Jon Stewart said Tony Hinchcliffe was "just doing what he does." That take helped get us here

This may be challenging to consider at a time when clipped-out segments have become the primary delivery system for headlines, information and ideas — but let’s remember that context is key.

Consider the immediate media reaction to Jon Stewart’s opener on the Oct. 28 episode of “The Daily Show” where, if one were to judge from an array of headlines, the respected host and comic “defended” — quotes intentional — Tony Hinchcliffe.

You know, the roast comic who appeared at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden nouveau Bund rally and called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean.”

Hinchcliffe also made jokes about “carving a watermelon” with a Black buddy, and said Latinos “love making babies”: “There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country.” But the garbage clunker received the lion’s share of attention due to the immediate outcry from Puerto Rican voters in swing states.

“In retrospect, having a roast comedian come to a political rally a week before Election Day and roasting a key voting demographic, probably not the best decision by the campaign politically,” Stewart landed on as his response to these "jokes," adding, “But, to be fair, the guy’s really just doing what he does!” 

At this, he tossed to a clip from Netflix’s Tom Brady roast special from May, where Hinchcliffe said of fellow comedian Jeff Ross, “Jeff is so Jewish he only watches football for the coin toss.” He told Rob Gronkowski, Brady's former NFL teammate, that he looked like “the Nazi that kept burning himself on the oven,” and said host Kevin Hart is so small “that when his ancestors picked cotton they called it deadlifting.”

Cutting back to Stewart, we see him sarcastically react with, “Yes, yes, of course, terrible. Boo!” before breaking into giggles. “There’s something wrong with me. I find that guy very funny! So I’m sorry. I don’t know what to tell you."

Comedy can be a terrific free speech stress test. If you doubt that, ask any comic, especially the ones who, like Jerry Seinfeld, blame “the extreme left and P.C. crap” for killing comedy, which is so dead and buried that streaming services are paying comics millions to feature their stand-up routines. Seinfeld eventually walked back that comment, but he’s not the only one to blame political correctness for the death of a good time.

Often lost when comics decry pushback from offended constituencies is any consideration of accompanying factors such as the effect their jokes have on their fans, and consequences. That second word is tricky since, to stars whose missteps come back to haunt them, consequence is coded language for "cancellation." It can translate to terminated deals, lost income, and a reputational plummet. It can also lead to lucrative deals for stand-up specials and sold-out arena shows.

Comedy can be instructive. It can also be a weapon. Right-wing troll battle cries meant to trigger perceived adversaries are, in effect, punchlines. “Cry harder, libs!” Rimshot!  

Taken by itself, Stewart’s giggles at Hinchcliffe’s rapid-fire racist punchlines at the Brady roast didn’t make him look especially sympathetic to the legitimately outraged reaction to the comic’s Madison Square Garden performance.

Neither should it be surprising. Type “Jon Stewart defends” into any search engine. You’ll come up with a mixed bag of names that includes but isn’t limited to Dave Chappelle (for his “Saturday Night Live” monologue many considered to be antisemitic); Samantha Bee (for describing Ivanka Trump with an expletive that starts with the letter c); Trevor Noah (prior to his "Daily Show" tenure, after a slew of regrettable tweets resurfaced), and his Egyptian counterpart Bassem Youssef, who was arrested in 2013 on charges of allegedly insulting Islam and the country’s president at that time, Mohamed Morsi.

These incidents don’t have equal weight, understand. Listing them demonstrates that comics, especially venerated personalities like Stewart, tend to land on the side of fellow comics most of the time and the comedy’s sanctity almost all the time.

Stewart reacted to a supercut of cable news personalities expressing outrage, including one describing Hinchcliffe’s material as “extremely vile, so-called jokes,” by turning that outrage into a bit: “’Extremely vile so-called jokes’? She name-checked my comedy album from the ‘90s!”

Here’s the thing – although Stewart brushes off Hinchcliffe as one of Trump’s underlings, he spends 14 minutes building to a conclusion that the rhetoric sold on Madison Square Garden’s stage was, indeed, outrageous: “Right now you think you’re safe,” Stewart concluded, “because the group Trump’s talking about, it’s not you.”

Notice the way this implies the only performer we should be paying attention to is the headliner. To Stewart, Hinchcliffe isn’t worth taking seriously because he’s a clown, like Stewart’s own longstanding argument that he’s an entertainer – one to whom viewers turn to make sense of headlines — not a journalist.

But again, let’s consider the context. Hinchcliffe was “just doing what he does” at the Tom Brady roast, a venue where everything and everyone is of similar social status; not a single celebrity on that stage has a net worth under $1 million. Regardless of how America votes on Tuesday, Hart — along with his nearest and dearest and estimated $450 million net worth — will be fine.

“Roasting” Black and brown people at a rally attended by very few of those folks and near the tail end of an election season in which mass deportations and demonizing Haitian immigrants with legal temporary protected status as dog and cat eaters, is not equal opportunity humor. It's a declaration of open season on anyone deemed “Other.” They suffer the consequences of those jokes and amateurs' retelling.

Hinchcliffe, a professional comic and podcaster, had to know that. He could have written different material. Stewart also knows that. Pretending like that wasn’t a choice is damning.

But Stewart, like Trump, lives in the Venn diagram overlap between entertainment and politics. Some will take issue with that since “The Daily Show” host grounds his satire in fact and, frankly, it's easier to be one of his fans.

In contrast, what Trump signals from that space isn’t simply disappointing. It’s dangerous. Trump fascinates comedians like Hinchcliffe and Joe Rogan, who downplays the threat he poses to democracy by likening his statements to performance.

“The problem with the Trump stuff is just that the people look at the inflammatory things he says…and they define them by that,” Rogan said on the Oct 27 episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience.” “But you also have to remember, this is a very bizarre combination of an entertainer and a businessman. He's like a comedian, man!”

So although Trump pledged to his Madison Square Garden audience to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 on his first day in office, the same act used to imprison Italian and German nationals during World War II, including refugees from the Holocaust . . . he might be kidding.

“My point is,” Rogan concluded, “people don’t know what to do with that.”

Not true. Trump’s influence on Republicans and right-wing media has given rise to scores of imitators who say and do horrible things in the name of aggressive conservative discourse. Fox News commentator Jesse Watters gets away with trumpeting racism, sexism, and xenophobia by calling himself a “political humorist.”

He may be one of the main commentators on “The Five,” Fox’s highest-rated primetime show viewed by its audience as a news source, but as a humorist, he can reassure anyone he offends that it’s all just jokes.

On the same Monday that Stewart’s segment aired, 1776 Project PAC founder and JD Vance-ally Ryan Girdusky, while appearing on  CNN's NewsNight, responded to journalist Mehdi Hasan’s comparison of Trump’s rally speech to Adolf Hilter’s speeches by saying, “I hope your beeper doesn’t go off."

That dumb jab refers to an Israeli operation targeting Hezbollah members in Lebanon whose pagers had explosives planted inside them. At least 40 people were killed and more than 3,000 injured.

Hasan is British-American and Muslim; his parents are from India. That statement told everyone exactly how Girdusky viewed the Brown man sitting across the debate table from him. Hasan picked up that vibe immediately: "Did you just say I should die?" he responded.

CNN removed Girdusky from the show immediately and “NewsNight” host Abby Phillip issued an apology to Hasan on the air. The network subsequently announced it cut ties with Girdusky who promptly took to X to huff, “Apparently you can't go on CNN if you make a joke. I'm glad America gets to see what CNN stands for.”

The good news for Girdusky is that Fox News is a veritable laugh-in when it comes to his type of humor. Remember, after CNN cut ties with Trump's former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski in 2016, he killed over on their cable news competition with his “womp, womp” line in 2018.

The setup: former senior Democratic National Committee adviser Zac Petkanas was recalling a story about a 10-year-old girl with Down Syndrome who was taken from her mother at the southern border and put in a cage. “Womp, womp” was Lewandowski’s version of “Dyn-o-mite!” Incredibly it did not catch fire in the culture.

None of this is new on the comedy side or among politicians. Comedians have been trending rightward since right-wing talk radio and Andrew Dice Clay ascended contemporaneously in the late ‘80s and ‘90s.

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Comedy led the backlash against political correctness, which Lindy West astutely defined in a 2015 Guardian column as a fancy term for “not treating people who are already treated like garbage like garbage.” A prevalent excuse, mansplained to me and everyone else denouncing that era’s red hot rape joke trend, involved a lot of blathering about “equal opportunity offense.” And the public played along with it, not wanting to be branded as no-fun joykillers.

That stopped holding water once Trump came into office and declared certain types of Americans to be unequal – those pesky “enemies from within” — and some to be more equal than others.  

The one-two wide swings of Hinchcliffe and Girdusky passing off dehumanizing comments as jokes at a politically tense moment shows us how far down the poison path we've bumbled on the “just joking!” cart.

So far the biggest voice specifically sounding the alarm about laughing our way into autocracy has been Marc Maron, who shared a post titled “The Democratic Idea” on that same Monday.

“The anti-woke flank of the new fascism is being driven almost exclusively by comics, my peers,” he wrote. “Whether or not they are self-serving or true believers in the new fascism is unimportant. They are of the movement . . . Whether they are driven by the idea that what they are fighting for is a free speech issue or whether they are truly morally bankrupt racists doesn’t matter. They are part of the public face of a fascist political movement that seeks to destroy the democratic idea.”

Later he adds, “Fascism is good for business if you toe the line. Popular podcasts became tribal and divisive years ago. Now they may be in the position to become part of the media oligarchy under the new anti-democratic government.”

Maron preceded these statements by explaining his podcasts aren’t about politics, but he is very political. In other words, the guy’s really just doing what he does.