The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are both programmed on our DVR machine at home. I think that these are two of the best shows currently on TV because they are both somehow able to simultaneously be irreverent & hysterically funny and also thought provoking & provide actual information.
The Inquirer piece notes how Stewart and the show had to deal with the horrible events at Virginia Tech last week:
So what's a fake anchorman to do? Find something else to be funny about.
"I will do what I always do when faced with something that is that powerfully damaging to the emotional core," Stewart said at the top of Monday's show. "I will begin to repress it, and swallow it . . . so let's move on, as if the world was OK."
"The main thing is to overcome your own sense of gloom," Stewart said the next day from his Manhattan office. The New Jersey native brings his stand-up comedy act to the Tower Theater in Upper Darby for two shows Friday.
"Our saving grace is that we're not the news, so we have no obligation to be the news. Our job is comedy, though the foundation of a lot of what we do is not particularly lighthearted. And it's not that horrible situations cannot make for something satirical or absurd. It's just that in the middle of the immediacy of something like this, you're fighting your own nausea."
I'm anticipating that the Daily Show coverage of the 2008 Election will be appropriately over-the-top given the over-the-top personalities involved in the election...but, that will also mean that Stewart's regular spot-light upon the incompetence of the Bush administration will be coming to an end.
Though the sitting president is Stewart's most frequent comic target, the satirist says he won't miss Bush when he leaves office. "People used to say, 'When Clinton goes, what are you going to do without him?' I have complete faith in the continued absurdity of whatever's going on.
"And besides that, I look forward to deconstructing someone else's game. At a certain point there's no more surprises. You know [the Bush administration is] going to come out and say the opposite of what most people believe reality to be as adamantly as they possibly can. . . . And I'm pretty much done with that. I'm ready to move on to another form of deception."
Well, I guess I won't have to miss it after all...
No comments:
Post a Comment