In a very unusual segment last night, Jon Stewart largely abandoned his comedian guise to deliver a sober commentary on the Staten Island grand jury that declined to indict Eric Garner’s killer. “If comedy is tragedy plus time,” Stewart said, “I need more fucking time.” Not joking at all, he observed that the Garner case had “none of the ambiguities” of Ferguson. “Someone taped it” and it did no good. “We are definitely not living in a post-racial society, and I can imagine there are a lot of people out there wondering how much of a society we are living in at all.”
Jon Stewart on Eric Garner: “If comedy is tragedy plus time, I need more fucking time”
The segment isn’t entirely humor free. There’s a good joke about Arby’s at the beginning, and an impressive combo of cute cats at the end. But mostly it’s the earnest side of Stewart in the wake of a legal outcome that’s shocked conservatives as well as liberals.
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