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The Truthiness of Hasan Minhaj - Live long enough, and see yourself become the thing you parodied
(goodreason.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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I menan, the complaints leveled at Minhaj are fair. The (very, very few) points against the current daily show are fair. But they lost me at the part about Jon Stewart. From my recollection, watching the old daily shows is all laughs. I know the clapter thing, because literally every single daily show spin-off rests their entire show on it.
But that really wasn’t happening as often with the Stewart daily show. How much of the old daily show did this person watch before writing this article? I remember this not being a thing until the new era of the show/only a problem with the spin-offs. Is this author just thinking “daily show…clapter…” and then thinking back on the last 10 years of the show? Because go back and watch the Stewart days. The feel of the audience wasn’t as “this is MY sports game.” Maybe those feelings were fledgling, but they weren’t really happening as much back then.
As for the defense of the show, I agree with Jon Stewart. It’s not his fault that what he was saying was so true of cable news that people had nowhere else to turn but Comedy Central. He was a a comedian. You can’t rest the entire premise of your article on “comedians at least have to tell the truth when we want them to” and then pivot to “well, he was telling the truth. Therefore he’s news.” Get real.
Also, not for nothing, this was an article about hasan minhaj that talked about Jon Stewart for two thirds of it.
exactly. jon always poked fun at his own show as a way to illustrate the absolute mind-numbing ridiculousness of "news media". the daily show got me through the bush era with at least some semblance of sanity intact.
anyone who has not seen jon's crossfire takedown really should watch it.
Very much so. The bush-era daily show wasn’t news, it was release from the news. No actual News show would spend so much time talking about OTHER news shows…nor would they spend so much time making funny noises and photoshopping pictures. Saying, “I get my news from the daily show” doesn’t make the daily show news. It makes the state of the news and people’s choices for their sources of information a problem.
It was intentionally comic relief. People mistaking someone who knew what they were talking about while telling jokes for news isn’t a criticism of Jon Stewart, it’s a criticism of everything else.