Comedy is Not Pretty

The role of comedians as truth tellers who give voice to what the rest of us are thinking (in a less funny way) is nothing new. What is new is that the jokes comedians tell — especially the important ones — are no longer ruled by the limits of the terrestrial world. What a comedian says one night can go viral the next morning. Comedy is now so connected to news that I wouldn’t be surprised if journalism schools taught a course on embedding video clips from the likes of Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Amy Schumer and Louis CK. In The Atlantic, Megan Garber explains how comedians became public intellectuals.