So this has less than nothing to do with life post-graduating college, but, uhhhh, well…young people watch The Daily Show. Yeah, that’s it…isn’t there some stat where most young people get their news from The Daily Show? Alright, so my bases are covered there, anyway, let’s talk about the process of getting to watch it.
As with every talk show, you’d better be ready to devote the day to it. You show up at about 1:30 in the afternoon, stand outside in a very hot line for about two hours. [It’s a lot worse than it sounds, imagine time literally standing still as have nothing to do but play with your cell phone–my flip phone’s only app is a calculator, but boy oh boy are square roots fun!–and inspect the shoulder tattoo of the guy in front of you for craftsmanship.] Then a guy gives you a yellow ticket no fancier than a Burger King receipt and tells you to come back at 4:55 p.m. Then you come back at that time to wait in another, you guessed it, line. Around 5:30 they start letting people into the studio and you sit there as a guy pretends to come out and warm up the crowd but really just wants to plug his standup.
After that, Jon comes out for a quick Q&A session with the audience. Long before that the bouncer has told us we can ask Jon anything except for an autograph, advice about starting our own political show, and especially not for a job. So of course, right off the bat someone asked him for advice about starting their own show and someone else asked straight up about a job. Jon didn’t really answer either of those questions (and all of the other questions were unbelievably stupid like if he had ever seen a baby squirrel) but it was enough to get his producer to cut short the Q&A session. No one asked him a political based question, and I didn’t get the chance.
In fact, the most shocking thing about everyone I talked to or heard talking in the audience with me is that almost no one was political or knew a lot about politics. I guess they just wanted to watch a comedy show but it didn’t feel right that I have a small army of hyper political Facebook friends that think Stewart is a political God and instead I was surrounded by people that just wanted to watch a comedian, any comedian, fucking Carrot Top could have been there and they would have been clam happy.
As for the actual show itself, what you watch at home is almost exactly what they film. Unlike the Anderson Cooper show (which ran very long and got edited down selectively), almost nothing got edited out of The Daily Show we watched. When Jon said “fuck” it was bleeped out, but that was about it. Oh, and there was a hilarious bit with Al Madrigal where he talked about no one being ideologically pure enough for The Tea Party and how no could win them over completely whether they were alive, dead, or fictional. They did cut out ONE joke from this segment where Jon said “What about Rambo?” and he said “No way, he admitted we lost Vietnam.” Other than that, it was very much the same.
The experience couldn’t have been more different than Anderson Cooper’s show (Anderson’s set was well lit and open, TDS felt like a dank cave that could seat no more than 200 people which actually isn’t that uncommon for a late night talk show as I went to The David Letterman Show last year and that was even more grim). And although I would rather watch The Daily Show at home, I probably would rather go to The Anderson Cooper Show.
It’s not that either show is bad. Just that Anderson feels a little more like an experience, as to where most of the Daily Show is you watching a screen of the show as it’s playing–all the clips play on the monitors and only Jon is actually in front of you, his reporters are there too but in front of a green screen so you have to watch the monitor for the full effect–which you could do at home but save yourself the afternoon. It was a nice, solid experience for a Tuesday afternoon, but you could easily do the same without missing much every weeknight at 11 p.m. on Comedy Central.
Great article.