Jon Stewart Respects You
by Tim Coates on October 25, 2006 in Culture
Tucker Carlson once asked whether Daily Show host Jon Stewart was America’s smartest funny man or the funniest smart man. After two back-to-back spasmodically funny stand-up shows on Friday, October 6, at the Wang Theatre in Boston, his adoring and mostly liberal fans discovered he’s the funniest smart man.
Out from behind his Daily Show desk and freed from those inane interviews with Hollywood idols (his political interviews are top-shelf), Stewart was alive and particularly refreshing compared to his sanitary TV hand-wringing from this year’s mid-term campaign.
“Bush isn’t stupid,” he told the audience. “He thinks you’re stupid. Listen to the way he talks, he mentions only the obvious.” At this point her transforms into his George W. Bush persona, “There’s a country called Iraq, it’s in the Middle East. [Bush]’s like the 6-year-old boy in the back seat of the car pointing at everything, ‘tree, building, person.’”
Cheney was a favorite target of incredulity. “That man hasn’t done a single thing right in 6 years. How do you not get fired after 6 years of fucking up?”
He then asked a man in the front row what he did for a living.
Man: “I’m a research fellow”
Stewart: “What do you research?”
Man: “Tuberculosis.”
Stewart: “So imagine you discover a new medicine for TB. You think, everyone will want this medicine, people will be dancing in the streets, and we’ll be able to export it all over the world. Then everyone who takes it dies. Would you be able to keep your job?”
After politics he took on religion. “If God made the world in 6 days, and didn’t make man until the sixth day, don’t you think that maybe he said, ‘oh shit, it’s due tomorrow?’”
He took on quotidian realities — getting his cat neutered, his children, their school and the homeless man that takes shelter near his apartment building.
From the 90-minute show, my new impression of Stewart is that he, more than almost every politician currently stumping, respects people. His material challenges politics’ overt patronizing and contrived communications.
He lashed at the people who, during the Terri Shavio affair, stood outside the hospital, their mouths gagged with signs saying ‘life.’ “Who are these people?” he asks. “Don’t they have shit to do? Here’s the problem with American politics, it’s run by people without shit to do.”
If it sounds like I’m a sycophant for Stewart it’s because I am. In ways the Daily Show can’t expose, his comedy transcends satire and delivers a hint of the adult public conversation Americans need and deserve.
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