#the opposition with jordan klepper

[stuffilikeontheinternet]

the opposition - lgbt acceptance plummets in america

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

Well here's a fucking Chortle headline for the roundup:

Holy fuck. I cannot believe that. Never for a moment did it cross my mind that this might happen. It's been nearly ten years since he left, and this never once seemed like a possibility.

I remember exactly when he left. I know it was announced in February 2015, because I was sitting in my bedroom in the city where I lived in 2015, where I'd moved to join their bigger and more impressive sports team and ended up just being miserable and lonely for two years because I did not have any of the skills required to fit in there. Anyway, it's fine, not the point of this post. The point is I know it was 2015 and I know it was February because I vividly remember sitting in that bedroom and scrolling on Facebook, and seeing a mock Valentine's Day card that said "May Jon Stewart be the only man to break your heart this week." And that's how I found out he'd announced he was leaving The Daily Show.

I know when he actually left, too. It was August 2015. Because Donald Trump walked down that fucking escalator in June 2015, and announced he'd be running for president. I remember watching The Daily Show that night, and Jon Stewart, incredibly pleased at the comedy gold mine that was about to befall all political comedians, looked into the camera and said to Donald Trump: "Thank you for making my last six weeks the best six weeks." Then he stayed on for six more weeks and made Trump jokes every night, then he left, and the world immediately ended. Looking back with a bit of perspective, Jon Stewart really did happen leave the show right as the Western world was on a precipice of having the norms as we thought we knew them all crumble at once. I'm thinking of that timeline that says 2000-2015=nostalgia, 2016-2019=2016, 2020-present=plague. Those are pretty much my life's eras. And Jon Stewart was there for a hell of a lot of that first one. (Not actually the first era of my life, there is also 90s=childhood, but I'm pretty sure everything was fine then, right?)

It's a bit weird to me now to see Jon Stewart as having an individual career, if that makes any sense at all. If you'd asked me in 2009 who my favourite comedians were, it wouldn't have occurred to me to say Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, even though I watched them both every night and loved those shows. I hardly even though of those as things that people had to make by being comedians and writers. They were just fixtures. Part of the landscape. I was so confused when he left the show, I didn't think it could exist without him. It didn't really feel like television could exist without Jon Stewart coming on at the end of the night. I remember learning some time ago about Marc Maron's feud with Jon Stewart over their days on the comedy circuit, and that was so weird. Jon Stewart didn't have days on the comedy circuit. He didn't have a career you could object to or admire, or opinions you could agree with or disagree with. He was just a fixture in the landscape.

I remember the first time I saw Jon Stewart. I think it was probably 2006, maybe 2005. I was really into Rick Mercer, this Canadian comedian who did TV shows where he made fun of the news. My mother put on a TV show, pointed to the guy behind the desk, and said, "That's Jon Stewart, he's like an American Rick Mercer." It only occurred to me relatively recently how funny it is to call Jon Stewart "an American Rick Mercer". But anyway, I watched that episode with my mom and then I kept doing that every night for many years.

I remember watching his final Daily Show episode with my mother, in August 2015. Bruce Springsteen came on live and played him out. My mother and I both got fairly emotional.

I kept watching The Daily Show for a long time after Jon Stewart left. I even followed a lot of the similar spinoff shows by its correspondents. I watched Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, and The Opposition with Jordan Klepper, and Larry Wilmore's The Nightly Show, and Hasan Minhaj's Patriot Act, and Michelle Wolf's The Break. Obviously, I followed John Oliver to Last Week Tonight (and would also if necessary follow him to the ends of the Earth, but that's beside the point).

I quite like Trevor Noah too; when he took over the show I read his autobiography and watched his stand-up specials and the documentary about him. I even saw him live in 2019. So I wasn't one of those people saying the show could never recover from Jon Stewart leaving. I watched a lot of the Trevor Noah years, and only dropped off from following it so closely fairly recently. It was around 2022, I think, when I just stopped keeping up with it. I had so much Britcom going on, and the world was so fucking depressing, getting all my news from actual news sites (as everyone should always always do, do not get your news from comedians, use political comedy as a way to lighten the mood of the regular news that you should first get from actual journalists, for the love of God please do not let the industry of actual journalism be steamrolled by entertainment) was stressful enough and I didn't want to keep having this other way of going over it.

So, those are a few disjointed memories that came into my mind when I saw that story this week. Here's another memory: I remember reading an interview with Jon Stewart from just after he left The Daily Show, in which he was asked if he would ever watch Fox News again. He replied that if he were ever in some post-apocalyptic scenario where Fox News was the only way to find out where to find vital life-saving information, he still wouldn't watch it. Because doing that job that required him to watch so much Fox News had destroyed him mentally and he could not wait to never ever ever ever ever do it again.

I was one of those people, after he left, saying, "I get it, it's high-pressure and difficult, I see why he wants to move on and have a break. But I would pay to have Jon Stewart just broadcast once a month in his sweatpants from his living room couch. He can't just be gone. He needs to keep telling us about the news, what will we do without him?"

We did do without him for nine years, and the world we thought we knew has crumbled around us in about twenty-five different ways since then, and I have absolutely no idea how the fuck Jon Stewart could fit into the landscape as it exists today. Like. I don't know what to do with this information. It wasn't on my radar. It's like finding out they're rebooting Buffy with the entire original cast and writing crew. Or if the girl I had a crush on from the ages of 9 to 14 showed up and told me she was in love with me. Of course it's what I wanted, but... what? Really? Why? Why now? Do I even still want this? You mean everything pre-2016 wasn't just a dream and we still technically exist in the same world as that one and the things in it are still out there and could just come back?

...There are people like @lastweeksshirttonight who actually know things about the US late-night comedy show scene, who have always understood that Jon Stewart is a person with a backstory who entered and then left an industry that also had a backstory and those things affected each other and this will have a significant effect on the ecosystem. Those people will have intelligent takes on what's happening right now. But I do not. Jon Stewart was on TV when I was in high school. He can't be on TV now because I am no longer in high school (even though I was 24 when he left in 2015). What the fuck?

[dykebeckett]

honestly love watching the jordan klepper fingers the pulse pieces on the daily show because I am so fascinated by maga people. like WHAT is going on in your head I have to know how can you say a thing and then immediately say the opposite thing and be smiling the whole time!!!! it’s so interesting

[baking-accident]

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no context the opposition with jordan klepper

[scoobydoozombieisland1998]

learning more about infowars makes me so sad that jordan kleppers the opposition got cancelled so early

[mintlimeginger]

Adventure Time is the Daily Show of cartoons and I will not be explaining this further

[stephencolbore]

Disney Adds a New Character to Aladdin Live Action Movie

[1outside]

To figure out what Jon Stewart doesn’t know about...go here.

[goshlyman]

Various Jordan Klepper photos. Top two are my favorites.

[jawitch-blog]

I love this show, they use my humor

[stuffilikeontheinternet]

the opposition with jordan klepper - can climate change save these crab dicks?

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

I watched the first episode in the new season of Ted Lasso, and it’s all right. The whole show is all right. That might not be fair to say, as throughout the first two seasons, the show had flashes of being much better than all right, and I guess it still has the potential to do that, though I’m not hugely optimistic about that getting fulfilled. We’ll see, though. I still plan to watch all of season 3.

That got me thinking about what other non-Britcom comedy shows I like. I decided to make a list of my ten favourites of those, but then I decided that’s too broad a scope for only ten, so I narrowed it a bit. Down to my ten favourite fictional American comedy shows from the twenty-first century. So I get to leave out Canadian shows like Letterkenny and Schitt’s Creek, and the amazing Australian show Utopia(/Dreamland), and shows from a previous era like Cheers and M*A*S*H. They’re also listed in alphabetical order, because narrowing it down to ten was hard enough and ranking them would be even harder, though it’s probably accurate to put 30 Rock in first place.

1. 30 Rock

2. Archer

3. Arrested Development

4. Bojack Horseman

5. Brooklyn Nine Nine

6. Community

7. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

8. Flight of the Conchords

9. Parks and Rec

10. The Good Place

Honourable mentions (aka copout that lets me take the shows I had difficulty cutting from the list and include them anyway): Bob’s Burgers, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Party Down, Good News, Portlandia, about 58% of everything South Park’s ever made

Opinion that was once unpopular but probably isn’t anymore: The Office (US) is fine. It’s a good show, but I don’t understand why anyone would count it among the best comedy shows. I’ve seen every episode of it at least a couple of times, I actually used to re-watch it fairly often. But I’ve also eaten a lot of rice in my life, I still wouldn’t think to add rice to a list of my favourite foods.

Bonus list: my favourite Daily Show-like shows, fronted by someone who was once on The Daily Show - and this one I will put in order.

1. Last Week Tonight

2. The Colbert Report

3. Full Frontal with Samantha Bee

4. The Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj

5. The Opposition with Jordan Klepper

Jon Stewart isn’t quite perfect, but he did spawn a hell of a generation.

[comedycentral]

The day The Opposition has prepared for is finally here.

[this-is-a-witty-url]

The Opposition with Jordan Klepper | 09.28.2017

[atomic-coleslaw-blog]

Me to my roommate: Jordan Klepper's "The Opposition" is just Colbert Report 2.0 without Stephen which makes it 20% less funny. Who knows if Klepper can really pull his own weight when every thing he says is written in the same way as colbert's character. and anyway no one can replace the king so why even try. plus its in the same time slot as the Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore was which was a really new, creative, important show that should not have been cancelled so comedy central can give another white guy a late night show

my roommate: so are you gonna watch it?

me: yah bitch I've been missing colbert since 2015

[513portfolio]

The Opposition with Jordan Klepper //  Comedy Central