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Jon Stewart cursed me out, Entertainment News
Jon Stewart,
daily show,
Stephen Colbert,
#cancelcolbert,
Comedy,
TV,
Television,
Editor's Picks,
Jon Stewart cursed me out, Entertainment News
Jon Stewart (Credit: AP/John Minchillo)
The furor about #CancelColbert revives a memory for me: the time that Jon
Stewart publicly cussed me out at “The Daily Show.” Ever since then,
I’ve wondered who gets to decide what’s funny — and who needs to get a
sense of humor.
This happened in April 2008, when I sat in the
studio audience of “The Daily Show.” I was a big fan of the way the show
used comedy to expose injustice; I was psyched to see Stewart in person
for the first time. But before the taping began, a comedian came out to
warm up the crowd.
To me, he seemed like a curious choice: This
white man told racist and misogynist jokes. He joked about greedy Jews,
and Caribbean women spitting before they cross the street. He singled
out people in the audience as his target: a married African-American
couple, and even a white lesbian in a wheelchair. It was their blackness
itself that he found funny, her lesbianism, her disability. (He
also picked on a white New Jersey family, but I’m originally from
Jersey, and we’re fair game — also, he didn’t pick on their whiteness.)
This
kind of humor warms me up in the wrong way. Since I was 6, I’ve dealt
with people telling jokes at my expense and expecting me to laugh: “Oh,
you know I’m just kidding!” At one job interview, they told me I was a
shoo-in, because one of the bosses had a thing for Asian women, ha-ha! I
know all about acting tolerant, friendly and forgiving, because it’s
social suicide to come off as humorless. I’ve given the benefit of the
doubt to all kinds of people who were clueless, or well intentioned,
whatever that means, or downright racist, so that I won’t sound like a
joyless harridan.
The mostly white audience laughed. Maybe they
found the routine agreeable and compelling; maybe they were trying to be
nice. They weren’t laughing because the jokes were witty, original or
successful at doing what “The Daily Show” (and “Colbert Report”) is
famous for: skewering and satirizing bigotry, to turn the joke on the
bigots. And the scapegoats also laughed. Maybe they were more tolerant,
friendly and forgiving than I was. But nobody should have to be that
tolerant. Nobody should have to make that judgment call, while the
straight white guy with the mic is disparaging you, and hundreds of
straight white people are laughing at you, expecting you to be a good
sport. Nobody should have to go home afterward, wondering if you had
truly been amused, or if you had felt pressured to behave that way, or
if you had felt too humiliated, too little, to mount your own
self-defense.
