Tuned In+Television | March 28, 2012

Hummus-Aisle Intifada! The Daily Show Comes to My Neighborhood

By James Poniewozik

Is The Daily Show quite so delightful and satirically on-point when it's making fun of an organization you belong to? Hell, yes.

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Tuned In+Remembrance | December 16, 2011

Christopher Hitchens, RIP

By James Poniewozik

Christopher Hitchens, the brilliant, pugilistic essayist and journalist, died Thursday of cancer at age 62. This is not a personal remembrance of Hitchens; I didn’t know him. It’s too bad, because from all accounts knowing “Hitch” was a bracing experience, involving arguments and legendary drinking bouts that Hitchens, inevitably, would win. (There will be plenty [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | June 3, 2011

The Daily Show on Weiner: Bigger, Longer and… Oh, This Is Too Easy

By James Poniewozik

The Daily Show is not live TV, so when Jon Stewart responded Wednesday to Anthony Weiner’s inability to identify “with certitude” whether a certain Twitter photo was of his own crotch, Stewart noted that the show had not had time to generate a full segment. The show made up for it last night, with an [...]

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Tuned In+News Media | May 23, 2011

MSNBC Hires Non-Puppet Michael Steele; Roger Ailes Wants to Be GOP Puppetmaster

By James Poniewozik

Fox News’ Republican-professional commentator ranks have been thinning lately, with contributors Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum leaving to explore Presidential runs. So you’d think that Fox might be a promising perch for former GOP party chief Michael Steele. You would be wrong: the defenestrated RNC head is not an especially popular figure among the conservatives [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | May 3, 2011

Bin Laden's Death, The Comedy!

By James Poniewozik

The killing of Osama bin Laden presented late-night comics an opportunity, as well as a challenge: how do you satirize good news? Jimmy Fallon (above), went the tried-and-true route of spoofing his network’s own programming, with a response to the news from “Donald Trump,” who complained that President Obama had deliberately interrupted Celebrity Apprentice. (“Where [...]

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Tuned In+News Media | April 8, 2011

RIP Jon Stewart's Glenn Beck Impression, 2009-2011

By James Poniewozik

It was too soon. Dammit, they took him from us too soon. So it was that, with the announcement that Glenn Beck would be leaving his Fox News show, Jon Stewart and his Daily Show writers took what they must have assumed would be the years’ worth of Beck material they would have in the [...]

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Tuned In+February 18, 2011

Dead Tree Alert: Game Changer?

By James Poniewozik

My column in the print issue of TIME this week looks at the success of the revival of The Game on BET, and how it suggests that the unfortunately-conventional wisdom of TV may be wrong: it may actually be good business to produce TV series featuring largely-minority casts, of the kind that big-network TV has [...]

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Tuned In+News Media | December 17, 2010

Never Forget: Jon Stewart Keeps Responding to First Responders

By James Poniewozik

9/11 was a tragedy that happened to the entire nation, and in its larger ramifications, to the world. But New Yorkers also felt it, and still feel it, on a personal level: not just the fear, the terrible sights and the awful memories (the rest of America watched 9/11; we smelled it), but also the [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | October 28, 2010

Obama and Stewart: What Fake News Can Do

By James Poniewozik

“I don’t want to lump you in with a lot of other pundits,” President Barack Obama told Jon Stewart in his interview on last night’s Daily Show. In saying that, Obama brought up a question that Stewart’s rising prominence, and this weekend’s Rally to Restore Sanity, have underscored: should we lump in Stewart with other [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | October 26, 2010

Daily Show Reaches DC, Visits Juan Williams

By James Poniewozik

The Daily Show was dark last week, so its first chance to address the Juan Williams tempest came in the first of a week of shows from Washington, D.C. It made up for lost time, snarking that Williams had been fired for violating NPR’s “never say anything interesting” policy, then documenting Fox News’s theatrical counter-overreaction, [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | October 20, 2010

Obama to Visit Daily Show Pre-Midterms

By James Poniewozik

President Barack Obama, who had some positive things to say about the Rally to Restore Sanity—or actually, the “rally for Americans in favor of a return to sanity or something like that”—is going to appear on The Daily Show Oct. 27, the Wednesday before midterms, during the week the show will tape in Washington, D.C. [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | July 9, 2010

Olivia Munn Hits the Road: Pretty? Funny? Or Pretty Funny?

By James Poniewozik

Caught in the crossfire over whether The Daily Show has a problem with women or not has been Olivia Munn, the show’s newest correspondent, who has been cited by some as an example not of the show’s inclusiveness but of sexism. To wit: she was hired, the implication goes, not because she’s funny but because [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | July 7, 2010

The Daily Show Women's Problem With "The Daily Show's Woman Problem"

By James Poniewozik

The women of The Daily Show‘s staff yesterday took the unusual step of issuing an open letter in response to a lengthy Jezebel blog post from last month that charged the show had a “problem” with women—specifically, with hiring too few women writers and on-camera talent. To rehash quickly, blogger Irin Carmon talked to female [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | June 17, 2010

"Release the Sprachen!" Jon Stewart on Obama's Oil Spiel

By James Poniewozik

Yesterday I wrote about the mixed messages in Barack Obama’s oil spill address, but last night Jon Stewart took on the same theme and showed why he gets paid a zillion dollars to do his work on TV, while I have this little blog I run out of the less-nice part of my basement: “I’ve [...]

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Tuned In+News Media | May 3, 2010

Do You Care If Daily Show Staffers Wrote Jokes for Obama?

By James Poniewozik

That, anyway, is the word from The Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove, who reports that David Axelrod told him the Prez received jokes for his White House Correspondents’ Dinner standup from writers for The Daily Show. (For a review of Obama’s, and Jay Leno’s, performances, see this post from my colleague and history-of-comedy authority Richard Zoglin.) [...]