'Daily Show' meets YouTube debate

No surprise that “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” had a field day doing next-night satire of Monday’s CNN/YouTube Democratic debate.

“This debate will come at you in six dimensions,” Stewart said, googly-eyeing the camera to lampoon CNN’s insistence that, with this techno-political miracle, they’d not only landed on Mars but opened a coffee bar.

I’m all for the service “The Daily Show” provides at a breathtaking four-nights-a-week clip — the news for people who tangentially follow the news but nevertheless want to remain intellectually above it and thus go back to not following it.

To that end, “The Daily Show” sort of took one tack about the YouTube debate — you missed nothing, except for CNN's ridiculous hype (a comedic sweet spot, to be sure).

But here's something that nags at me: Was this a case where "The Daily Show" stoops to mocking the powerless, in this case the uploaders who participated in the YouTube debate?

Seen through the show's funhouse mirror, none of them looked any too smart--the North Carolina pastor,for instance, who was present in the audience for a follow-up to his question of Sen. John Edwards about gay marriage. 

“So, was CNN able to take the debate process and youth-anize it?” was how Stewart introduced a piece by John Oliver about the Youth of Today watching the debate as a drinking game, sipping on common references like “Bush,” gulping on less-common ones like “torture” and “gay marriage.”

Better, and less defeating, was the “gotcha” the show pulled on Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), shown reacting with evident feeling during the debate to the lesbian couple in Brooklyn who asked about gay marriage.

Except, as “The Daily Show” illustrated, he’d given the same talking point at a previous debate, saying he and his wife ask themselves, “How would I want my two daughters treated if they grew up and had a different sexual orientation [from] their parents?”

“Apparently you would like them treated as hypothetical debate lesbians,” Stewart said.

— Paul Brownfield

(Photo courtesy Comedy Central)

Comments

[Mollie]

I found Jon Stewart's takeoff on the UTube debates brilliant, funny, and very entertaining, especially the jabs toward CNN's self-conscious self-promotion of the whole gimmick as over-the-top, cutting-edge TV. Awww, was he mean to spoof Average Americans? C'mon, Stewart constantly mocks himself along with everyone else, pushing the utmost boundaries of silliness reaching for that extra laugh, so I think "we" can handle a little ribbing ourselves.