Thursday, August 6, 2015

remembrance of Daily Shows past

The inner tubes are full of memorial articles looking back at the reign, and the snarks, of Jon Stewart, who concludes his tenure today. But the article on the subject I want to draw your attention to is Rolling Stone's on the 25 best Daily Show correspondents - the other folks on the show. From Colbert and Oliver down to folks I'd never heard of because I wasn't watching back then, there's an appropriate clip provided for every one of them.

I'll admit that I often skip over the correspondent segments on the show. I find that the relentless stupid act of Jason Jones or Samantha Bee can get tiresome at times, though not always. But almost every single one of the clips chosen for this article is terrifically funny. If you only have time for one or two, I'd particularly recommend Al Madrigal on the Latino candidates in the 2016 presidential race, and Wyatt Cenac on the fraught topic of racist place-names. As with the women on the show, they say things that Stewart as a white male can't say without being paternalistic, and they say them in a tremendously funny way.

You can also see new host Trevor Noah's first appearance as a correspondent, which impressed me very much even at the time, and it goes back to a set of Frank DeCaro's movie reviews, which have the knack of amusing me even when I liked the movie that DeCaro panned.

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