This week, The Daily Show celebrated its 30-year anniversary. Over the course of 30 year
Look, I’ve talked before about the misnomer of “fake news”: sure, in the Kilborn era, it often was (although note that, even then, there was enough for the retrospective to find a clip or two), but then things changed. The Daily Show doesn’t report fake news. It reports real news, in a way that some people want to refer to as fake. They seem to believe that, if you can laugh at the news, that can’t possibly be real. Or maybe they just need to denigrate it to justify their own lack of humour. Maybe they’ve been drowning in their own sombriety so long that their fatalism just won’t let them accept that it might even be possible to consider another way.
Well, for me, The Daily Show (and the many other shows, podcasts, and YouTube channels it’s inspired) is the only way I can keep track of what’s going on in the world and stay sane. I never watched the news as a child, and even throughout the bulk of my adulthood ... right up until the Towers came down, and then I decided I had been foolish and, like many other Americans, started watching the news obsessively. And you know what I discovered? It’s just not good for you. Not conducive to your mental health (and, sometimes, not your physical health either). Somehow, we’ve designed the news to be depressing, and frightening, and rage-inducing: it imparts a sense of existential dread ... by design. Surely we can see that there’s something fundamentally wrong with this model. Surely it can’t be too radical a concept to want to be informed in a way that makes us laugh, even when we have to laugh through our tears. And study after study after study shows that viewers of “satirical” news shows are better informed than those who watch “real” news. And the only thing about that that continues to boggle my mind is that anyone is surprised by these findings. What are you more likely to remember: a barrage of facts spewed at you by a very serious person in a serious suit, or a real zinger that simultaneously taught you something? Humour invests facts with a “stickiness” that raw regurgitation can never aspire to.
And so, for 30 years, I’ve been watching The Daily Show, along with all its spiritual successors, and it’s a huge part of the information that I gather every week for these Doom Reports. Every single week I have to restrain myself from exclusively sending you clip after clip from them just to spread the love. But some weeks, it’s practically impossible. Here’s just a sampling of what they have for us this week:
- Jon Stewart breaks down the “meritocracy” on Monday’s show.
- In this week’s “In My Opinion”, Leslie Jones enlightens us about how racism is alive and well (tragically).
Here’s hoping we get another 30 years.
Other things you need to know this week:
- For another take on the whole communism bullshit, see also this week’s Armageddon Update.
- The rightwing nutjobs seem to think they can convince America that you should have to show your passport to vote by pointing out that you need your driver’s license to use your Unlimited Pasta Pass at the Olive Garden. Besides the very real disconnect that a driver’s license is much easier to come by than a passport, Seth Meyers makes the compelling case that “unlimited pasta isn’t a constitutional right, you fucking bozos!” in Wednesday’s “A Closer Look” segment.
- The Even More News crew covers the pasta pass as well, in addition to the whole bizarre meltdown the nutjobs are having over The Odyssey. Best quote on that topic comes from SMN head writer Dave Bell (filling in for Katy Stoll), who, when talking about the nutjobs’ prediction that the Christopher Nolan blockbuster wouldn’t make any money going down in flames, notes “It’s like watching them fight the ocean, where you’re like: it doesn’t even know you’re there.”
- Another take on Lindsey Graham’s passing, this time from Gabe Sanchez on What Was That?.
- Have you ever wondered why your taxes keep going up but government services keep getting worse? Well, Garys Economics explains the reason (spoiler: it’s wealth inequalit
y— tax wealth not work!).
Where shall we go for our note of hope this week? Why, back to The Daily Show, of course.
About a year and a half ag
Sadly, Martin won, and turned out to be exactly the sort of useless establishment politician that I feared he’d be. If you need proof, take a look at how badly he bungled the DNC’s “autopsy report” for the 2024 election. Basically, any time you hear a politician say “we need to keep looking forward,” it means they’re trying to cover up how badly someone fucked up, which you’d instantly realize by looking backwards. It means that they’ve decided they utterl
But Wikler, rather than taking his defeat lying down, decided to write a book. His success was in Wisconsin, where he was state party chair. In 2018, Wisconsin had a Republican governor, a Republican supermajority in the legislature, and a 5-2 conservative state Supreme Court. Today, they have a Democratic governor, bare Republican majorities in the legislature, and a 4-3 liberal Supreme Court. And, while Wikler is quick to point out that he was only one member of a larger team, he oversaw that transition. The national DNC was not ready to win that hard, apparently, but, just in case they’ve changed their minds, his new book This is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy contains the blueprint.
So this week he sat down with Jon once again for another interview. And I thought he said some really trenchant things: about unrigging the system, about fixing the Supreme Court, about fixing all the gerrymanders. Perhaps it’s best summed up by this quote:
The pendulum swings in American politics. But what the right does is, when it swings their way, they catch it, and they grab it. And they don’t want to let it go. And you need to electrify the pendulum so that you cannot grab the thing and stop it from moving.Now if only the Democrats would start listening ...