Jon Stewart and ‘The Daily Show’ Had ‘Terrible F***ing Week’
You think Jon Stewart is happy he returned to Comedy Central?
“Hey Jon, come back to The Daily Show just for the election, it’ll be fun,” he joked on last night’s episode. “You can do one day a week, it’ll be a laugh. What could go wrong?”
As it turns out, everything went wrong last week — for the show and the country, according to Stewart. “What a terrible f(bleep)ing week,” he began. The show’s plan to broadcast live from the Republican National Convention? That went out the window due to security concerns after last week’s dramatic events involving the party’s nominee, Donald Trump.
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“Obviously, we were supposed to be doing our shows from Milwaukee for the RNC this week, but because of the attempt on the former president’s life, the venue in which we had planned to do this show, a theater which was originally located in the ‘soft perimeter’ … was shifted, understandably so, to the hard perimeter,” Stewart explained. “You really don’t want to be in the hard perimeter.”
After security officials locked down facilities, essentially building cages around the proceedings, The Daily Show pulled the plug. “We felt that we could not logistically put on the theater shows effectively without people,” Stewart said — people being one of the key ingredients of a comedy show.
That made for a hectic week on The Daily Show, with crews forced to uproot its remote production plans on a dime and “rejigger all the things in the studio to get us ready to do a program this very Tuesday night.”
But just because Stewart and friends couldn’t travel to Milwaukee didn’t mean the show couldn’t deliver its comedic take on the RNC. Senator Ron Johnson from Wisconsin received ridicule after he first called for the country to unite on a cable news show, then demonized Democratic policies as “a clear and present danger to America” in a speech. Johnson later claimed he meant to deliver a message of unity but the wrong script got loaded in his teleprompter.
“I guess he’s what’s known as ‘unity in the streets, divisive in the sheets,’” quipped Stewart.
Stewart ran through some of the convention’s unlikely opening night speakers, including SlutWalk organizer Amber Rose and a Teamster who called for tougher laws to protect unions, a cause that’s not exactly on the party’s platform.
But Stewart saved his funniest punchlines for Trump’s choice for a vice-presidential candidate, J.D. Vance. “It’s like Donald selected the actor who would be hired to play Don Jr. in the Lifetime movie,” he joked. “It’s like Don Jr. was the beta version that had to have some kinks worked out. He’s the default avatar in the video game, and then Donald Trump Sr. adjusted the pretty eyes and charisma sliders up a little bit.”
Stewart confessed that he is guilty of turning to an internet full of misinformation about the causes and motivations behind last week’s events. “We’re all doing it because we have to know what our posture will be on the tragedy,” he said. “Will it be a haughty ‘I told you’ or perhaps a circumspect ‘Well, let’s not rush to judgment?’”
“We don’t know yet who’s got dibs, who wins, and none of us knows what’s gonna happen next,” Stewart said, “other than there will be another tragedy in this country, self-inflicted, by us, to us. And then we’ll have this feeling again.”
