Look. Look on the screen. This is where we are; this is who we are: these cars. That’s a schoolteacher who probably thinks his taxes are too high. He’s going to work. There’s another car. An investment banker: gay, also likes Oprah. Another car’s a Latino carpenter…And yet these millions of cars must somehow find a way to squeeze one by one into a mile-long, thirty-foot wide tunnel carved underneath a mighty river. Carved by people who by the way I’m sure had their differences. And they do it. Concession by concession. You go, then I’ll go. You go, then I’ll go. You go, then I’ll go…
–Jon Stewart, “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear”, Washington, D.C., Oct. 20, 2010
In fairness to Jon Stewart, he was speaking at perhaps the last possible moment in recent history at all hospitable to the belief that the divisions in American society were only skin-deep, that media-fomented rancor and Beltway ineptitude upstaged a basically harmonious citizenry. No one really should take too seriously anything a comedian says in an avowed “moment of sincerity”.
Which is not to say that all comedians are dumb. I’m trying to make a point about jokes, not joke-tellers. As a form of entertainment, humor relies on a welter of bold assumptions about its audience. The charismatic power of the comedian resides in their ability to induce the audience to accept these assumptions as at least temporarily true. It is the stand-up equivalent to the suspension of disbelief required of theatre audiences. The comedian charms us into relinquishing our individuality by promising laffs in return.
Humor, then, is a powerful ideological tool. Stewart’s Rally speech can be interpreted ideologically in at least two ways. According to a 2019 article by Alex Shephard, a New Republic staff writer, the remarks augured a “decade of liberal futility” in their “denialism”-driven refusal to reckon with the dire threat of an ascendant Tea Party. But you could also read the speech as just another example of the futility of political entertainment backed by large corporations, unusual only in its nakedness. Compelled to say something to justify the presence of hundreds of thousands on the Mall that October day, so as to banish the spectre of nihilism stalking the deep shadows of the event’s irony, Stewart wound up exposing the vast wastes of platitude upon which his Daily Show funhouse was built.
Those vast wastes were not created by Stewart; he was transplanted there, as are all artists working in the present Hollywood system. They all know there are lines they must not cross. Their acts of suggestion, indirection and (in rare blessed moments) subversion can only tweak, but never truly transgress the border between their forced “normalcy” and the crazy real world. At the same time, all manner of genuine aberrance (violence, greed, morbid sex obsession) can be imported and assimilated into the fold of the normal. That’s what Hollywood platitudes are for: to give certain social pathologies a pedigree. “Don’t look at that twisted thing. Don’t talk to it; don’t bother it. Just let it pass by. You go, then I’ll go. You go, then I’ll go. You go, then I’ll go…”
The alt-comedy videomaker Conner O’Malley works both within the pop-culture system, and way outside it. A former writer/performer for Late Night with Seth Meyers, he is mostly known now for his viral comedy pieces uploaded to YouTube, Twitter and (now defunct) Vine. The vast wastes of platitudinous America are his playground and explicit subject. As he inhabits various manic characters, each one affixed to his own little square on the scrambled grid of American ideology, he traces out intricate patterns that weirdly wind their way to the heart of where we are now.
A highlight is his series of “Howard Schultz for Prez” endorsements, from back when that was a potential thing. Here, O’Malley is an increasingly scary parody of that wholesome American type, the zealous youth canvasser carried away with political puppy love for his chosen candidate…the CEO of Starbucks. For some reason shirtless on an active construction site with workers about their business in the background, O’Malley proclaims his ardour in a gravelly roar reminiscent of a pro wrestler: “Only the Coffee Man can beat the Covfefe Guy!” Over the course of several short videos, he progressively loses his shit, writing pro-Schultz slogans on his person in (his own?) blood and shouting across the internet to the candidate, “I’m about to fucking come!…You have a cock of wealth! I need your cock of wealth inside my fucking body, dude!” As with many O’Malley videos, these use (as the character would) a long selfie stick so the vantage can shift on a dime from vertiginous to uncomfortably close, as we are pulled to seemingly within an inch of O’Malley’s unhinged grimace-grin.
What makes this young idealist a typical O’Malley character – and maybe a typical American — is his certainty, not that he is right (truth claims and moral claims alike do not register with him) but that he is normal. He is sure he speaks not for himself but for a “movement”. Totally isolated and evidently coming apart at the seams, he exhibits all the self-appointed authority of Jon Stewart on Rally day.
So far, so funny. But I decided to go from enjoying O’Malley’s videos to writing about them, because unlike his characters, he shows signs of healthy (artistic) ambition. The Howard Schultz series goes in an interesting direction toward the end, when O’Malley is kidnapped by Starbucks goons, who torture and brainwash him in the back of a van as part of an apparent “renormalization” project. He is released into a shopping mall, where he proves how normal he is by going up to random strangers (who do not appear to be in on the joke) and explaining how “I was acting weird, and then Howard sent the mobile response unit and they fixed me”.
Shopping mall culture is a too-easy target for comedians, but O’Malley is doing more than mocking late-capitalist U.S. banality. In his insistence that every “American idiot” is also an American ideologue, he showcases the collusive constructedness of normality. Inculcated complacency, confusion and the unfunny coercion of the powerful work together to maintain the illusion of social stability.
Letting no one off the hook, O’Malley also reels in the extremely-online culture that is making him internet-famous. In “Smoking 500 Cigarettes for 5G”, he accomplishes the titular meaningless, self-destructive viral stunt, out of sheer gratuitous devotion to telecommunications technology. (“I’m doing this in loving service of 5G, T-Mobile, Verizon…I’m not getting paid.”) According to the surreal logic of O’Malley’s satire, the gates of 5G then open, his phone goes incandescent and he becomes one with the internet. The ensuing app-swiping montage – a blitz of venal memes – lands him on a social-media account (“Milfinfo.com – I got the ass, I got the truth.”) where he discovers the true identity of Jeffrey Epstein’s murderers.
O’Malley is sensitive to how technology has changed our thinking. His satire both reflects and challenges those changes, by short-circuiting the internet-era tendency toward quick, reflexive praise or blame. The confrontational style of his comedy does not merely invite dialectical analysis, it almost imposes that analysis on the unsuspecting viewer. (Hence his niche appeal.) He lays unacceptable cultural extremes in our laps, declares them ours and then runs away. It’s our job to figure out what to do with them.
Several O’Malley videos specifically target the gamification inherent in late-capitalist culture, which is just a canny disguise for what used to be called the rat race. “Life is exactly like a video game, and I’ve got the cheat codes,” says another of O’Malley’s would-be ubermenschen. “Hudson Yards Video Game” shows us O’Malley as a central character in the bland, expensive amusement that Manhattan has become. His goal in the “game” is to accumulate Hello Points, by greeting people with vacuous affability in a kind of social credit system a la Black Mirror. Unlike the Netflix show, however, O’Malley does not attempt to creep us out with upside-down visions of what we almost but not quite are. Rather, he shows where we are already, have been for a while without knowing it. Running along the upper levels of the Vessel, O’Malley frenetically waves at tourists until he again racks up enough numbers to enter neoliberal nirvana: “You unlocked allyship!”
It remains to be seen whether O’Malley can unlock true artistry. But at the very least, his vids are a refreshing alternative, if not an antidote, to ubiquitous normie jokes about Mr. Tiny Hands Orange President. Most mainstream comedy is still holding out for the unlikely “return to sanity” retailed by Stewart, without the Obama-era comedian’s good excuse of not yet knowing how things would turn out. At this late date, it’s a mistake to take our normalcy for granted. A harmless one? Maybe – except if it helps set the stage for another hellish decade of “liberal futility”. As Jon Stewart said at the Rally, “Sanity is in the eye of the beholder.”
You can follow Ben Kessler on Twitter at @koolfresh.