Karl Vincent Frisch

By Bret Schulte

After months of hopeful talks, John Kerry’s staff last week finally booked their candidate on one of television’s most influential political programs: The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.

It’s just the latest example of what political insiders and Internet junkies already know: In today’s climate, humor may be a candidate’s ultimate weapon. At the Democratic National Committee, “there is a conscious effort to inject humor” into strategy, says communications director Jano Cabrera. Before Kerry, Sen. John McCain and Bill Clinton had been on Stewart’s show. “It’s a great way of reaching younger audiences who don’t watch traditional news shows,” McCain told U.S. News last week by telephone. “When you’re meeting with voters, you’ve got to keep them amused as a way of keeping them interested.”

And while Stewart’s news-and-parody show, which airs on Comedy Central, may be the most high-profile outlet (along with Saturday Night Live, providing nearly as much political news to people ages 18 to 29 as the major networks, according to a Pew Center poll), the real action is on the Web. An upswing in broadband Internet is having a viral effect, spreading doctored photos of the Democratic nominees as SNL’s Ambiguously Gay Duo, dance remixes of the Howard Dean scream, and the wildly popular animated video from www.jibjab.com starring President Bush and Kerry exchanging insults to the tune of This Land Is Your Land.

Then there’s the Will Ferrell ad. Found at www.whitehousewest.com, the spot by the liberal nonprofit America Coming Together features SNL’s Ferrell spoofing Bush at his ranch, where he’s frightened by horses and warns of “liberal agitators” like “Howard Stern, Richard Clarke, and the news.” Where once Ferrell poked gently at Bush’s “strategery,” his portrayal is markedly sharper here. It’s an example of what prominent Republican political ad pro Fred Davis calls “contrast ads”: like negative ads, “but without the odor of negativity applied to a candidate.”

“The stakes are high,” notes Prof. Brett Sharp, who teaches a course in political humor at the University of Central Oklahoma. “There is a fear climate after 9/11, and you have this incredible technology to spread the message: the Web, satellite TV, E-mail.” It’s all creating an unusually engaged populace that gives joke writers “a greater reference base to work off,” says Mark Katz, humorist and former speechwriter for Bill Clinton. “Political humor is more political than it’s ever been.”

But it certainly isn’t new. Thomas Nast’s caricatures for Harper’s Weekly in the 19th century almost single-handedly brought down “Boss” Tweed and the Tammany Hall political machine that had controlled New York for decades. In the television age, Jimmy Carter’s victory over incumbent Gerald Ford was credited, in no small part, to SNL star Chevy Chase. “I wanted him out and Carter in,” Chase said last week in a phone interview. So he made hay of Ford’s trips and falls (like the famous tumble out of Air Force One). “It became pretty easy to see he had an issue with stumbling,” says Chase.

Famous straight man Richard Nixon harnessed humor for himself when he appeared in 1968 on Rowan & Martin’ s Laugh-In to say “sock it to me.” He then went on to defeat Hubert Humphrey (who had declined an invitation to the show). Still, it’s risky to try to be funny, and “politicians know the downside outweighs the upside by a factor of infinity,” says Katz. “A good joke will last a week. A bad joke will be reprinted in your obituary.” Just ask James Watt. Ronald Reagan’s interior secretary lost his job after cracking a joke describing members of a federal panel as “a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple.”

Such episodes have all but ended off-the-cuff cracks from politicians. What remains is very well orchestrated. This year the DNC unleashed a squad of “Super Zeros”: actors in cartoonish costumes who appear as “Enron Ed” and “Hal E. Burton” at Republican campaign stops. Republicans have responded by dispatching folks dressed as 8-foot flip-flops. Meanwhile, gags are springing up on the sites of the DNC (http://www.democrats.org/cosmoquiz), the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (www.dtriptv.org), and the Republican National Committee, (www.rnc.org), where you can play “Kerryopoly” on a game board full of the senator’s properties (and their estimated values).

Ha, ha. Sound, well, not so funny? The official stuff often isn’t. “The majority of the humor you’re seeing online is not being done by the campaigns or organizations themselves,” says Internet expert Brian Reich. And it can have extraordinary results. Even the Howard Dean campaign, which pioneered using the Internet as a political tool, was shocked by the volume of Web-borne gags exploiting the infamous scream. If the derision didn’t immediately kill the campaign, “it certainly quickened the death,” says Karl Frisch, Dean’s multimedia communications director.

So what does this mean for those who make comedy their profession? Bill Maher, of HBO’s lefty Real Time With Bill Maher, describes today’s comedy audiences as “rabid.” Republican funnyman Ben Stein believes that “the rise of vicious political humor is not a good thing,” calling some of the humor “sick,” such as Whoopi Goldberg’s raunchy puns on Bush’s last name. Comedian Dennis Miller, now hosting a political talk show on CNBC, is just plain weary of how mean the humor has become: “The country can’t maintain this level of acrimony,” he says. (Nor can Miller, who is planning a “deliberately nonpolitical” post-election stand-up HBO special.)

Nasty or not, Maher calls this the most intense election of his lifetime: “It’s great for comedy.”