LAST WEEK TONIGHT WITH JOHN OLIVER: John Oliver. photo:Emily Shur/HBO

I caught an interview with John Oliver, formerly of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and now on into the third season of his own comedy show, Last Week Tonight.

He pushed back on the obvious question. Are you a journalist? No, I’m a comedian, he insisted.

The fact that his show is doing the sort of in depth investigative journalism that NPR itself prides itself on, and goes places 60 minutes doesn’t dare tread, undermines his claim, and personally I think he’s being disingenuous…but that doesn’t make him wrong. In fact, I think he’s right, though I’m not quite sure he knows why.

Journalism’s job is to inform people. To bring them the facts and educate them on issues. It’s job isn’t to make their minds up for them. Undoubtedly you’re taking internal exception to that and thinking about media bias in one direction or another, but while that’s rampantly true, it’s besides the point. Journalism’s beat is finding what’s true and presenting it to us. Like any human institution, it falls prey to special interests who warp it to their own ends, something that happens on the left, right, and middle of the ideological spectrum, which undermines it and makes it hard to accomplish its mission. But it doesn’t change the mission.

Comedy, on the other hand has a different, but closely aligned mission. It too is based in fact. As Oliver said, “You can ‘t build jokes on sand. You can’t be wrong about something, otherwise that joke…disintegrates.” Comedy get’s the audience to engage with uncomfortable facts, by putting them in a context that makes them tolerable. Much of comedy is based on building up the listener’s anxiety and then releasing it with a punch line. Comedy has to be rooted in the real, but by adding an element of the surreal, it makes that tolerable, something news alone can’t do.

So, is Oliver a comedian? Yes, but that doesn’t mean that he’s simply an entertainer. The jester holds a valuable position in the news delivery system: it is he who apes the king, mocks the bishop, and reveals the commonality of concerns amongst the people that the court wish hidden.

NPR: Interview: http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=466569047&m=466584981