Sehr schönes Porträt über Jon Stewart und die Daily Show, wie sie gemacht wird und welchen Einfluss sie inzwischen hat. Via Die gestundete Zeit.

“The Obama presidency was supposed to spell doom—or at least irrelevance—for Bush-satirizing comics like Stewart and his protégé Stephen Colbert. But a funny thing happened and is continuing to happen. Stewart is as essential as ever. Lately the show has been on a hot streak, exposing anti-mosque demagogues and carving up spineless Democrats. One of the lessons of the recent past is that the circus is in town no matter who is in the White House, which, while far from ideal for the state of our nation, has only increased the standing of a satirist like Stewart. Creating consistently funny and barbed bits four nights a week is extremely difficult, and not only because Stewart has to fend off the adulation of an audience that wasn’t entirely kidding with those STEWART/COLBERT ’08 bumper stickers. Constant exposure to the muck of politics can easily, and quickly, produce cynicism. Yet immersion in the political-media mess has left Stewart at once more bitter and more idealistic.

“Even if you’re eating delicious chocolate cake, there are moments you feel like, ‘I’ve had too much,’ ” Stewart says. “Now replace ‘chocolate cake’ with ‘shit taco’ and you know what our day is like every day. But this is not a fragile country. I’m not suggesting we couldn’t find ourselves in deep conflict. But we had slaves, and we fought a civil war; now we’re down to Glenn Beck being hyperbolic with his audience about nostalgia. This too shall pass.” Which doesn’t mean that Stewart is so confident in the inexorable triumph of good and right that he’s going to stop ridiculing the evildoers and charlatans.”