The boys are back together! Everyone loves it when old
Daily Show buddies and chronic Smart Aleks Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert reunite on
The Late Show to giggle at each other’s silly jokes (or in this case, quarantine hair-dos), rib each other endlessly, and then blow our minds with new thoughts and ideas on current affairs. What better time than now—when we are knee-deep in a global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement has taken over streets and communities in North America—to have the two stalwarts of late night political comedy come together and break it down for us. Jon, especially, has done some reading lately on the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, and it turns out, the medical advice 102 years ago was scarily similar to what health professionals are telling us now.“The 1918 pandemic,” Jon explained to Stephen via video-chat, “the advice that they gave was ‘Stay inside and if you don’t stay inside, wear a mask and socially distance.’”“No!” Stephen gasped.
“I was hoping it would make me feel better,” Jon continued. “I thought there was going to be some old-timey, like ‘Drink apple cider and mercury, and that will be the elixir for your vitality!’ In 102 years, we literally have just been driving in circles!”You heard it, fam. The old advice is the good advice. So wear ya dang masks in public and keep up-to-date on
the medical advice for your are.[video_embed id='1982958']RELATED: Jon Stewart and Steve Carell reunite, but why is Brad Pitt bossing them around? [/video_embed]In between all the laughs, Stephen and Jon didn’t want
to waste an opportunity to muse on why, in the midst of the pandemic, this Black Lives Matter movement has caught on in a way that, even four years ago, seemed like a radical, fringe idea.“By the way, as ridiculous as it is for two old white dudes to be sitting around going, ‘the problem with racism in this country is…’” Jon prefaced his argument in the most Jon Stewart way possible, but continued, “When I was still doing the show, and the terrible tragedy in Charleston, Ferguson, Eric Garner—I remember those moments being so chilling and feeling like such a wake-up call. But also feeling hopeless that we continue to stare at the abyss of a gaping racial wound that we never seem to do anything about. I think
Will Smith said it’s not that racism is worse, it’s being filmed. But the others were on-camera as well!”“We all went into kind of a stasis,” he continued, referring to people confined to their homes by COVID-19 lockdown, “and so much of the distractions of your daily life were removed, that it allowed the country a moment of clarity. It’s almost like, in this moment of more quiet reflection, America suddenly stopped and smelled the racism.”It seems Jon has had his own moments of clarity, since he recently publicly reckoned with some of his blindspots, specifically his hiring for
The Daily Show. Speaking on Charlamagne tha God's
Breakfast Club, Stewart admitted that having an all-white, all-male writing room on the show was technically unintentional, but not acceptable. While the show had a hiring policy that hid applicants' names during the process in an effort to give everyone equal opportunity, Jon has since realized that wasn't enough—white men in positions of power need to actively lift up women and minorities, not just apply a colourblind or genderblind ideology."The river that we were getting the material from, the tributary was also polluted by the same inertia," he explained. "And you had to say to them, send me women, send me Black people. And all of a sudden, women got funny, it just kind of happened—but they’d been funny all along. We just hadn’t actively done enough to mine that." Stewart elaborated on that with Colbert, explaining that since Black people have been systematically shut out, the movement for equality also needs to be systematic and deliberate.He specifically mentioned the GI Bill, where World War II vets coming back from overseas were given a low-cost loan to buy a house, but Black veterans were explicitly excluded from those loans. “It feels like Black people have had to fight so hard for equality for so long, and the exhaustion of that, and the despair of that, the anguish of that, while they were fighting for equality, white people were building equity,” he explained. "Until we address that, equality won't come."[video_embed id='1983386']BEFORE YOU GO: More than 300 Black artists have signed a petition calling for change in Hollywood [/video_embed]
