Often when we complain about the late-night talk-show hosts making dumb jokes about
Brokeback Mountain we forget to exclude Jon Stewart. Not to say Stewart has never made a dumb joke about BBM -- maybe he has. But generally I've always thought of Stewart as being very unhomophobic -- in fact, an outspoken proponent of gay rights. Though I've always had to go on memory, so I haven't been able to cite many examples one way or another.
Now I can!
The new Daily Show website offers free videos of every Daily Show ever. In the future, they'll apparently be searchable. But meanwhile, here's an article from After Elton compiling Jon Stewart's "greatest gay moments," with plenty of clips from the show. (Caveat: I haven't watched them all.) The author of the piece points out that the Daily Show isn't completely flawless in this respect -- some of the jokes are off, she says. But
What sets Stewart apart, aside from his tremendous mainstream popularity, is that his humor conveys a deeply-rooted sense of personal outrage at anti-gay policies, laws, and attitudes. He doesn’t, like[Bill] Maher, support gay civil rights as part of an overall libertarian or progressive political ideology, but because, as he told conservative pundit Bill Bennett in what may be the greatest interview of Stewart’s career, gay equality is part of “the natural progression of the human condition” because “every gay person [is] someone’s son or daughter.”
The Bennett interview, BTW, is the first one you come to in the story.
http://www.afterelton.com/TV/2007/10/thedailyshow?page=0%2C0
