Obfuscations and Diversions — ”How to do comedy”
The Daily Show with Trevor Noah did a 6 minute piece on Kanye West praising a conservative political commentator, Candace Owens and calling slavery a ‘mentality’.
The views of Kanye and by extension Ms.Owens was reduced to a single point in the succeeding seconds: They are denying the existence of racism in the United States. That statement is of course, easy to disprove. They use two incidents — a distasteful ‘exhibition’ by a resident in New Richmond, Virginia and an act of vandalism in Friendship, Tennessee (Yes, it’s a real town, I checked)
In the first case, the ‘exhibition’ is being held by private citizens on private property, and is protected by the first amendment to the US Constitution. It may be a real or perceived act of racism, but that is a legitimate use of that citizens rights. The second case is one in which the rights of a private citizen was violated, and the same is being investigated by the state (as made clear by this report).
Both cases are examples of individual actions of racism, the state nor any of its institutions is aiding or abetting the racists. In one case, the state is actively attempting to prosecute the perpetrators. In the other, the state is precluded from taking action because it is the exercise of a constitutional right.
Let us look at this video from the point of view of a casual viewer of the show. You are initially given the impression that Mr. West and Ms. Owens think that ‘racism does not exist’, which is then disproven by the use of two individual acts of racism that was documented in the preceding days. “Ha!” you would think. “Kanye and that commentator are proven to be fools”. But in fact, neither the host (Trevor) or the commentator (Roy Wood, Jr.) are debating the propositions that West (and by extension Owens) are advancing.
What The Daily Show is doing isn’t smart commentary, its the use of obfuscations and diversions to score something that isn’t even being contested. This is why ‘Comedy news shows’ like this are a disservice to public discourse in general. We can see the same in India as well, when comedians blatantly adopt the talk points of certain political alignments, time and time again.
The art of political humor, in my opinion, should provoke us to think critically and analyse, not fall into the trap of logical fallacies in the pursuit of a political ideology. That has been more than lacking for a long time.
Long point short: we’re better off not watching political comedy if we want to craft our opinions based on facts and reality.
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