Entertainment Politics as a Modernist Project in a Baudrillard World

Abstract

As "post-truth" was Oxford Dictionaries' 2016 word of the year, late-night comedians were featured on Time magazine's cover bearing the tagline "The Seriously Partisan Politics of Late-Night Comedy." This article attempts to frame what is going on in theoretical and philosophical terms. By a "Baudrillard World," we mean the post-truth era that was first announced by theorists such as Jean Baudrillard. By a modernist project, we mean that the late night comedians are making various rhetorical moves to reassert a commitment to truth incompletely secured by conventional, cool-style journalism. We identify a number of offenses against truth that the late night comedians counter in an attempt to rescue not just particular facts but the very notion of truth.