WebProNews

Tag: Daily Show

  • Samantha Bee: Late Night Show to Debut Next Month

    Samantha Bee will debut her new late-night satirical talk show, set to air on TBS, on February 8. Full Frontal With Samantha Bee will be the only late night show hosted by a woman. Does she have what it takes to compete in late-night ratings war?

    A former correspondent on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, Samantha Bee plans to lean heavily into the big news issues, relying on satire to fuel her humor. One of her first on-air interviews involves a female veteran as she takes on the VA.

    Her interviewee lost a foot and got a prosthetic, although it was made for a man. Samantha Bee learns there aren’t any words for female body parts in the computer system, and that they barely offer any OB/GYN services.

    “So, the VA is the one place you can’t find a woman’s vagina online,” Samantha Bee deadpans. This prompts the official to respond, “We’re on the faster side of slow.”

    If you liked the humor on the Daily Show, you will no doubt enjoy Full Frontal With Samantha Bee. That’s something she’s proud to admit.

    “It’s natural,” Samantha Bee said on Thursday at the winter Television Critics Association gathering. “I loved doing that so much. But we’re expanding that world and going to mix up the styles and evolve the medium.”

    Bee knows she will soon be the exception to the late-night rule. That isn’t something she fears, however, but she says hers won’t be a “woman’s show.”

    “It makes complete sense to me that it would be part of the conversation. Women’s issues are completely important to me. But it’s not going to be the only thing we talk about on the show,” she says.

    Will you be tuning in to check out Samantha Bee when her new show–Full Frontal With Samantha Bee–debuts on TBS on February 8? Do you think she stands a chance against the late night men?

  • Jon Stewart Discusses Humor and Disbelief in ‘Rosewater’

    Jon Stewart took a three-month hiatus from filming The Daily Show to film Rosewater in Jordan.

    Rosewater is a biopic about Maziar Bahari, an Iranian-Canadian reporter imprisoned and tortured while covering the Iran presidential election and the protesting that followed the results, which kept President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in control. The film marks Stewart’s directorial debut. Stewart also adapted the screenplay based on Bahari’s memoirs, Then They Came for Me.

    Bahari became incarcerated after shooting news videos of the protesters. Besides beating and torturing him, Bahari’s captors accused him of being a spy. They used a Daily Show video he starred in as proof. When asked by NPR about how Stewart felt about his satire being used as evidence to torture someone, he responded by saying, “It’s so surreal and it’s so absurd that it’s hard to imagine it as not farce.”

    Stewart was then specifically asked about the piece that Bahari filmed for the Daily Show. “I always assumed that somewhere one of our bits would be used like that — I just didn’t think it would be this one. I think it just affirms that sense that you always have that you cannot outsmart crazy. You can’t ever imagine how someone might weaponize idiocy.”

    Rosewater gets its name from Bahari’s anonymous Iranian interrogator, who was nicknamed “Mr.Rosewater” for his cologne. Despite the horrible 118-day ordeal, Stewart and Bahari do find some humor in the situation.

    Bahari shared with the Washington Post an anecdote from the incident, which makes it in the movie. Rosewater makes Bahari call his wife, Paola, because he wants her to stop talking publicly about her negative feelings towards Iran. In the film, Stewart added that Rosewater told Bahari to dial 9. He said that “when the joke lands, I always feel really wonderful.” In actuality, Bahari shared that Rosewater made calls using a scratch-card “to get the cheaper minutes.”

    Fans of the Daily Show may expect a political satire from Stewart, but that isn’t the case with Rosewater. A Time review described it as this:

    The virtue of this movie is its commitment to political ambiguity and emotional truth. If you expect a Jon Stewart film to sputter with cogent rage, as Stewart often does on TV, you will be disappointed. This film could be the work of Stewart’s more serious alter ego, Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz (his real name). Though not really a comedy, Rosewater is a demonstration of the creed behind The Daily Show: belief in the crucial need for impious wit against entrenched power. The freedom of the press is also the freedom to depress, and to inspire.

    Rosewater stars Gael Garcia Bernal as Bahari. It’s now playing nationwide.

  • Jon Stewart Says America’s Enemies Are Not the X-Men

    Comedian and Daily Show host Jon Stewart has a knack for simplifying things. His show is known for taking the hype and drama spun by the 24-hour “news” networks and reducing it to snips and bites that reveal what’s really going on. Jon Stewart is the kid who exposed the emperor as being naked, but that kid grew up to get a TV show.

    Stewart took a break from that show back in the summer of of 2013 to go film a movie. His hiatus left John Oliver in the big chair on the Daily Show set for Comedy Central, which went on to launch Oliver’s own show, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on HBO.

    It is that film that Stewart made in his eight-week absence from his own show that is getting attention now. It is called Rosewater, and it is based on the memoir Then They Came for Me by Maziar Bahari and Aimee Molloy. After participating in an interview on The Daily Show in 2009 where he answered questions about the presidential election in Iran, Bahari was arrested and imprisoned for four months because of that interview on Stewart’s show. He was brutally interrogated by a man Bahari came to call Rosewater.

    Bahari never saw his torturer. He would be blindfolded every time he was interrogated. But the man torturing him smelled like rosewater. Yet, in the film, Rosewater is not portrayed as some faceless representation of evil, but as a human. He is seen having a phone conversation with his wife. He has to deal with a pain in the ass boss.

    Stewart spoke to Salon about his treatment of this torturer in the film. He says he deliberately chose to present Rosewater as human.

    “Yes. Very much so. That was important for many different reasons. One is, they are human beings. So why not present them as such? You know, they’re not the X-Men. They’re not monsters, and if you’re going to battle something effectively, then to see it in a …”

    Stewart trails off into a more specific application of his point. Not seeing our enemies as human is an American habit that does not serve America well.

    “We have a tendency in this country, whether it be Ebola or ISIS, that whatever is the new threat becomes the new super-threat. It’s not a bug, it’s a superbug! It’s not a predator, it’s a super-predator! It’s this thing … We can’t bring prisoners from Guantánamo here because, for God’s sake, Magneto could break out of that cell. And what are we going to do then? They’ll wreak havoc throughout the land!”

    Keeping with his general mission of deflating the hyperbole and rhetoric of what passes for “news channels” in America, Stewart feels that it is important for Americans to see things as they really are, not as Big Headline declares them to be.

    “The general conversation between Iran and America has been this: ‘You are the axis of evil!’ … “Well, you’re the great Satan!” … So the bar has been set relatively low as far as nuance goes.”

    Seeing our enemies as human is not so much about sympathizing as it is about realizing that they are beatable. And that they are not all the same, not some faceless mass of a society that all have the same opinion on topics like democracy and the West in general.

    “More importantly, I wanted to portray not so much even his interrogator in that way, but that element of Iranian society, those kids and that [anti-Ahmadinejad, pro-democracy] movement as something that Westerners might look at and go, ‘Oh, you know, I had a sense of this culture as monolithic, but that’s very relatable.’ And it’s not exaggerated, it’s not unreal. That’s what is there.”

    Despite his even-handed treatment of the subject, Stewart — who is Jewish — is being accused by Iran of serving Zionist interests. In Iran, the presidential election of 2009 is called “the American-Israeli sedition of 2009.”

    “Jon has been directing an ultra-formulaic movie commissioned by his masters. Jon is filming Rosewater, the story of the American-Israeli sedition in 2009,” said an Iranian state TV report on Stewart’s film.

  • Jon Stewart NFL Rant A Thing Of Epic Beauty

    It can be hard to inject humor the right way into topics that are gravely serious. Somehow Jon Stewart manages to do this, and do it better than most.

    On Wednesday, Stewart put the embattled NFL organization on blast during a segment of his popular Comedy Central program The Daily Show.

    “The National Football League used to have a good name,” quipped Stewart in reference to the league’s reputation suffering severe damage over the past few weeks.

    Much of the backlash is due in large part to their poor handling of NFL players who’ve either been guilty of or stand accused of acts of domestic violence.

    Of course, it must be pointed out that the majority of ongoing criticisms against the NFL and its handling of player behavior existed long before the explosive scandal involving former Baltimore Ravens player Ray Rice.

    Stewart said the flip-flopping by the NFL organization on the treatment of players like Rice and Greg Hardy of the Carolina Panthers demonstrates “the kind of firm decision-making we’ve come to expect from people who don’t know what the f**k they’re doing.”

    Stewart also pointed out that, not too surprisingly, the reversal in the decision on the part of the Vikings had a large part to do with the response of some of the league’s sponsors. Anheuser-Busch came out with a strongly worded response to the NFL’s handling of domestic abuse problems.


    More ABC news videos | Latest world news

    To be blunt, the money is being threatened and we all know few things will make a large organization move to do the right thing quite like lost revenue.

    As for Sean Hannity’s comment that the response to the Adrian Peterson child abuse allegations would somehow snowball into laws forcing political correctness on parents, Stewart pointed out that Hannity’s “special brand of spiteful ignorance would always be legal”.

    Watch Jon Stewart’s response to the ongoing NFL scandal in the Youtube video below:

  • Hillary Clinton Drops Blatant Hints About Running

    Ordinarily, when Hillary Clinton is being asked about her plans to run for president in 2016, she is very coy about the whole thing. She pivots effortlessly from talk of whether she will run or not to the kinds of problems that she would address if she, in fact, were President. And she does so without you seeing the sleight of hand.

    Hillary hates the media. They have raked her over the coals many times, and she does not trust anyone to get what she says right or not twist her words. But Hillary let her guard down with Jon Stewart. He’s not one of them.

    Hillary recently stopped by The Daily Show to push her new book, “Hard Choices”. Right from the top of the interview segment, Stewart got the ball rolling.

    “I think I speak for everybody when I say, ‘No one cares.’ They just want to know if you are running for President.”

    “Jon, I was going to make an announcement, but you kind of spoiled it,” Clinton responded with a laugh.

    Stewart then proceeded to go through a series of questions with Hillary, with the comic intent of getting her to reveal if she was running. These included:

    Q: Do you like commuting to work, or do you like a home office?
    A: Home office.

    Q: Do you have a favorite shape for that home office? Would you like it to have corners or not to have corners?
    A: I think the world is so complicated, the fewer corners you have, the better.

    Q: Do you enjoy constant, non-stop criticism?
    A: It sort of comes with the territory.

    Stewart then stated, “It sounds to me like you have just declared that you are running for President.”

    Clinton said that a “cottage industry” has sprung up around criticizing and pursuing her. Clinton has caught a lot of flack for how she worded an answer to one person and saying that she and Bill Clinton were “dead broke” when they left the White House in 2000.

    Image via YouTube

  • Jon Stewart Returns to “The Daily Show”

    What’s scarier than seeing Miley Cyrus act sexually inappropriate with a foam finger at the MTV VMAs? Seeing a 50-year-old man in a tank top impersonate that act. As disturbing as it had to be for Jon Stewart’s coworkers to see that up close and personal, Stewart made his return to Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” in hilarious fashion.

    After taking a 12-week hiatus from “The Daily Show” to work on his personal project “Rosewater,” Stewart returned to his post on Tuesday night, relieving temporary replacement John Oliver from his duties. While “Daily Show” fans had a lot of love for Oliver, there is no doubt they were ready for Stewart’s return.

    Once Stewart was able to find his old persona in the dressing room and not those of Cyrus and Adolf Hitler, he returned to the set to an enthusiastic audience. “I’ve missed you so much–you don’t know what it’s like out there in the real world. Nobody applauds every stupid f****** thing you do!” Stewart told his audience.

    After all of the obligatory “Stewart’s return” comments were made, Stewart launched into the meat of the show, which dealt with the conflict with Syria. Even though Stewart made a few jokes about the situation, it was a struggle for the funny man to keep things light considering the seriousness of the situation. “I came back to a dark, dark place,” Stewart said. “We have to bomb Syria because we’re in 7th grade, and the red line that they’ve crossed is actually a d–k-measuring ribbon.” Stewart followed up his comments with a straight-laced interview with the Jordan United Nations Refugee Agency head, Andrew Harper.

    While the show may have been a little more serious than some fans of the mock news show expected for Stewart’s first night back, the show saw a huge ratings boost with his return. The show had just over 2 million viewers on Tuesday night, which was an increase of 24 percent over the average for the year.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvokfgdt7jM

    Image via YouTube

  • Sheryl Sandberg Talks Women and Leadership on The Daily Show

    Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg dropped by The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Wednesday night to promote her new book Lean In. The conversation mostly focused on her message in Lean In of equality in the workplace and changing how we think about successful women.

    “The blunt truth: men still run the world…and I’m not sure that’s going that well,” said Sandberg of her desire to write the book.

    She goes on to discuss the barriers women still have, and the “plateau” that exists near the top.

    “We’re held back by sexism, discrimination, and terrible public policy..but we’re also held back by the stereotypes. You know, go to a playground this weekend and you’ll hear little girls called “bossy.” You won’t hear little boys called bossy, because we expect boys to be assertive. Lean In is trying to change that. Instead of calling our girls bossy we should say ‘my daughter has executive leadership skills.”

    Check out part 1:

    And part 2:

    [via The Daily Show]

  • Colbert Report & The Daily Show Do the Harlem Shake

    I know, I know. We’re all sick of the Harlem Shake. Like any semi-enjoyable thing, the Internet has run it into the ground. There’s no need to mourn it. What was created by the internet must eventually be destroyed by the internet. I think that’s some sort of cosmic law.

    But before we say goodbye, for good, I must inform you that both The Colbert Report and The Daily Show did their own versions of the craze.

    First, Colbert:

    And then Jon Stewart gives a valiant, if completely unsuccessful attempt at it:

  • Steve Jobs Remembered By Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart

    Adding to the giant list of tech industry people, celebrities, politicians, athletes and everyday Apple users who have publicly expressed their condolences and memories of the late Steve Jobs – the Comedy Central nightly news block has now weighed in.

    On last night’s Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert gave his respects to Jobs with a bit that traced his excitement over various Apple products through the years.

    He closes by remembering the brief communication that he had with Jobs, a short email following his appearance at the Grammy Awards. Check out Colbert saying goodbye to the icon with a rare break in character –

    As the show closed, Colbert also gave this simple iPhone-themed tribute to Jobs:

    On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart talked about his numerous interactions with Jobs, praising him for always being generous with his time. Stewart laments that the world lost Jobs way too soon, before we had time to extract a little more of his genius. Check it out:

    What do you think about these tributes? What are the best tributes to Jobs that you’ve seen in the past couple of days? Let us know in the comments.

  • Daily Show Defends Rick Perry, Calls Out Selective Editing Practices

    In this age of soundbites, it is becoming easier and easier to take things out of context. And with the popularity of YouTube, it’s becoming even easier to selectively edit video clips to suit your specific message. Though the practice is far from an issue of partisan politics (both sides use selective editing), this time, a Republican candidate for President became the target of selective editing.

    MSNBC’s Ed Schultz used a clip this week of Texas Governor Rick Perry giving a speech to supporters about the economic situation. In that clip, Perry refers to a “black cloud” hanging over America. On his show, The Ed Show, Schultz chose to stop the clip after that Perry utterance. He then went on to accuse the Governor of racism, saying that the “black cloud” he was referring to was President Obama.

    A couple seconds later in the clip, Perry says that the “black cloud” he is referring to is the national debt.

    Schultz later apologized for the error, saying “we did not present the full context of those statement, and we should have.”

    But the selective editing incident caught the attention of Jon Stewart, who on last night’s Daily Show tore into Schultz about his misuse of the video clip. The relevant part begins at about the 2:15 mark.

    Stewart then brings in correspondents John Oliver and Wyatt Cenac to discuss racially charged language in the American political landscape.

    This instance of selective editing reminded me of a video that went viral concerning a local news station taking a young boy’s comments out of context. CBS affiliate WBBM in Chicago showed a clip of a young African-American boy saying that he wants to have a gun when he grows up in order to frame a story about gun violence. They news station failed to play the follow comment from the child, that specified the reason for owning a gun in the future: because he wanted to be a police officer.

  • Jon Stewart Takes On Supreme Court Violent Video Game Ruling

    The internet has been buzzing about the recent Supreme Court decision that said it was unconstitutional to restrict the sale of graphically violent video games to minors. In a 7-2 vote, the SCOTUS struck down a California State law that would fine retailers $1,000 for distributing the mature games to children.

    Justice Antonin Scalia, in his majority opinion, argued that video games must be protected as free speech because of their status as art. This put them alongside things like books, film and music in the court’s eyes.

    Another part of Scalia’s argument was that there was no precedent for the restriction of violence to children in the same way that there was a restriction to sexual imagery like pornography. The ruling basically said that it is OK to sell violent imagery to kids, but not sexual imagery.

    This distinction has people talking, mostly about the hypocrisy of such a dichotomy. Why, in this country, do we demonize sex much more than violence? Are we a violent culture? Are our sexual sensibilities warped because of our puritanical beginnings? All of these questions were at the heart of Jon Stewart’s take on the SCOTUS ruling on last night’s episode of The Daily Show.

    Talking over footage from a recent Mortal Kombat game where a woman is pulled apart at the groin and disemboweled, Stewart points out the strange nature of the ruling.

    The U.S. Supreme Court determined seven to two that the State of California has no interest in restricting the sale of this game to children, but, if while being disemboweled this woman were to suffer perhaps a nip-slip – regulate away.

    Stewart also debuts a new game for Wii that looks promising. Check it out below –

    It seems as though people both agree and disagree with Stewart’s take on the SCOTUS decision. Check out these responses from Twitter –

    @AnneMurata
    Anne Murata    Supreme Court #FAIL: It’s OK for minors to purchase graphically violent video games that disembowel women, but no sex vids? #Sick 1 hour ago via web · powered by @socialditto

    @JTonWNES
    J.T. Murphy    For the record, I’m psychotically defensive of video games. Thus, one dumb statement can make even Jon Stewart forever dogshit in my eyes. 12 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto

    @JeremyDStanley
    Jeremy Stanley    Wholly disagree with Jon Stewart’s interpretation of the Supreme Court ruling on video games. Has he heard of the ESRB? 13 hours ago via Tweetbot for iPhone · powered by @socialditto

    @bobzuercher
    Bob Zuercher    Dear John Stewart: if you don’t want your kids to have violent video games – don’t buy them. Simple. 2 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto

    So what do you guys think about the SCOTUS ruling? Is it hypocritical to allow our kids violence but shield them from anything sexual? Let us know how you feel.