Jon Stewart
My new post on Politics Daily / Woman Up:
Newspapers are hanging on for dear life. Comedians, meanwhile, are cleaning up. In fact, one is a now the junior senator from Minnesota.
For many Americans, “The Daily Show,” hosted by satirist Jon Stewart, has supplanted the evening news. And this year The Onion, a site that is 100 percent parody, won a Peabody Award for its online send-up of cable-TV news. One-time sportscaster Keith Olbermann brings attitude aplenty to his MSNBC show, “Countdown.”
They say things. They’re not afraid. You might call them modern-day court jesters. From wikipedia: Jesters could give bad news to the King that no-one else would dare deliver. The best example of this is in 1340, when the French fleet was destroyed at the Battle of Sluys by the English. Phillippe VI’s jester told him the English sailors “don’t even have the guts to jump into the water like our brave French.”
With a few adjustments, that quote could have been lifted from the script of “The Daily Show.”
Jesters delivered bad news, and we’ve had an awful lot of bad news this decade, starting with 9/11. And a few months ago, Vanguard founder John Bogle said this was the worst bear market he’d ever seen.
Bogle is 80 years old. Yikes.
Gallows humor has always gone hand-in-hand with hard times, but now we’re witnessing something new…
Read the rest on AOL. It’s the Comedy, Stupid.
