Bernie Mac show.. 5 seasons 🖤🖤🖤🖤

Cord Jefferson on how American Fiction came to be

Having Cord Jefferson on was such a full circle moment for both of us & we had an amazing conversation. Here Cord talks about the book "Erasure," the parallels between his own life & the main character 'Monk' & how that informed the script for "American Fiction."

Listen to our full conversation on @spotify

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (2007) || 18/x

The Harvard rival B-plot sticks out. It’s kinda forced and contrived, and definitely feels like it’s added so the script can stick to a formula. But somehow, the good feels outweigh the contrivances.

Jerry & Marge Go Large is a 2022 American comedy film directed by David Frankel and written by Brad Copeland. Based on Jason Fagone's 2018 HuffPost article of the same name, the film stars Bryan Cranston and Annette Bening. 

Anybody here remember The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore? I'm still mad it was cancelled tbh.

white house correspondents dinner 2016 with larry wilmore

What’s Insecure About It? It’s Issa Rae.

While in college, she made music videos, wrote, and directed plays, and made a mock series called Dorm Diaries...

Known as the critically acclaimed creator of “Insecure” (2016-2021), Issa Rae is now a decorated actress, comedian, writer, and producer. Issa Rae (Jo-Issa Rae Diop) was born on January 12th, 1985, in Los Angeles, California to Abdoulaye and Delyna Diop. For a short period, in her life, Issa and her four siblings, along with their parents lived in Dakar, Senegal but she mostly lived in Potomac,…

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I love my brother tremendously. Miss him a lot. When I started doing stand-up, Marc started doing it about a year later and it surprised me. And I said, “Oh, you want to do stand-up?” He was like, “If you couldn’t do it well, then I wasn’t going to do it.” He wanted to see if I would sink or swim. And when I was able to swim, it gave him the confidence to do it. He got in his own way, unfortunately. He was a very emotional person. He was very hard on himself. Low self-esteem, big ego, and high IQ in terms of abilities. But low IQ in terms of the worth of that. Crazy. He was a person who had many gifts but thought he wasn’t any good but also had the ego of someone who was good. Writers face impostor syndrome, but he took it harder than he should have, and it was always his burden. I hated that he had that. But Marc was very inventive. He was very funny. We both had these different skill sets. I was a good impressionist. I could do the voices of different people. But Marc could do faces. He could just become somebody. It was the funniest thing to watch him contort his face.

Larry Wilmore on his brother Marc Wilmore

Institutional racism & its deep effect on mental health in the black community

Journalist Antonia Hylton & I talk about the history of institutional racism and the twisted way black people's health and well-being was, and to some degree still is, deeply impacted by those views.

Listen to our full conversation on @spotify

Jerry & Marge Go Large (2022) Review

Jerry & Marge Go Large (2022) Review

Based on a very true story about Jerry and Marge Selbee who keep winning the lottery after Jerry figures out a loop hole in the system after using Maths to work it all out, seeing this as a chance to enjoy retirement and help out friends and family in their small town. ⭐️⭐️⭐️ (more…)

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Meghan talking politics over the years. I especially loved her segment with the late Larry King.

i know I KNOW jon stewart was very gen-x liberalism for the masses but fuck The Daily Show was so important to my education around media literacy and understanding that literally everything is political and it's weird that the juggernaut has fallen so fast and so far in terms of actual cultural competency

Pdx has been outsourcing punks to Chicago for 10 years and I'm not about to be one of them even though I'm not white I hate that shit

But we are sending one of our best

Well here's a fucking Chortle headline for the roundup:

Holy fuck. I cannot believe that. Never for a moment did it cross my mind that this might happen. It's been nearly ten years since he left, and this never once seemed like a possibility.

I remember exactly when he left. I know it was announced in February 2015, because I was sitting in my bedroom in the city where I lived in 2015, where I'd moved to join their bigger and more impressive sports team and ended up just being miserable and lonely for two years because I did not have any of the skills required to fit in there. Anyway, it's fine, not the point of this post. The point is I know it was 2015 and I know it was February because I vividly remember sitting in that bedroom and scrolling on Facebook, and seeing a mock Valentine's Day card that said "May Jon Stewart be the only man to break your heart this week." And that's how I found out he'd announced he was leaving The Daily Show.

I know when he actually left, too. It was August 2015. Because Donald Trump walked down that fucking escalator in June 2015, and announced he'd be running for president. I remember watching The Daily Show that night, and Jon Stewart, incredibly pleased at the comedy gold mine that was about to befall all political comedians, looked into the camera and said to Donald Trump: "Thank you for making my last six weeks the best six weeks." Then he stayed on for six more weeks and made Trump jokes every night, then he left, and the world immediately ended. Looking back with a bit of perspective, Jon Stewart really did happen leave the show right as the Western world was on a precipice of having the norms as we thought we knew them all crumble at once. I'm thinking of that timeline that says 2000-2015=nostalgia, 2016-2019=2016, 2020-present=plague. Those are pretty much my life's eras. And Jon Stewart was there for a hell of a lot of that first one. (Not actually the first era of my life, there is also 90s=childhood, but I'm pretty sure everything was fine then, right?)

It's a bit weird to me now to see Jon Stewart as having an individual career, if that makes any sense at all. If you'd asked me in 2009 who my favourite comedians were, it wouldn't have occurred to me to say Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, even though I watched them both every night and loved those shows. I hardly even though of those as things that people had to make by being comedians and writers. They were just fixtures. Part of the landscape. I was so confused when he left the show, I didn't think it could exist without him. It didn't really feel like television could exist without Jon Stewart coming on at the end of the night. I remember learning some time ago about Marc Maron's feud with Jon Stewart over their days on the comedy circuit, and that was so weird. Jon Stewart didn't have days on the comedy circuit. He didn't have a career you could object to or admire, or opinions you could agree with or disagree with. He was just a fixture in the landscape.

I remember the first time I saw Jon Stewart. I think it was probably 2006, maybe 2005. I was really into Rick Mercer, this Canadian comedian who did TV shows where he made fun of the news. My mother put on a TV show, pointed to the guy behind the desk, and said, "That's Jon Stewart, he's like an American Rick Mercer." It only occurred to me relatively recently how funny it is to call Jon Stewart "an American Rick Mercer". But anyway, I watched that episode with my mom and then I kept doing that every night for many years.

I remember watching his final Daily Show episode with my mother, in August 2015. Bruce Springsteen came on live and played him out. My mother and I both got fairly emotional.

I kept watching The Daily Show for a long time after Jon Stewart left. I even followed a lot of the similar spinoff shows by its correspondents. I watched Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, and The Opposition with Jordan Klepper, and Larry Wilmore's The Nightly Show, and Hasan Minhaj's Patriot Act, and Michelle Wolf's The Break. Obviously, I followed John Oliver to Last Week Tonight (and would also if necessary follow him to the ends of the Earth, but that's beside the point).

I quite like Trevor Noah too; when he took over the show I read his autobiography and watched his stand-up specials and the documentary about him. I even saw him live in 2019. So I wasn't one of those people saying the show could never recover from Jon Stewart leaving. I watched a lot of the Trevor Noah years, and only dropped off from following it so closely fairly recently. It was around 2022, I think, when I just stopped keeping up with it. I had so much Britcom going on, and the world was so fucking depressing, getting all my news from actual news sites (as everyone should always always do, do not get your news from comedians, use political comedy as a way to lighten the mood of the regular news that you should first get from actual journalists, for the love of God please do not let the industry of actual journalism be steamrolled by entertainment) was stressful enough and I didn't want to keep having this other way of going over it.

So, those are a few disjointed memories that came into my mind when I saw that story this week. Here's another memory: I remember reading an interview with Jon Stewart from just after he left The Daily Show, in which he was asked if he would ever watch Fox News again. He replied that if he were ever in some post-apocalyptic scenario where Fox News was the only way to find out where to find vital life-saving information, he still wouldn't watch it. Because doing that job that required him to watch so much Fox News had destroyed him mentally and he could not wait to never ever ever ever ever do it again.

I was one of those people, after he left, saying, "I get it, it's high-pressure and difficult, I see why he wants to move on and have a break. But I would pay to have Jon Stewart just broadcast once a month in his sweatpants from his living room couch. He can't just be gone. He needs to keep telling us about the news, what will we do without him?"

We did do without him for nine years, and the world we thought we knew has crumbled around us in about twenty-five different ways since then, and I have absolutely no idea how the fuck Jon Stewart could fit into the landscape as it exists today. Like. I don't know what to do with this information. It wasn't on my radar. It's like finding out they're rebooting Buffy with the entire original cast and writing crew. Or if the girl I had a crush on from the ages of 9 to 14 showed up and told me she was in love with me. Of course it's what I wanted, but... what? Really? Why? Why now? Do I even still want this? You mean everything pre-2016 wasn't just a dream and we still technically exist in the same world as that one and the things in it are still out there and could just come back?

...There are people like @lastweeksshirttonight who actually know things about the US late-night comedy show scene, who have always understood that Jon Stewart is a person with a backstory who entered and then left an industry that also had a backstory and those things affected each other and this will have a significant effect on the ecosystem. Those people will have intelligent takes on what's happening right now. But I do not. Jon Stewart was on TV when I was in high school. He can't be on TV now because I am no longer in high school (even though I was 24 when he left in 2015). What the fuck?