News Satire Roundup: April 14th

Sunday, April 14 – More on Brexit; responding to a dumb “Independence Day” reveler, I liked John’s plan for the U.K. not to pull out of the EU but allow Leave advocates to say they have.  We also covered Julian Assange’s arrest, touching on his gross behavior at the embassy but also exploring the implications his arrest may have on journalistic freedom.  After a quick And Now This of newscasters saying hugely inappropriate things, it was onto the main story, an update on the opioid crisis.  Specifically, John looked at the Sackler family’s involvement in the creation of the crisis that they’ve since tried to distance themselves from.  I really liked the point about how Richard Sackler’s callous remarks don’t have the same heft because they’re all in print, with no actual video footage; the solution of enlisting Hollywood actors to reenact some of his quotes – Michael Keaton, Bryan Cranston, Michael K. Williams, and Richard Kind – was awesome.

The Daily Show is off this week and Patriot Act is done with its current block of episodes, so I thought I’d backtrack a little and give some thoughts on Patriot Act as a whole.  As I’ve said, Hasan was my favorite Daily Show correspondent, so I was bummed when he left, but having his new show to watch totally makes up for it.

First, I really like how brown the show’s sensibility is.  From the way Hasan doesn’t use an anglicized pronunciation of his name (like they did on The Daily Show,) to his side bars for aunties and uncles who won’t get the jokes, to his fast and frequent in-references (like UC Santa Cruz being a shameful college for Asian-Americans to go to,) you never lose sight of the unique perspective that he brings to his show.  It informs his commentary, his humor, and a number of his topics.

While the deep-dive single-story format is similar to Last Week Tonight and Hasan comes similarly armed with well-researched stats and data every week, the tone and feel of the two shows are very distinct.  Just the fact that Hasan has no desk and is constantly moving around adds a different feel (he’s compared his show to a funny TED Talk, which tracks,) and the specific way he incorporates and interacts with his visual aids offers a unique flair.  More than that, he just brings a very different sensibility to his work.  He has a lot of swagger and flair, with this excited/incredulous energy that’s infectious; when he drops a stat that’s mind-boggling to him, you feel every inch of it.

It strikes me as a very millennial-minded show.  I can’t pinpoint specifically why, but it’s something about the language, the graphics, the energy, the references – all these things come together in a way that feels really millennial-friendly, like you can tell it’s made for their (our) attention spans by one of their (our) own.  I like that, while I watch three different news satire shows (all of which, in a way, are offshoots from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show,) all of them really bring something different to the table.