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Jon Stewart is in the middle of the best book promotion tour ever, and he hardly even talks about the book.
By now you've probably heard about Jon Stewart's appearance on CNN's Crossfire, possibly via his own recap on The Daily Show. Tonight he'll be on 60 Minutes. (He's also made the cover of the Rolling Stone and hit the Washington Post and New York Times.)
He's even been on C-Span's American Perspectives show (Oct 23 show RealVideo is now online).
In almost all cases (particularly on TV), instead of promoting his book, he's practically biting the hand that feeds him, personally taking the news organizations to task for uncritically letting each side give its take on things rather than pushing tough questions and giving intelligent analysis. And he never lets them forget that while his show is getting attention for intelligent news, it's merely a "fake news" show, and the "real news" shows are failing us.
I watched him on C-Span last night, and it was a very strange experience. First of all, seeing Jon Stewart on C-Span in the first place. C-Span is known more for boring talking heads than for jokes and occasional profanity; every once in a while they'd put a message across the bottom of the screen saying that "portions of this program contain language that may offend some viewers". Plus, the entire studio audience in this show was news people. They all either were targets of Stewart's complaints about the state of news today, or corporate affiliates with the targets, or were at least hyper-aware of the state of the industry in a way that the rest of us outside that industry can never be. So the on-screen laughter had a different quality to it from our laughs at home.
I also noticed that Stewart's humor is reminiscent of Dennis Miller's (before Miller went way conservative); both expect the audience to come in with a certain amount of knowledge, and aren't afraid to go over the heads of part of their audience. And The Daily Show seems somewhat inspired by SNL's Weekend Update, of which Miller was one of the better hosts because of that expectation of audience intelligence.
Too bad I can't get Comedy Central anymore. I rarely get to watch The Daily Show these days.
Update: A nice person has made the 60 Minutes clip available online.
Update 2: Added RealVideo link for the C-Span show.
By now you've probably heard about Jon Stewart's appearance on CNN's Crossfire, possibly via his own recap on The Daily Show. Tonight he'll be on 60 Minutes. (He's also made the cover of the Rolling Stone and hit the Washington Post and New York Times.)
He's even been on C-Span's American Perspectives show (Oct 23 show RealVideo is now online).
In almost all cases (particularly on TV), instead of promoting his book, he's practically biting the hand that feeds him, personally taking the news organizations to task for uncritically letting each side give its take on things rather than pushing tough questions and giving intelligent analysis. And he never lets them forget that while his show is getting attention for intelligent news, it's merely a "fake news" show, and the "real news" shows are failing us.
I watched him on C-Span last night, and it was a very strange experience. First of all, seeing Jon Stewart on C-Span in the first place. C-Span is known more for boring talking heads than for jokes and occasional profanity; every once in a while they'd put a message across the bottom of the screen saying that "portions of this program contain language that may offend some viewers". Plus, the entire studio audience in this show was news people. They all either were targets of Stewart's complaints about the state of news today, or corporate affiliates with the targets, or were at least hyper-aware of the state of the industry in a way that the rest of us outside that industry can never be. So the on-screen laughter had a different quality to it from our laughs at home.
I also noticed that Stewart's humor is reminiscent of Dennis Miller's (before Miller went way conservative); both expect the audience to come in with a certain amount of knowledge, and aren't afraid to go over the heads of part of their audience. And The Daily Show seems somewhat inspired by SNL's Weekend Update, of which Miller was one of the better hosts because of that expectation of audience intelligence.
Too bad I can't get Comedy Central anymore. I rarely get to watch The Daily Show these days.
Update: A nice person has made the 60 Minutes clip available online.
Update 2: Added RealVideo link for the C-Span show.