'Be funny, but say something'
'Daily Show' comedian returns to Athens for 2006 commencement

I am honored. … And I am so happy to be in my home state of Ohio and even happier to be at my alma mater, Ohio University.

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Graduates, before I reveal to you a foolproof way to claw your way to the top and mercilessly destroy your peers, I'd like you to take a moment to consider your parents or a relative who supported you through your years of study. If you can see a parent from your seat, take a long look at them, and just know that is the person from whom you will be borrowing money -- over the next 10 years. And recall the basement in their house, and know that's where you will be living very soon if you don't get a job.
 

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Your success, and ultimately your trajectory -- the snapshot of your entire life's arc -- will reflect how you coped with randomness and how openly you engaged it along your journey. I'm quite sure that your life's plan will be interrupted many times. For better and for worse. How will you react?

I was determined to be journalist. And from the time I was a kid, watching Walter Cronkite anchor the news, I knew I just had to work for CBS News. And when I got a job at CBS News in New York as a 27-year-old and eventually became a producer there, I thought, this is where I'll spend the rest of my career.

That's when randomness altered "the plan."

Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were brutally murdered outside her Brentwood home. The long, exhausting O.J. Simpson trial began. And in covering it, so began the slow unraveling of my plan. Tired of chasing excused jurors around Los Angeles, getting into fistfights with camera crews struggling to interview the same subject and conflicted about the story's real national importance, I quit my job at CBS. I joined a group of people in 1996 who were starting up a new show on a cable network called Comedy Central. The show was to be a daily show, and for lack of a better name, it was called "The Daily Show."

We were a group of writers and producers from disparate backgrounds -- comedy, print and news -- who all shared a huge discontent with the status quo of media in this country. Cable news content was exploding into the realm of the absurd, and we were all looking for a way to express that. Or make fun of it.

When I walked into my "Daily Show" office for the first time, there was a silhouette of a man against the window in a raincoat, in the dark, smoking a cigarette. It was A. Whitney Brown, my new office-mate, the brilliant satirist and comic from "Saturday Night Live." And he looked at me, and said, "Ya know, this show is never gonna make it."

Ten years later, "The Daily Show" is the cynical, wisecracking kid we sent off to college that came home a Rhodes Scholar. A success. And a random one at that. I wish I could say it was all part of the plan. But, for me mostly, the show was an accident. A fortunate, successful accident.

Now humor is a peripheral but increasingly mainstream and profitable means for communicating news especially to younger viewers. For some, "The Daily Show" is the only source for news. Some get their news online from satirical Web sites. Howard Stern. At NPR, where I am humor contributor, my role is that of jester. But beneath the laughs is a stab at the truth. Perhaps a truth so ugly, absurd or so unjust we as listeners and viewers don't want it straight. With a laugh it goes down a little easier. Yes, truth can entertain us as much as it hurts us.

But therein lies the journalistic paradox. The entertaining truth.

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While satire affords us detachment from news, comedy is still context. And if reasonable, it establishes a moral compass and a human connection to events. It can be as intellectual as hard news. It's just not serious on the surface.

It is no accident that "The Daily Show" and other satirical news sources flourished during some morally challenging times: the O.J. trial. The Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal. The Bush-Gore election. 9/11. And now the War on Terror. News in the past decade has been hard to take and often hard to believe.

  
But here's an admission from someone whose hands are dirty. You can't laugh at all the news all the time. Because detachment does not fulfill the obligation of an informed citizenry or a democracy.

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Look around at the number of seats in this convocation center. It seats about 13,500 people. Not enough seats to hold the number of soldiers injured in the war in Iraq. More than 18,000 men and women have been wounded, some of them two, three, even four times, in this war. Almost 2,500 have died. Twice as big as this graduating class. Kind of hard to make funny. But in a democracy, in order to know what cost is too high, you gotta stop laughing for a moment and do the math to know what price we’re paying.

Otherwise, we are merely cynics. Glib, snarky dismissers of truth. Comedy demands that you be informed and look at news critically. But it asks nothing more from you than to laugh. Journalism asks you to act.

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Don't get me wrong. In your lives, be funny. But say something.

One last thing. I've saved this for the end. It is a secret that will serve you well. It's something you will take from here that no other graduate in this nation will possess. A currency more valuable than any paper that will help you navigate all the tough choices and all the randomness of life. No, it's not Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard. It's your Ohioness.

In Ohio, you sit between the elite in the east and the glitzy in the west who seem to garner all the attention, mainly because they’re so damn rich. But you, the nonjaded, you have something they want and can never have: your Ohioness.

It is your curiosity. Your openness. Your tolerance. Your common sense. For 12 years in New York, the city in which I first ruined my credit, I would ride my bike beneath the World Trade Center just blocks from my apartment, and in my Ohioness, I marveled at the industry of man. And when the towers fell, I lamented at what the Rev. William Sloane Coffin called one man's "faith-based" violence toward man.

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Let your Ohioness be a touchstone. This November, when you vote, the nation will look to you, again, Ohio, to see how you voted. Test marketers will want to know what you, Ohio, think of their new cheeseburgers. Political consultants will want to know what you, Ohio, think of their new candidates. And Hollywood will want to know what you, Ohio, think of their new TV shows and movies.

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Commit to be informed, and never stop being impressed, never quit being tolerant, and above all, don’t be a jerk. And you graduates of Ohio University, will be a force.

Otherwise, in America, the easiest, quickest way to get a job is to have a relative give it to you. The rest will have to work for it. Congratulations. We’re all depending on you. Thank you. And good luck.

Brian Unger, BSC '87, was on the original team that created the "Daily Show" and has appeared on "The Jimmy Kimmel Show," "The Man Show," NBC's "Later" and E!'s "Talk Soup." He is a commentator on National Public Radio's "Day to Day."

Posted 09-12-06