Last night The Daily Show took on the FIFA corruption indictments, and there were wigs. Oh, there were wigs.
The parade of toupées was in service of FIFA: A 24-year sting operation, the one-man show Stewart put on to illustrate the incredibly long time it took for the justice system to actually do anything about the corrupt scheme at the center of yesterday’s indictment. “This FIFA corruption,” Stewart noted with outrage, stretched back 24 years. That means “it started a Jennifer Lawrence ago.”
Stewart, using a series of wigs and a giant set of headphones, plays a dogged FBI agent tracking FIFA corruption for decades, only to be told year after year to wait before moving in to make an arrest. (Come for the Jennifer Aniston ‘90s hair, stay for the jokes about MC Hammer and the Stone Temple Pilots.)
Stewart then turned to the question of why the US is prosecuting this case at all, given that the arrests happened in Switzerland and FIFA is an international organization.
Part of the explanation, he muses, is the American financial system’s equal-opportunity approach to money laundering: “Americans may not watch soccer, but we will gladly — nay, enthusiastically — finance and launder its dirty, dirty money.”
But perhaps there are also some hurt feelings involved. The US had put in a bid for the 2022 World Cup that was eventually awarded to Qatar — a country that has a host of problems, including temperatures that reach 140 degrees in the summer. That raises questions about the bid, Stewart says — questions like “Will humans survive the World Cup?”
But so far it looks like the corruption allegations aren’t going to take the World Cup away from Qatar, leading Stewart to suggest that FIFA does have some moral principles after all:
“Look, if there’s one thing we pride ourselves on at FIFA, it’s that when we get bribed, we stay bribed. It’s a little something called integrity.”
By Joseph Stromberg
