Jon Stewart Reminds Us Why We're Over Jon Stewart
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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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Maybe... and I'm probably crazy here... maybe you should listen to all of the previously neutral celebrities of Puerto Rican descent about why they were disgusted by it and encouraged their 150 million followers to vote Kamala Harris in response to it.
Maybe... and again, I'm probably crazy here... we don't elevate hate by having a rally devoted to it in the same location as a famous Nazi rally, as you are supported by open Nazis, and then invite your opening acts to play "rank the races" and "why Hitler was right."
Maybe we don't normalize that.
Maybe if someone wants to go tell racist jokes unironically, we don't give them a national platform.
The classic Dean Martin roasts were friends of the roastee making jokes at the roastee's expense, then the roastee got their turn to roast their friends. It was mutual punching across, not up or down, based upon truths about the roasted, and genuinely funny. Oh, and they all laughed WITH each other. What this "comedian" does ain't that. It's all punching down, and those who were punched on don't get the chance to punch back, at least at the event. When they do, they are told "it's only a joke," or to "lighten up." And his jokes aren't funny, but based upon stereotypes of whoever is punched on, so not based upon truth. To call what he did a roast, is wrong and dismissive of those whom he punched.
ETA: that "comedian" claimed to roast everybody. He didn't roast anyone, he just punched, and it wasn't everybody, because he left out white males. Jon Stewart seems to not understand what a comedy roast is.