Jon Stewart was a heat-seeking missile tonight on The Daily Show with a target set on MAGA‘s “pathetic” meltdown over Bad Bunny‘s Super Bowl halftime show performance.
Beginning with the big game itself, he drew early laughs with: “Man, if you like high-scoring contests where the outcome is in doubt till the final suspenseful climactic seconds, this was not the game for you. Slow. Grinding. It nearly took all the fun out of watching the Patriots lose.”
But, at least there was the halftime show, where “Mr. Bunny killed it.” The host added, “It was joyful and infectious and— oh, oh, right, right, I forgot, I forgot: For a significant portion of Americans, everything that happens must uniformly be filtered through a particular MAGA-centric worldview and judged on how well it conforms to that traditional vision, which doesn’t including knowing where the biblioteca is.”
With his signature acerbic wit, the comic began sarcastically, “Is it too much to ask for a halftime show that this great nation can enjoy in its mother tongue? It’s why the good people at TPUSA went through the trouble of putting on an alternative All-American halftime show that celebrated this beautiful country in the King’s English we all share.”
At this point, the screen played a baffling and chaotic moment from Kid Rock’s poorly lip-synced and largely incoherent performance at the Turning Point USA show, where the close captioning included lines like “Bawitaba da-bang da-bang diggy-diggy-diggy.” Feigning relief, Stewart exclaimed, “Thank you! Merriam and Webster couldn’t have put it better themselves, regarding the up jumping of said boogie insofar as the diggy diggy diggy being a da-bang da-bang.”
Moreover, Stewart questioned, “Why the fuck is it the Super Bowl halftime entertainer’s job to unify the country? In what world is that their job? Isn’t there another person whose job description is much more along those lines?”
Elsewhere, the two-dozen Emmy winner slammed Republicans’ defense of President Donald Trump‘s posting of a racist video depicting the Obamas as apes. Playing a clip of Sean Spicer defending the video as not racist but rather one that “ended with a racist thing,” Stewart responded, with an exaggerated flair of his arms, “If you say the N-word at the end of the sentence, it still ruins the whole sentence. There are certain things in this world where placement is less important than presence. ‘Oh, I don’t have gonorrhea, the tip of my penis has gonorrhea. You’re going to judge my entire penis by the gonorrheic tip? Who’s the racist now?’”
In a night full of loud cheers of agreement from the audience, Stewart saved the best for last; his concluding speech was interrupted by premature applause: “For all of MAGA’s triumphalism, it’s not a movement that seems confident in its position. These people, who control every branch of government, are so triggered by someone singing in Spanish for 20 minutes, they need to create their own safe space alternative halftime show, where Trad Bunny over here is singing songs about how he can’t even enjoy sitting in a truck and drinking beer because he knows that somewhere, out there, there’s a trans person. It’s actually fucking pathetic, the gap between the power you all wield — I’m not done! — and the victimhood you all claim is the real offense.”
And what does one serve at a “weak and pathetic pity party?” Why yogurt of course, he quipped, harking back to an earlier extended bit deriding RFK’s alimentary choices (of “meat and ferments”).
