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?