In Politics, Comedy is Central

From In These Times here's a pretty good run down on why we get some of our "News" from comedy shows. It makes you feel good, well okay. There was that dark period from let's say 2000~2003 where I needed places like Bartcop , The Onion, etc. to actually get me through the alternate universe I'd found myself in. Here's why there's humour in things like dumbya...er, I mean Dubya:
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In Politics, Comedy is Central
By Jessica Clark

Lewis Black is irate. “The last year and a half is by far the toughest time I’ve ever spent as a comedian,” he confides to the audience in his HBO special, “Red, White and Screwed.”
“It used to be easy—one or two things might happen in a week. And now, something will happen, and I’ll read about something and I go ‘I’m going to make that funny,’ and then”—here he starts to yell and pace—”the next day, 30 other things would fucking happen! Who can keep track of this shit? I don’t even have a ports of Dubai joke, and we’re on to immigration.” The audience hoots in sympathy.
Perhaps this abundance of absurdities helps explain the recent boom in political humor. In May, the Washington Post reported that the number of Bush jokes on the late-night network shows had doubled, hitting Clinton/Lewinsky-era levels. Explicitly progressive comedy is also on the rise—from the cheery vitriol showcased on Air America, to a host of viral videos, to the recent national tour of a new stand-up troupe, Laughing Liberally. At the same time, Comedy Central satirists Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart have become the era’s most effective media critics, drawing distinguished guests from left, right and center, and providing a spirited space for public debate.
This evolution of political comedy has everything to do with the collapse of public trust in our truth-telling institutions, hastened by the right’s sustained attack on what one GOP insider dismissed as the “reality-based community.” (“Reality,” quips Colbert in full conservative drag, “has a well-known liberal bias.”)
We now routinely watch the mainstream media with the expectation that we’re being spun, but when did we start watching comedy for the real deal?

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