Sunday, August 2
· Recap of the Week – Coronavirus updates
o John has some of the best Jared Kushner descriptions, such as looking like “he just emerged from a vat of Vaseline as a fully-formed hate mannequin.”
o Advice for Rep. Louie Gohmert – “‘I’m carrying a highly-infectious disease,’ is never news that needs to be delivered in person!”
o Ha, John compared wearing your mask on your chin to “putting a diaper around a baby’s ankles; you clearly don’t know how butts works!”
· And Now This – Steve Guttenberg riffs dog names
o As a dog lover and a sucker for a literary pun, I smiled at “Virginia Woof.”
· Main Story – Teaching the history of race in America
o The fact that George Washington owned his first slave when he was 11 years old is “so horrifying it’s kind of hard to know what to do with it” – also, a Black professor describing students discovering that Thomas Jefferson was “the R. Kelly of his day” was on point.
o Looking at one textbook that called slave labor “chores,” John likened that euphemism to calling Hitler “a best-selling author with a side hustle.”
o I appreciated that John acknowledged the experiences of Black kids in these classrooms – “It’s not just the history that hurts here. It’s how it makes you feel as you’re learning it.”
o Re: people learning about the Tulsa massacre for the first time, I loved John’s analogy asking us to imagine someone who’d never heard of dinosaurs before and suddenly learning about them and their subsequent extinction.
o Ending on several great lines – “The less you know about history, the easier it is to believe you’d always be on the right side of it.”
o “Ignoring the history you don’t like is not a victimless crime.”
o “History taught well teaches us how to improve the present. History taught poorly teaches us there’s nothing to improve.”
It’s wild to think that, before long, it will have been five months since The Daily Show first went remote. I think the show has done a fantastic job navigating the constraints of lockdown, and I’m glad that they’ve continued to do the responsible thing even as various places have reopened in recent months.
That first week of remote shows, the YouTube exclusives that were mainly extended “Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That” segments of coronavirus news, was rougher around the edges, and the show quickly stepped up its game, but I still liked them. I liked that the “guests” that week were just the correspondents video chatting with Trevor, doing bits but also just talking about how they were coping in quarantine. While unpolished, it was real, and I liked hearing them talk honestly about their feelings on COVID-19 and isolating.
Since then, like I said, much of the show’s more usual bag of tricks has returned, including graphics, interviews (that whole first week after the show came back following George Floyd’s murder, the interviews were off the charts,) correspondent pieces, fake ads, and more, with good video and sound quality overall. The lack of live audience no longer bothers me, and I enjoy seeing Trevor’s neverending collection of hoodies (as well as how long his hair has been getting in quarantine!) The other day, I was watching an old clip of the show and actually had a bit of an “oh yeah, that’s right” feeling when I saw Trevor in a suit behind the desk and heard the audience laughing.
One thing I’ve noticed that’s different about The Daily Social Distancing Show is an increase in silly cutaway gags that often involve cornier jokes than the show’s usual humor. Things like the “flashbacks” of Trevor attempting to make a mask out of a T-shirt or cutting to a tight shot of Trevor delivering some kind of confessional or call-out directly to the camera. And I like these moments a lot – to me, they’re reflective of that slightly-giddy quarantine mindset, leaning into the idea that, “Yes, this is what you find funny when it’s been ____ days since you’ve been in the same room as another human.” Although the show’s normal jokes are much funnier than these gags, I find them highly relatable on that level.
I can’t speak for the other late-night shows, but it feels like this show and Last Week Tonight have both been taking more weeks off since the start of all this, and I don’t begrudge them for it one bit. It can’t be easy to handle the logistics of putting these shows together remotely, and during such a wild, stressful time, I’m glad that these shows are taking time out to look after themselves. Stay strong, everybody! We’re lucky to have you!
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