On Wednesday night, Comedy Central host Larry Wilmore went to great lengths to promote the idea that calling rioters in Baltimore thugs was just a socially acceptable way of using the “n-word.” The Nightly Show comedian began is commentary by playing several edited clips of different people referring to the Baltimore rioters as thugs, including President Obama, which Wilmore took great offense to.
Comedy Central
By Scott Whitlock | April 29, 2015 | 5:27 PM EDT
Good Morning America co-host George Stephanopoulos, a former Bill Clinton operative, appeared on Tuesday's Daily Show and hedged on the scandal engulfing Hillary Clinton and her family's charitable foundation. Prompted by Jon Stewart, the co-host minimized, "This is a tough one. Because when you actually look at, look closely at it, he [Peter Schweizer] even says there is no evidence of any direct action taken on behalf of the donors."
By Jeffrey Meyer | April 23, 2015 | 12:06 PM EDT
In his first three months as host of the Nightly Show, Comedy Central’s Larry Wilmore has seen his audience down nearly 40% compared to the Colbert Report which occupied the same 11:30 p.m. time slot.
By Tom Johnson | April 19, 2015 | 12:12 PM EDT
According to Jon Stewart, cable news is so awful that Daily Show staffers who keep tabs on it are essentially “turd miners.” That said, Stewart believes that the most foul-smelling poop comes from Fox News.
In a Saturday profile in the left-wing British newspaper The Guardian, Stewart told writer Hadley Freeman that MSNBC is preferable to Fox “because [MSNBC isn’t] steeped in distortion and ignorance as a virtue. But they’re both relentless and built for 9/11. So, in the absence of such a catastrophic event, they take the nothing and amplify it and make it craziness.”
By Matthew Balan | April 16, 2015 | 12:58 PM EDT
Jon Stewart launched a rant against the news media on Wednesday's Daily Show for their mad dash after Hillary Clinton's "Scooby Van" as it arrived at a recent campaign stop in Iowa. Stewart mocked the running journalists, and likened them to five-year-olds chasing after an ice cream truck.
By Kyle Drennen | April 10, 2015 | 2:52 PM EDT
In an interview with Comedy Central's Nightly Show host Larry Wilmore on Friday's CBS This Morning, co-host Gayle King wondered if the controversy swirling around newly-named Daily Show host Trevor Noah was racially motivated: "So keep it a hundred about Trevor Noah....do you think this would have happened if he was white?...Because first he's, you know, 'Trevor Noah, Trevor Noah,' and then there's this controversy about his tweets."
By Mark Finkelstein | April 6, 2015 | 6:16 PM EDT
I hadn't before seen Will Leitch, the Deadspin creator who now writes on politics for Bloomberg, in action. But on today's With All Due Respect, I found him funny and affable.
Even so, he made one left-leaning assertion so absurd it was too much even for show host John Heilemann. Running parallel with the NCAA tourney, Bloomberg has been running a bracket of 64 non-presidential candidates. In the Final Four, Jon Stewart defeated the Pope and Tina Fey took out Warren Buffett. Asked to explain the results, Leitch alleged that Fey and Stewart have a "universality that maybe not everybody has, frankly including the Pope."
By Christian Toto | April 4, 2015 | 9:29 AM EDT
It looks like new Daily Show host Trevor Noah will survive his Twitter vetting. The South African comic took some heat immediately after getting the gig earlier this week. Social media users scoured his past tweets, finding a number of jokes targeting women and Jews. Comedy Central rushed to stand by its new hire, and it appears the Stewart-to-Noah baton pass will take place later in the year as scheduled.
Noah would never get in trouble merely for making gross remarks about Republicans.
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By Brent Bozell | and By Tim Graham | April 4, 2015 | 7:44 AM EDT
Comedy Central hosted another one of its vicious and disgusting celebrity “roasts” with Justin Bieber as the target. On the “pre-show” before the roast, unfunny comedian Jeffrey Ross arrived in a pope costume, accompanied by sexy “nuns” in black habits and fishnet stockings.
Red-carpet host Sarah Tiana introduced him as the “popemaster general” and gushed “you look amazing, you're going to be hilarious." To which Ross replied, "Bless you, Sarah, congratulations on all of your abortions."
By Scott Whitlock | April 3, 2015 | 12:25 PM EDT
A front-page article in Friday's New York Times almost entirely avoided new Daily Show anchor Trevor Noah's history of joking about Jews and Israel. Yet, the story by Norimitsu Onishi and Dave Itzkoff also tried to justify the attitude. In a single sentence, the writers minimized, "Few if any topics seem too delicate for him to make fun of – for better or worse, as illustrated by a controversy this week over some questionable jokes he made on Twitter about women and Jews."
Vox’s Ezra Klein: Comedy Central Hosts Noah, Wilmore Well-Suited For Era of Race-Conscious ‘Post-Obama Liberalism’
By Tom Johnson | April 2, 2015 | 2:08 PM EDT Larry Wilmore and Trevor Noah are first-rate comedians, but beyond that, argues Klein, Comedy Central’s choice of two black hosts to succeed Stephen Colbert and (eventually) Jon Stewart was an extremely smart business move.
Noah and Wilmore have a “particular skill for limning America's complicated, and often infuriating, racial politics,” writes Klein, “and their takeover is a recognition of one of the lessons of Obama's presidency: American politics isn't moving past race. It's moving into it. And so, too, is the news business…[I]n the Obama years, attitudes toward politics have begun driving attitudes toward race. The result is that racial controversies are a bigger part of American politics right now than they were before Obama's election.”
By Scott Whitlock | April 1, 2015 | 12:16 PM EDT
All three networks on Wednesday rushed to defend Trevor Noah, the newly announced Daily Show host who has been attacked for making anti-Jewish, anti-Israel comments. ABC's Good Morning America avoided quoting the tweets. Instead, George Stephanopoulos summarized that Noah is "in the hot seat within online critics saying some of his tweets are sexist and anti-Semitic."