Wrong:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Arizona Shootings Reaction | ||||
|
||||
Right:
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Pundits Lay Blame for Senseless Arizona Attack | ||||
|
||||
If Jon Stewart, as he keeps claiming, really and truly wants to disclaim any responsibility his show may have beyond making viewers laugh, he needs to quit it with the pompous lectures already.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Also, what happened was tragic, but it didn’t warrant the “will we ever want to laugh again” theme, a la the post-9/11 show.
Also, why does Stewart appear to be speaking completely off-the-cuff? Dude, you have a team of very talented writers, and presumably a teleprompter!
I don’t see why you’re so upset that Jon’s threshold for flippancy is lower than Colbert’s.
If Stewart feels that a solemn speech is more appropriate than a pun and a badly photo-shopped news-segment title, I’m going to trust him on that.
I wouldn’t say I’m “so upset.” But I do get irritated by Stewart’s vacillation between the positions that the show is “just comedy,” and that the show must set the tone of liberal response to current events, as it suits him and without consistency or apparent self-awareness.
I also am starting to feel like a lot of his angst about the media is self-inflicted. He’s created a job where he watches TV news all of the time, and bemoans how awful it is, but most people *don’t* watch TV news all the time. He mentioned “watching the news all weekend”–I chose not to watch the news all day Saturday and Sunday because I knew that a) the details would be upsetting, and b) the coverage would be ridiculous, and c) I had other things to do.
“I do get irritated by Stewart’s vacillation between the positions that the show is ‘just comedy,’ and that the show must set the tone of liberal response to current events.”
Bingo. I actually soured on Jon Stewart for this reason after his “Crossfire” excursion. When he defended himself by saying, “The show that leads into mine is puppets making prank calls,” I was all, “And how much do you pay Comedy Central to keep ‘Crank Yankers’ on the air so you can use that line?”