When the Daily Show (blessed be its name) launched its new website and video clip archive last week, I was all over it like, well... you know, white Borzoi hair on black wool slacks.
And I convinced my darling editor Michael Jensen at AfterElton.com to let me write an article about the best of the gay (or maybe it's the gayest of the best) clips. And he said oh, well, if you must, I guess you must.
So I turned it in yesterday and it's up today and you know, that must mean he really liked it because that never happens.
And even though it's hideously immodest of me, I have to say it's pretty funny, and not just the embedded clips. So hey, you know... read it.
There’s a whole lotta gay going on in the brand-spanking-new archive of The Daily Show video clips launched last week by Comedy Central. Ever since 1999, when a relatively unknown political humorist named Jon Stewart took over as anchor and made “fake news” a household word, the anti-gay elements of society have been one of the main targets of his increasingly impassioned, brilliantly funny fake newscasts. So let’s check out the best of the best by looking at the highlights of the last eight years, stopping along the way to note a time or two The Daily Show really blew it (and not in a good way).
It does bear mentioning that there are plenty of queer comics doing pro-gay political humor. And Stewart isn’t even the only straight comic who supports gay rights. Kathy Griffin, Roseanne Barr, and many others have championed our issues and earned large queer followings. Stewart isn’t even the only straight male political comic with his own TV show who supports LBGT equality; so does, for example, Bill Maher.
What sets Stewart apart, aside from his tremendous mainstream popularity, is that his humor conveys a deeply-rooted sense of personal outrage at anti-gay policies, laws, and attitudes. He doesn’t, like Maher, support gay civil rights as part of an overall libertarian or progressive political ideology, but because, as he told conservative pundit Bill Bennett in what may be the greatest interview of Stewart’s career, gay equality is part of “the natural progression of the human condition” because “every gay person [is] someone’s son or daughter.” And in Stewart’s mind, apparently, you just don’t treat your kids like that.
It also has to be said, no matter how much it hurts, that Stewart isn’t perfect. Oh, his sense of humor rarely misses, and his hair actually really may be perfect. But when it comes to gay political humor, sometimes The Daily Show gets it wrong – hello, Stephen Colbert gay-baiting the inventor of “Gaydar,” a little electronic device that will vibrate whenever anyone else in close proximity has the same device.
It’s also true that The Daily Show and its spin-off, The Colbert Report, haven’t been making a lot of friends in the MySpace generation or the blogosphere lately. That’s because those buzz-killers at Comedy Central have been rampaging around YouTube and other video-sharing sites for months now, getting those shows’ clips yanked as fast as they went up. The reason is now clear: They’ve been building their own little Daily Show video universe, where every single clip of every segment of the show since the day Stewart joined its cast in 1999 can be viewed and embedded. The Colbert Report will be getting the same treatment soon.
The Daily Show site launched in mid-October with the butt-covering word “Beta” scrawled under the logo, probably to account for the fact that a lot of times, the videos just won’t play. Still, those seeking the gay can lose many, many hours in The Daily Show vaults, reliving past moments of queer glory and discovering many others previously unknown. After all, no fan, however obsessed, can ever really have seen every single episode – until now.
It's all here... have fun!
Comments