I Cogitate

Media Savvy: The Thinker
Serious philosophers make the case that Jon Stewart is the Socrates of our day
Sam McManis
Sacramento Bee
October 23, 2007

Deep, esoteric chin-pulling is not the reaction you'd expect from people who watch "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart."

I laugh, therefore I am?

Not exactly.

But then, Jason Holt is not your average viewer of Comedy Central's popular fake-news program. An assistant professor at Acadia University in Canada and the author of two academic books, Holt processes the pop-culture world through a philosophical prism.

So, to him, Stewart and television cohort Stephen Colbert are nothing less than the Socrates and Plato of our time.

Really. He's serious about studying these TV funnymen. In fact, Holt enlisted the help of 20 other academics – or "Senior Philosophical Correspondents," to ape a "Daily Show" shtick – to put their high brows together and muse on the significance of all things Stewart.

The result: "The Daily Show and Philosophy" (Blackwell, $17.95, 270 pages), a compendium of essays that consider whether Stewart and his merry band of fakecasters are the public intellectuals of today, whether "truthiness" is indeed a higher form of truth, and just how edifying those "Moments of Zen" really are.

"I sent out a call for papers for this project and got upward of 50 proposals," says Holt, on the phone recently from Nova Scotia. "I couldn't take all of them for the book. But that shows you the level of interest."

Hmm. "The Daily Show" popular among philosophers? Who knew?

And what, pray tell, would the congenitally snarky Stewart think of all this?

Well, we never heard back from Stewart's people, but Holt is willing to venture a guess.

"Outwardly, (Stewart) would – and perhaps should – mock it," he says. "He could use this kind of thing as grist for his mill, because he always sells himself short. He underplays the cultural importance of the show.

"What Stewart and 'The Daily Show' do is fill that gap, not because it's intellectual discourse first and foremost, but because they're doing a better job than academics like me have traditionally done."

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