Comedy regains its sense of purpose as Stewart ridicules the bat-snack theory.
Comedy regains its sense of purpose as Stewart ridicules the bat-snack theory.
L ast night was a turning point for comedy and for America. A dam burst. Scales fell from eyes. Howard Beale charged himself up with holy fury and let it come thundering out.
Thank you, Jon Stewart, for saying what needed to be said.
In his first post-pandemic episode filmed in front of a studio audience at the Ed Sullivan Theater, Stephen Colbert built The Late Show around a chat with his old friend and mentor, and Stewart came up with the perfect metaphor. Musing about the origins of the novel coronavirus with a combination of righteous rage and ridicule for all of those who have resisted the most obvious line of inquiry, Stewart said this: “There’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania! What do you think happened? Like, ‘I don’t know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean.’ Or, it’s the [expletive deleted] chocolate factory!”
Huzzah, hallelujah, and hot damn, that was good television. For nearly a year and a half, we’ve been told that an extremely far-fetched theory about the origins of the coronavirus was the only acceptable story, and that an extremely plausible explanation about the origins of the coronavirus was “debunked,” “disproven,” “nutty,” a “conspiracy theory,” and just plain unsayable.
Conservatives can deal out unpleasant truths all we want, but the culture at large has so marginalized us that nothing we say really breaks through, and both the legacy media and Silicon Valley tech firms are increasingly brazen about simply denying conservatives access to the microphone. Stewart is different. He is worshipped by the left-of-center media. At his peak, he seemed to enjoy as many adoring profiles as he had actual viewers. When he speaks, lefties listen.
It was only a few years ago that comedy defined itself as being the profession of those who would speak out loud the forbidden truths that you could get in trouble for bringing up. Forty or 50 years ago, it was profanity that was not allowed. Then it became other kinds of taboos — racial, sexual, and otherwise. At some point comedians, such as Colbert, started to see it as their duty not to tweak the norms but to enforce them, and to ask their audiences not to look within themselves honestly but to bathe in feelings of moral superiority as they directed their contempt at the conservative bogeyman of the hour.
All of that came tumbling down when Stewart started speaking: “Science has in many ways helped to ease the suffering of this pandemic. Which was more than likely caused by science.”
This line got a big laugh, but alleged professional comedian Colbert said exactly what a spokesblob for the Chinese Communist Party would say: “What do you mean? There’s a chance that this was created in a lab, there’s an investigation.” Colbert was suddenly the “That’s not funny” lady wielding the gavel on what is supposed to be a leading comedy show.
Since when do comics wait for the results of an investigation before cracking jokes? Since when do comics say, “When in doubt, assume the authorities will get it right, but in no case should you compromise their sober and thorough fact-finding mission with any hint that they might not have the people’s best interests at heart”?
Stewart stomped all over Colbert’s suggestion that there is only “a chance” that the virus just happened to emerge next door to the place doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses:
A chance? Oh my God. There’s a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China. Oh you know who we could ask? The Wuhan China respiratory coronavirus lab. The disease is the same name as the lab. That’s just a little too weird, don’t you think? And then they asked the scientists, so wait a minute, you work at the Wuhan respiratory coronavirus lab, how did this happen? And they’re like . . . [silly voice] ‘Mmm, a pangolin kissed a turtle?’
Colbert, again taking the most obsequious and pro-CCP line possible, argued that the virus emerged in Wuhan because that’s where the bats are. Stewart apparently doesn’t know this, but the caves in question are 1,000 miles from the lab. Stewart responded by citing the thousands of bats that can be seen daily in Austin, Texas, and marveled that there is somehow no Austin Coronavirus. When he asked Colbert to remind him of the name of the Wuhan lab, Colbert replied, “The Wuhan novel coronavirus lab, and how long have you worked for Senator Ron Johnson?”
At this point the band broke in with an “ooh, sick burn” sound on the piano. That break reframed matters for the audience: Hey, whose side are you on? Nearly every one of Colbert’s viewers, given a choice between aligning with the Chinese Communist Party and the U.S. Republican Party, would choose the former in a heartbeat. Wild applause erupted in support of Colbert’s position, which was: Don’t forget that tribe must come before truth. If you agree with any Republican politician, especially one linked to Donald Trump, you’re on the wrong side. It therefore becomes imperative to ignore or even help to cover up the truth, even when you’re a comic whose brand is speaking the truth.
By daring to embrace the truth (by which I mean that the most plausible explanation for the virus’s origin is that it came out of the lab, and making this theory unsayable by stamping it as racist or debunked is an outrage to common sense), Stewart granted permission to the American Left to finally admit that the theory conservatives have been discussing for more than a year is the road of inquiry we should all be heading down. Welcome to the right side, folks, better late than never. We’ll do our best to be gracious about this.