News Satire Roundup: October 8th

Sunday, October 8 – The opening segment was really scattered, covering Trump’s toolish pronunciation Puerto Rico, Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment allegations, the administration removing the birth control mandate from healthcare, Rex Tillerson (possibly) calling Trump a moron, and Trump’s ominous “calm before the storm” comment, and those were just the highlights.  Excellent main story on Confederate statues.  Even though I already knew a lot of the information, like how most statues went up during the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras, not after the Civil War, John’s explanations were really clear and well-stated.  In response to the “you’re erasing our history!” argument, I especially liked his statement that public statues aren’t how we preserve history, they’re how we glorify it; a monument can’t be neutral.  And his end-of-show suggestions for alternate statues in various Southern states were great!

No Daily Show this week.  I know it wasn’t too long ago that I brought up how much I appreciate the way Trevor covers stories about mass shootings and gun control (in looking at how his nationality informs his commentary and jokes,) but in light of the events of last week, I want to look at it more thoroughly.  Though not as often as police shootings, Trevor has had occasion to cover way more mass shootings than one would think possible in just a little over two years on the show.  In looking at this horrific, uniquely American problem, Trevor brings a lot of thoughtful insight to the conversation.

As I said in that other post, the fact that Trevor isn’t from America aids these stories quite a bit.  I remember people being skeptical of his ability in this regard early on, hearing suggestions that, as an immigrant, Trevor “doesn’t have a horse in that race” and wouldn’t be able to summon the necessary care/outrage/what-have-you into an awful occurrence like this.  But Trevor’s relative-newcomer perspective allows him to simply hold out his hands and say, “How in the world does this continue to happen and the fallout continue to play out this way?  I don’t understand it.”  Every time, it’s a heavy reminder that mass shootings like this don’t happen anywhere else in the world, that for all its touting of being a country that has it all together, America has deep-rooted problems that it’s almost willfully baked into its fabric, problems that other countries have solved despite America insisting that there’s nothing that can be done (I was very impressed with Trevor’s recent observation that Americans talk about mass shootings as if they were natural disasters, as inevitable as they are impossible to prevent.)

So too, he finds America’s gun culture baffling, hammering home not only how unusual America’s adherence to guns is, but also the horrible way politicians prioritize gun rights over human lives, despite overwhelming constituent support for reasonable safety measures.  Over his time so far on the show, Trevor has come up with numerous comparisons to highlight how bizarre and counterintuitive America’s gun debate is.  With last week’s shooting, he touched on the insanity of politicians urging that now is clearly the time to be talking about hotel safety, he boggled at how Sean Hannity stuck to his delusional “good guy with a gun” fantasy despite the many factors that would have made it impossible in Las Vegas, and he brought up a great analogy for the insistence that “now is not the time” to talk about gun legislation.  Again, as with the show’s coverage of police shootings, it’s terrible that Trevor has had to deliver these stories with such frequency, but he gives them the thought, gravity, and emotional response that they deserve every time.