Open Thread for Night Owls, Early Birds & Ex-Pats: Election Eve Edition

Thomas Schaller at Salon writes:

The end of the satirical industrial complex?

^{For the past eight years, Jon Stewart, Tina Fey and other comedians have had us laughing through our tears. If Obama wins, will the laughter die?}

Bush's rise to power this decade contributed significantly, if not primarily, to the emergence of what Stewart has called the "satirical industrial complex." The complex's roster includes Stewart and his late-night Comedy Central cohort Stephen Colbert; the "Saturday Night Live" troupe, which has experienced its own surge during the 2008 presidential race; and sundry other parodists and comedic agitators ranging from low-key Tom Tomorrow cartoonist Dan Perkins to Chris Rock, who recently quipped that President Bush has "fucked everything up so much, he's even made it hard for a white man to become president." ...

Ultimately, though, it is the raw material -- the content of current events -- that gives political humor its heft. "The role of a satirist is to point out things that don't make sense, and if there are more things that don't make sense, there's a greater sense of urgency for the satire," explained Todd Hanson, founder of and longtime writer for the Onion. ...

"SNL" writer James Downey, for one, predicts that Obama will be "a lot tougher" to satirize than other presidents and presidential candidates his show has been skewering for the past three decades. "The media is kind of madly in love with Obama," Downey told a New Yorker Festival audience. "He is also such a smooth character that he doesn't give you many handles." (No such rule applied to Hillary Clinton, he noted. "Bill Clinton got a free pass, but we took it out on her.")

Of course, if McCain and Palin were somehow to win, satire would be permanently dead. How could anybody compete with that pair?

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