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Rally To Restore Sanity

Politicians, Pundits, And Other People

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It wasn’t a political rally, said the comedians, but it wasn’t a joke either. Looking out across the crush of people who swarmed the National Mall in Washington, DC, for “The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear,” Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s singing, dancing, joking extravaganza, things didn’t look precisely sane. And that was partly the idea.

An attempt at civil sensibility via nonsensicalness, at serious discussion by way of Halloween, or simply what ComicCon might be like if its nerds traded Warcraft for statecraft: circulating along the packed edges of the mall, over 200,000 people — easily dwarfing Glen Beck’s conservative-leaning rally in August — traded inside jokes borrowed from television and the internet, seasoned with puns, acronyms, bastardized American political tropes.

Some were dressed as obscure comic book characters, sci-fi villains, Tobias from Arrested Development, a man in a cigarette costume, Avatar aliens, a Hunter S. Thompson. It was The Daily Show inside out, crowdsourced and in the flesh. It was the absurd costumery of politics, run through the 24-hour news cycle, and then hung out to dry.

It didn’t matter if it was a rally for a pragmatic citizenry or a convention for fans of the shows; there is little difference now, at least according to the logic of Stewart’s brand of infotainment, which has become the go-to source of TV news for a few generations of Americans. And that was also the point, perhaps. Whether comedy proves to be a salve for a deranged national conversation or an ironic refuge from it, the buzz of 215,000 people, young and old, celebrating civility on the Mall, invited the kinds of questions that Stewart himself might have asked: what exactly did it mean that a fake news show on a comedy network could bring so many people out — and where would they go next?

1 year ago

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