicans rated him more knowledgeable over time. But partisans who were high consumers of late-night appeared identical in the extent to which their ratings of Bush's knowledgeability changed from July to October.
Of course, comedy (at least, broadcast and mainstream sketch comedy) only really works if your viewer has knowledge of what you're joking about, as Seth mentioned earlier. Jon is quoted in this journal piece as pointing out that audiences need to "know something before [comedians can] even make a joke about it." This is what works so well with the Fey/Palin skits on SNL: many viewers have already glutted themselves on the ACTUAL ridiculousness of Palin's interviews and appearances, therefore they are familiar with the material. So when Fey repeats some lines verbatim, that is one kind of funny (sad funny, I suppose), and when she makes others up that are in the style of the actual quotes, that is a comedy of recognition.

With all that in mind, I'm not sure I'm convinced that our late-night friends actually have that much influence over public opinion. Let's conclude with what Lorne pointed out in the Times:
"I think we offer some perspective," Mr. Michaels said. "But when people start getting into how we're changing things, I think we're not. I think we affect the media and maybe influence some people. I think we're a safety valve. Some pressure gets let off by what we do."
Thoughts? Have you ever had your mind changed by a monologue, joke, or skit?