Political Comedy In 2017: It's Amateur Hour | Josh Lieb | Big Think

Political Comedy In 2017: It's Amateur Hour

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What’s that smell? It’s political humor in 2017, according to Josh Lieb, former producer and writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. "There's always a temptation in comedy to go for the low hanging fruit, to go for the easy jokes. And right now it's not even that the fruit is low-hanging – it's on the ground, it's rotting on the ground," says Lieb. When your grannie gets on Twitter to ridicule the current administration, she’s as funny as someone who’s studied and performed comedy for a decade. Political absurdity is stealing the comedic limelight, and comedians must evolve and aim much higher.

Josh Lieb is the author of

I Am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President and Ratscalibur.

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JOSH LIEB :

Josh Lieb is the former Producer and Show Runner of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. His credits include stints as Executive Producer of NewsRadio and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He won 7 Prime Time Emmys as a producer and writer for The Daily Show. In 2009, he published a young adult novel, I Am A Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President, which was a New York Times Bestseller.

Lieb was raised in Columbia, South Carolina, and graduated from Harvard, where he was an editor of The Lampoon, the college humor magazine. After graduation, he found work writing for Twisted Puppet Theater, The Jon Stewart Show, and NewsRadio. He subsequently worked as a producer or consultant on shows including The Simpsons, Drawn Together, Sirens, Nikki, I Hate My Teenage Daughter, and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

Lieb's tenure at The Daily Show lasted from 2006 to 2010, during which he also served as Executive Producer of “The Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear” and as co-editor and co-author of Earth: The Book.

In 2013, he wrote and directed a series of comedic shorts to raise money and awareness for the charity Water.Org. Stars featured in the shorts included Matt Damon, Jessica Biel, Sir Richard Branson, and Bono.

Penguin/ Random House released Lieb's second novel, Ratscalibur, in 2015.

In October 2016, NBCUniversal announced an exclusive writing deal with Lieb.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Josh Lieb: I think the political situation always has a huge effect on what is humorous or what's funny, what people are laughing at. And when the situation is bad people need that escape. When our leadership is poor you need that satire, not just as a release but also as the strong finger of the people pointing back. There's no punishment worse than being laughed at. And there's nothing our leaders hate more than being mocked, any leader across the board nobody likes it. You don't like being mocked. So that's the most effective tool we have as a people is being able to laugh at our bosses. So when our bosses are especially oppressive that's when that kind of humor comes to the forefront.

I mean right now I think we're in an extremely difficult political situation. Like I'm glad I'm not at The Daily Show anymore for instance. I was there during the Bush administration like there was plenty to laugh at in those days and every American administration has plenty to laugh at. And this is going to feel dated I'm sure a year from now or ten years from now or whatever, but where we stand in the middle of February in 2017 there's always a temptation in comedy to go for the low hanging fruit, to go for the easy jokes. And right now it's not even that the fruit is low hanging, it's on the ground, it's rotting on the ground. Like you don't need a comedian to pick this up and look at this fruit, examine this this is why this fruit is funny, anyone, anyone walking up can point down at this joke on the ground and go oh my god what the hell is going on? A lot of the brilliance of Jon Stewart or Trevor Noah is finding this apple and going you've probably seen this apple a hundred times you haven't thought anything of it, look at this apple really look at it when you examine it you realize oh that's a crazy goddamn apple.

But anyone can see the apple tree you have pineapples falling off the tree now, you have coconuts falling off the tree, you have frogs falling off the tree. It's so intrinsically bizarre that there's almost not a challenge for a writer or a comedian to make fun of it. And by the way I'm not even being partisan here I'm not even talking like I do think the administration is doin...

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