When All That's Left Is To Make Stupid Faces
So we totally missed the Oscars. A little pooped after a long drive home from visiting extended family, we just went to bed and read. I hear that local boy Philip Seymour Hoffman did well. But Jon Stewart, maybe not so much.
So then it seems that I did catch Stewart's prime weekend performance when I watched his interview with Larry King on Saturday night.
It was bizarre. Larry spent most of the time laughing at Jon Stewart's jokes, but kind of in that stiff, I'm-laughing-to-cover-up-my-discomfort kind of way. Stewart meanwhile seemed baffled by King's questions.
Here's where it got really wacky. They'd been discussing potential presidential candidates and King threw out the name of Senator Bill Frist:
STEWART: Let's vote tomorrow. Frist, please! He diagnosed Terri Schiavo as not being in a persistent vegetative state from like five seconds of a videotape. The guys a cardiologist, "Ah, she looks OK." I mean that's the whole thing. This country we can't even get the two political parties to agree on what reality is.
You know the Democrats look at Terri Schiavo and they're like, "Ah, she's been dead for 20 years. Take her water away." The Republicans are like, "Ah, she's a couple of Pilates classes away from, you know, joining the Rockettes," like nobody can agree what reality is. I am so tired of both of these groups.
KING: Both.
STEWART: I cannot tell you.
KING: Then what is left for you, Jon?
STEWART: What is left for me?
KING: If you're tired of both groups?
STEWART: Hosting a basic cable show. That is what is left for me, sitting every day and getting to rub my eyes and make stupid faces on videotape. That is all that is left for me. That is the catharsis that I live for.
KING: So, in a sense you're happy over this.
STEWART: No.
KING: This gives you fodder.
STEWART: Yes, I prefer not the fodder. I'm not -- we're not the guys at the craps table betting against the line. I would -- we'd make fun of something else. If public life, if government suddenly became inspiring and moved towards people's better nature and began to solve problems in a rational way rather than just a way that involved political dividends, we would be the happiest people in the world to turn our attention to idiots like, you know, media people, no offense.
KING: So, you don't want it to be bad?
STEWART: Did you really just ask me if I want it to be bad?
KING: Yes because you...
STEWART: What are you -- I have kids what do you think? Yes, I don't want them to have any kind of a -- I want things to corrode to the point where we're all living in huts.
KING: Not all living in huts but generally comics political comics like things to go a little wrong, don't have to be the end of the world.
STEWART: Like things to go a little wrong like birdshot to the face of a guy that will survive.
KING: That's right.
STEWART: Not like things to go wrong until it's like Mad Max, every man for himself, let's all ride around with machineguns on, which seems to be the way that it's...
KING: You don't want Medicare to fail?
STEWART: Are you insane?
There was a lot of that kind of thing. Including more on Cheney's mistaking his hunting parter for a bird. (Full transcript)