Jon Stewart Reminds Us Why We're Over Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart Reminds Us Why We're Over Jon Stewart
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Jon Stewart, who’s recently signed to do another year of hosting Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” on Monday nights, had a pretty good riff this week about Sunday’s Trump Nazi Rally at Madison Square Garden. The rally has been in the news primarily because of that racist joke by rightwing insult comic Tony Hinchcliffe, where he did a rightwing twofer mocking Puerto Rico and also environmental concerns about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (“I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now, it’s called Puerto Rico, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”)
Stewart didn’t actually show the joke in this segment, which started off by noting that Beyoncé didn’t sing at Kamala Harris’s Friday rally, then offered a selection of different disgusting, racist remarks from several other speakers including Tucker Carlson and Rudy Giuliani, plus other grody Trumpers, of whom Stewart said, “Now, generally, that’s a lineup that you see outside Madison Square Garden, yelling at strangers as they try to get inside Madison Square Garden,”
Here’s the entire “A” block, if Viacom lets it embed, which spends surprisingly little time on the Trump rally before moving on to a pretty decent discussion of Trump’s plan to deport between 2 million and 30 billion immigrants “on day one.”
As for Hinchcliffe, Stewart dismissed the reaction to his slurs on Puerto Rico as something that “the media” and maybe nobody else found alarming, which doesn’t seem to reflect the disgusted and outraged reactions we’ve seen, but hey, those reactions were in the media, now weren’t they?
Stewart didn’t really have a lot to say about the incident except to suggest it was at most a poor choice in booking.
“In retrospect, having a roast comedian come to a political rally a week before Election Day and roasting a key voting demographic — probably not the best decision by the campaign politically. But, to be fair, the guy’s really just doing what he does.”
Yeah, that was jarring, to treat what might be Trump’s last-minute own goal in terms of “roast comedians gonna roast.” Stewart went on to show a clip of Hinchcliffe at a Netflix roast of Tom Brady, where he made hilarious jokes about Jews, the Holocaust, and slavery, but it’s OK because it was a roast you see:
“Jeff [Ross] is so Jewish he only watches football for the coin toss. Gronk [sportsball player Rob Gronkowski], you look like the Nazi that kept burning himself on the ovens. Kevin [Hart] is so small that when his ancestors picked cotton, they called it deadlifting.”
Stewart pretended to be offended but the comedic artistry was simply too much for him: “Yes, yes, of course, terrible, boo.” (I will confess I cringe-chuckled at the “deadlifting” line’s absurdity myself.)
Then Stewart, still suppressing giggles, added,
“There’s something wrong with me. I find that guy very funny, so I’m sorry. I don’t know what to tell you. I mean, bringing him to a rally and [having] him not do roast jokes, that’d be like bringing Beyoncé to a rally and not hav—oh.”
Again, not a bad line, at least if you want to say that having a racist comedy routine at a national campaign rally is more true to the spirit of the entertainer’s best work than not having Beyoncé sing. And we see that for Hinchcliffe, this was fairly tame stuff compared to his regular act, so hooray for the Trump campaign nixing his nasty stuff and just leaving the racist content.
We’re probably making too much of this, really. Jon Stewart spent most of his career on the “Daily Show” reminding us not to consider him a real newscaster or political analyst, and it’s our own fault for not listening to him, huh?
We just didn’t expect him to be the one telling people to lighten up, that’s just what roast comedians do.
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I'm so tired of 'comedians' defending other 'comedians'.
It's just juvenile, selfish, bros before hoes nonsense.
If someone punches down and just throws insults, they are not a comedian, they are just an asshole.
There are so many jokes (even bigoted ones!) that actually are jokes and are funny. Like some of those 3 types of people walk into a bar jokes.
Calling Puerto Ricans garbages isn't a joke, just like me yelling "you suck and are ugly!" at someone isn't a joke either. It's just an insult.
I appreciate this article, Dok, because it's circling around the thing that brought us to this poisonous moment. I'm 75, and I remember when "National Lampoon" started publishing. Because men laughed at it, its pedophilia, its animal cruelty, its inhumanity to man, it grew. It was stupid but it grew. And it led to "Animal House" and "SNL" and any number of "comedians" whose central joke was "ain't we stupid?!" So the left has to share blame for the lionization of stupid, and the jokes made by Donald Trump's supporters are disturbing echoes of "National Lampoon". I don't know what the option would have been or how exactly cultural history horse-shoed itself into this permutation; I just want to point out that it happened and is still happening.