Laughter: The Road to Education

How people get informed has always been an interesting topic. Now with the birth of the internet, the possibilities are truly infinite. This has caused things like TV and Newspapers to take quite a hit.

However, there are still a fair amount of both available and the way in which these things are chosen is interesting.

No too long ago Bill O’ Reily had Jon Stewart on his program, you can watch the interview here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5pK7sK0i4A .

Despite the rudeness and general boorishness of O’Reily in this clip, he did bring up some interesting talking points. Namely, that more and more young people are getting informed by The Daily Show every day.



Where he got the data to support his claim is never brought up, but I’m going to go ahead and assume for the sake of argument that he is right.

If we make that assumption we then have to ask the question… does it matter?

Of course it doesn’t matter! So what if Jon Stewart cracks some jokes and ridicules the current institution, at least he’s doing it openly and not claiming to be fair and balanced. Perhaps the most beautiful thing about The Daily Show is that Stewart is open about who he is. Most importantly however, the truth does come from humor.

We don’t laugh at the jokes Stewart makes at the president because they’re ridiculous, we laugh at the jokes because they are grounded in the truth.

There’s nothing wrong with people choosing to watch Stewart’s show and quite possibly it’s a greater sign of the cultural circuit. What Stewart is doing differently from people like Bill O’Reily is he’s actually engaging his audience. Stewart doesn’t necessarily talk about what people want to hear, he just talks in a way that people respond to, and accordingly he has been one of the champions of keeping the youth informed.

O’Reily can whine all he likes about Jon Stewart, but at the end of the day, people know the score.