Why Are We Such Asses?

do we feel entitled?

A short but not-so-sweet post today.

I was repelled by an episode of The Daily Show last night. I may have mentioned before that I personally think that Jon Stewart’s comedy has devolved since his show came back on the air. In a number of instances, he’s taken a news item that was negative, even tragic, and used it as a springboard for some comedic take. He’ll make disclaimers, but the bottom line is that such an occurrence should never be equated with a cheap laugh. And I would hope he knows better.

Last night, among other topics, he was discussing the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team’s win. He observed that it was the only thing lately that could have brought the entire country together. Even the MAGAs were happy. Stewart remarked that the right-wingers were politicizing the win, suggesting that somehow it represented “real” America. OK, so marginally acceptable so far. Then he turned to Desi Lydic, one of the other presenters on the show. Her segment starts at about 7:10 in the above-linked episode.

She appeared to be in an empty locker room, and viewers were apparently meant to think it was a locker room at the Olympics. She proceeded to do about ten minutes of obscene, repetitive riffing on the Canadian men’s hockey team’s loss. No congratulations to the Canadians for a good game, no consideration for their efforts, no smallest hint of sportsmanship. Just a prolonged rant to the effect of, “Eat this!”

Aside from the fact that the sheer, unimaginative vulgarity robbed the bit of any humor, I was just appalled at the lack of respect for the Canadians. To quote a line on Facebook about it today, “Canadians celebrate winning; Americans celebrate their opponents losing.” That’s the attitude last night, in a nutshell.

The fact that Stewart himself had criticized the MAGAs for being “dicks” and “sore winners” was meant to be a foil for Lydic’s comments, I guess, but I thought it was ineffective. At the end of Lydic’s rant, she revealed that she was not in Milan, but in a locker room at a fitness center, and she hadn’t watched the hockey match. If that was supposed to make her spewage look silly and take away the sting, it didn’t work. In fact, I think it made everything she said worse. How is any of that content supposed to add anything to the public discourse? I understand the concept of satire, and Lydic’s bit was obviously intended as such, but for my taste, it was just too stupid to be good satire. Instead of rapier wit, we got a brick.

And no mention of the women’s hockey team’s win, either. Nice.

Just goes to show that even TV that’s supposed to be liberal and clever can end up making us the ugly Americans. Again.

Addendum: As if I wasn’t disgusted enough by Lydic’s absurdity, then Stewart went on to start making fun of Punch, the little orphaned monkey in a zoo in Japan. Keepers had given him a stuffed toy, hoping he would bond with it and not spiral into a depression at losing his mother. Then he was rejected by the other occupants of his habitat, only recently gaining acceptance. When Stewart began to poke fun at him, I changed the channel. How low do you have to be to ridicule an orphaned baby animal? There’s absolutely nothing whatsoever that’s humorous about Punch’s situation.