The Imperial City

Humor Is the New Gravitas

The difficult trick is manifesting much of that within a very tight, mostly serious half-hour each evening. Reading a script while sitting alone at a desk doesn’t easily allow for the expression of a broad range of one’s personality. But Couric is game to try. She plans to bring in people like Tom Friedman and interview them live. She’ll go into the actual newsroom and talk to producers on the air. She aims to make the Evening News “appropriately casual, less what I call Newzak, the kind of droney thing that has no relation to normal conversation.” As she said to McManus recently, “if we have a day in Iraq that’s particularly bloody, I’d like to come on air and say, ‘This is a really, really lousy day in Iraq.’ ”

An anchor can show off more brains and charisma by getting out and reporting— although as a practical matter that often amounts to reading a script while standing in front of an exotic skyline (a might-as-well-be-fake photo op that’s expertly satirized by the ridiculous blue-screen stand-ups on The Daily Show). Couric suggests she won’t play along, Gunga Dan style, and appear in war zones just because Brian and Charlie are flying in. “It’s a bit of a show when the anchor parachutes in and bigfoots a correspondent who’s been working on a story. It’s window dressing sometimes.”

Being less pompous and fake than her competitors is one thing. But how, on the Evening News, will she manage to be assertively, accessibly witty? It’s hard. Brian Williams is actually very funny and loose in person and when he appears on comedy shows. But as an anchor—when his viewers’ median age is 60 instead of 51 (Letterman, Leno) or 35 (The Daily Show)—he’s still entirely invested in a hyperearnest premodern version of gravitas, which just doesn’t suit a 47-year-old very well. As one senior TV news executive said to me, he comes across “at times as a parody of an anchorman.”

On the new CBS Evening News, “there will be some nights,” McManus says, “perhaps the first night, where there will be some humor.” The regular container for that will be what Hartman calls “the opinion section,” a nightly 90-second commentary by civilians as well as famous people—“the Nora Ephrons of the world,” Couric says, or Carl Hiaasen. How about Stewart? “I love Jon,” she says. “He and I have talked about it. Early on it might be too much, but down the line.” And please, God, not Andy Rooney? She laughs. “He’s got a perch already.” And she adds: “I’d love Ali G to do one.”

Reading a script alone at a desk doesn’t easily allow for the expression of a broad range of one’s personality.

What about impertinent lines or amused inflections and smiles from Couric herself? “We have to figure out how to titrate it appropriately,” she says. “I think probably less is more in this format.”

Until now, daily TV about current events has tended to be one or the other, either dry and sober (at its finest, PBS’s NewsHour) or a pure frolic (The Colbert Report). In print, however, hybrids of seriousness and humor are nothing new, and have propagated through daily journalism for the past quarter century, as forever-young baby-boomers came of age. Today a majority of the Times’s op-ed columnists write “funny” at least some of the time. And elsewhere the most celebrated political commentators of the left (Michael Moore, Al Franken, Arianna Huffington) and right (Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh) are now humorists.

If successful political journalists and pundits are practically obliged to demonstrate a sense of humor in this Daily Show age, then so, naturally, are successful politicians. People who dislike George Bush find his chuckles and smirks repellent, but it was nevertheless the regular-guy jolliness, frat-boyish though it may be, that helped elect him. His performance alongside a Bush impersonator at the White House Correspondents’ dinner last spring killed, because it was funny and surprising and self-deprecating—and thus preemptively spoiled Stephen Colbert’s mock-right-wing act. And if Bush’s Democratic opponent in 2000 had been as loose and funny as a candidate as he is now as a climate-change Jeremiah (“I’m Al Gore. I used to be the next president of the United States”), he almost certainly would have been president. Which is also another way of explaining why (puckish) John McCain will trounce (earnest) Hillary Clinton in 2008.

A sense of humor is powerful stuff in an era of rampant phoniness and PC dissembling. But if you’re clumsy at it—and if you’re kind of a dick—it can blow up in your face. It was Senator George Allen’s Bushian predisposition for barbed ad-libs that wrecked his presidential candidacy in one stroke two weeks ago, when he turned to the Indian-American videotaping him at a campaign rally and, grinning, encouraged the (white) Virginia audience to laugh at “Macaca, or whatever his name is.” That was the same news cycle in which Bryant Gumbel, Couric’s former Today co-anchor, got into trouble for joking on TV that the outgoing NFL commissioner has had the leader of the players union on a leash. Thus all spontaneous displays of humor, even when they backfire, are glimpses of authenticity—authentic churlishness as well as authentic charm.