After a long, difficult weekend in which Jon Stewart lacked “The Daily Show” platform — though not a stage — to mock former CNN anchor Rick Sanchez’s comments about him (and Jews) that seemingly led to Sanchez’s firing, Stewart fans were ginned up to watch the much-awaited evisceration.
They were likely disappointed.
Rather than bring down the hammer on Sanchez, Stewart mocked him gently for assuming that their upbringings were so disparate — “He really nailed what it was like growing up in Central Jersey in the seventies, the fortunate son of a single mother in the education field” — before getting to the truly problematic comments Sanchez made about the people that run the networks who, like Stewart “are Jewish,” according to Sanchez.
And yet, Stewart still didn’t go in for the kill, telling the audience he was angry because, “I realized, I don’t go back on the air until Monday and there is no way this cat survives the weekend at CNN.” And, as he pointed out, he was right: Sanchez was fired on Friday afternoon.
But Stewart still played it straight, telling the audience that they didn’t have a problem with Sanchez because of his ethnicity:
We here see him as kind of a complex television character who is flawed by fascinating to watch every week. And we put this whole bit together to demonstrate that point, and they fired the guy. So doing the whole bit now seems kind of mean. But you gotta have just a little taste of it because it was so… Let me just give you a little bit of where we were going.
And only then did Stewart introduce the real comic reaction: he and his staff mashed up behind-the-scenes videos of Sanchez and his staff with some of the most uncomfortable scenes of Michael from “The Office,” making the point that Sanchez was as egotistical, un-self-aware and bombastic as the Steve Carrell character, Michael — and then he suggested Sanchez would be perfect to fill the role.
But Stewart wasn’t going to stop there: he then moved on to mock the media for their obsession with the supposed feud, making fun of the many outlets that referred to his joke from Saturday night about Sanchez as “slams” or “ripping him.”
Stewart finally came to the point:
If CNN got rid of Rick Sanchez because they didn’t like his his show fine. We weren’t that crazy about it either. But if they fired him for making some intemperate statements and some banal Jew-baiting, I gotta tell you, I’m not even sure Sanchez believes what he was saying. ‘Cause I know when Sanchez has time to think things through and doesn’t necessarily think he’s about to get fired anyway, he has a slightly different take on the topic.
And then Stewart showed clips of Sanchez calling out on his now-canceled show, in forceful terms, bigots — including anti-Jewish agitators. It was a series of scene with which any regular Sanchez viewers might have been familiar: inviting neo-Nazis and anti-immigration advocates on his show and calling them racists and bigots to their faces was, indeed, part of Sanchez’s shtick.
Stewart ended on a high note — if still a funny one — telling his audience that the “silver lining” of the situation was that “it is perhaps a chance for all of us to get in touch with not our dirtier, but our better Sanchezes,” adding that Sanchez “probably has a good heart.”
He then welcomed the thought that CNN might air better programming, to starve shows like Stewart’s — only to follow up with a clip of the eagerly anticipated new CNN show “Parker Spitzer,” starring disgraced former governor (and known prostitution enthusiast) Elliot Spitzer.
Watch the full video below.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Hurty Sanchez | ||||
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