The Ominous Omen Of Another Hostless Oscars

Three years into the Trump presidency, the entertainment industry still hasn’t come to terms with the end of the Obama era. The collective Hollywood braintrust is so rudderless that, for the second year in a row, the Oscars won’t have a host. If the Oscars are the showbiz Super Bowl, we’re in year two of the Academy deciding a halftime show wasn’t worth the effort (not exactly a radical notion, given how many people whined about Shakira and J.Lo).

Partly this dates back to last year’s announcement that Kevin Hart would host, followed by the controversy over some of his past homophobic jokes and tweets. People demanded that Hart apologize, Hart said he wouldn’t because he already had, then stepped down as host, then apologized anyway but still didn’t want to host… honestly, just trying to keep up is a little bit exhausting, isn’t it Who could blame the Academy for just saying fuck it and going host-less If Kevin Hart is too controversial, what does a safe choice look like (Please don’t say Billy Crystal)

But this is also bigger than Kevin Hart and it’s bigger than the Oscars hosting gig being a thankless job. We’ve entered into a prolonged period of general ambivalence towards, and confusion about, the comedic gesture in general. What is the use of comedy in 2020

To understand where we are, it helps to know where we were. In the early aughts, when the George W. Bush administration was off starting the Iraq War while maintaining sky-high approval ratings and lying to the public as a matter of course, being left/progressive/anti-war felt like a very lonely proposition. It was something you didn’t want to say too loudly in front of mixed company. This was a time when the Dixie Chicks essentially got blacklisted from the radio for saying they were ashamed that George W. Bush was from Texas. As bleak and tragicomic as the Trump era can be for anyone who isn’t a diaper-wearing shitposter, there’s no counterpart for the Bush era’s punishment of people who simply expressed shame about the president. By contrast, Donald Trump is essentially a cartoon of our most negative national stereotypes made flesh; being performatively ashamed of him is the national sport.

In the context of the Bush era, things like Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show — which dedicated a half-hour of every night to calling out the hypocrisy of Bush officials and Fox News anchors — really did feel like a beacon in the darkness. Somewhere in my house I still have a “Jon Stewart ’08” t-shirt I had made in the darkest days of mainstream media warmongering. Which is a little embarrassing to admit now, but felt entirely understandable in the context of the times. When Steven Colbert was the featured speaker at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner and brutally roasted George W. Bush straight to his face, it was one of the most ballsy things many of us had ever seen. It was also incredibly funny. “I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers, and rubble, and recently flooded city squares.”

When Obama won the election in 2008 (perhaps not the furthest left candidate, but the furthest left of any mainstream candidate at the time, and unthinkable even a year earlier that a black guy with “Hussein” in his name could one day be president) it felt like maybe all that shit-talking we’d done to make ourselves feel better for the previous seven or eight years had actually accomplished something. Comedy felt not only fun but maybe even important. It wasn’t, of course — it was just a dumb thing we did to entertain ourselves. Still, the timing made it easy to confuse.

The idea of “comedian as bold truth-teller” gained steam even as the Obama disappointments mounted. At some point in the early 20-teens (I’m sorry we don’t have better names for these eras yet) we tacitly acknowledged Louis CK as the president of comedy, and by extension that he was the nation’s unvarnished conscience. It was something CK himself probably never asked for and anyone who understood comedy could see was a terrible idea, but to make a long story short, it backfired spectacularly. Now CK is, like everything else, another front in the ever-exhausting culture war.