For those of you who don’t watch The Late Show, (or, you know, YouTube highlights the next day), you need to see part of Monday’s episode. beginning Republican National Convention coverage. You have to watch this. I’ll wait.

OK, now that you’ve witnessed that bit of comedy splendor, you can join me in missing the heck out of Jon Stewart.

I do find it adorable that in his self-imposed exile, Stewart seems to have become a zeyde, still the same Jewish comedian, but older, fussier, and even more fed up with the world than he was before (nice joke about kippot there, too). I know he’s only 53, but I almost expected him to be wearing his pants up to his chest in traditional grandfatherly fashion.

After all, a large part of what made Stewart a great presence on late night TV was his uniquely Jewish attitude towards the absurd politics unfolding in front of him: There was frustration bordering on righteous anger, and a wit, and with a cynical candy-coating from a man whose people have seen it all. “You’re not crazy,” Stewart seemed to urge us, “It’s the world that is upside down.”

Years ago, I went to a taping of The Daily Show, and when the audience was given a chance to ask questions, I trotted out my then stock-prompt for Jewish celebrities about the impact of their identity on their work. Stewart told me that that it’s a part of his genes (I believe he made up a component of DNA he called “Jew-nine,”) and said that it related to his fear of being kicked out of whatever country he was in. Clearly, this Jon Stewart hiding out in a cabin in the woods still has such a genetic neurosis. And while his departure from The Daily Show wasn’t the death of comedy, it left a Jewish-sized hole (whatever that means) that’s still unfilled.

Yes, Trevor Noah has Jewish ancestry.  But regardless of how he feels about his own identity, there have been enough think pieces explaining why he’s failed to sustain The Daily Show‘s legacy. He’s no longer a substantial part of the political comedy equation.

This isn’t to say that the landscape is barren; John Oliver and Samantha Bee do fine jobs, fitting different niches in the political comedy sphere. And Bee even mentioned Sheldon Adelson on her most recent episode (though, oh, imagine how Jon Stewart might take him to task as only a member of the Tribe can). So now, we can only hope that with the release of this video Stephen Colbert’s conservative alter-ego (who then stuck around for an additional segment) will return again and again for the next several months, like a comedy Golem, called out to serve the people in our time of need.

Stewart should also come back in a more substantial way. Remember when Trump announced his candidacy, shortly before Stewart was scheduled to retire from The Daily Show? Stewart joked that the news was so absurd that he was tempted to stay. Even he couldn’t imagine then how much more surreal the campaign season would become.

Colbert teased more appearances of Stewart on his show this week, and we’ll see what that looks like. It won’t be like having him back at his old desk, but maybe he can supply us a little more of his unique, Jewish style of catharsis.

UPDATE: Oh, God. Thank you, God.

Image via YouTube

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“New Year’s Eve is like the death of a pet,” says John Oliver. “You know it’s going to happen, but somehow you’re never really prepared for how truly awful it is.”

If you’re a human being with a modicum of sanity, you too hate New Year’s Eve. Welcome. Sit. Warm yourself by the fire of internet rage. This is a safe space for us haters to hate, hate, hate, hate the following: champagne, noise-makers, confetti, desperate kisses with near-strangers at midnight, and enforced joy at the ticking over of the clock into a regular day that just happens to be called January 1. (And who needs New Year’s Eve when there’s the prayer-food-guilt-laden-fest that is Rosh Hashanah?)

Anyway! Enough of my exasperated ranting. I’m turning the stage over to Jewish comediennes Soren & Jolles, who nail everything that is heinous about New Year’s Eve in their latest video, “An Honest New Year’s Eve.” (Avid Jewcy readers may recall their displeasure at the Anne Frank House make-out scene in The Fault in Our Stars.) Enjoy! And Happy New Year, I guess, FWIW.

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Jon Stewart has been absent from The Daily Show all summer long filming in the Middle East and we’ve missed him so much. Though John Oliver was a great substitute pundit, there was a little part of us that just wanted our main man back. In anticipation of his September 3 return, Comedy Central compiled all of Stewart’s greatest Jewish moments— there are a lot of them.

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If Krusty the Klown had grown up in in Kent, England and studied Classics at Oxford, he might have become Andy Zaltzman. A politically conscious Jewish comedian whose most distinctive features are his wild fringe of orange hair and an obsession with puns, Zaltzman is one half of The Bugle, a comedy podcast that he created with fellow Brit John Oliver in 2007. Bearing the tagline “Audio Newspaper for a Visual World,” The Bugle is not only hilarious, it’s also a perfect antidote to the dull pablum of corporate television news. With weekly episodes running as long as 45 minutes, The Bugle is lively, weird, and fantastically droll. Often it feels like a more freewheeling, smarter version of The Daily Show, for which John Oliver is a writer and a featured correspondent.

Oliver’s profile in the United States has surged over the last couple years; besides his Daily Show work, he’s hosted standup specials for Comedy Central and appeared regularly on Community and in The Smurfs movie. Oliver’s busy schedule—and his home being in New York—makes it all the more impressive that he has stuck with Zaltzman, who continues to grind out a living doing standup, earning occasional TV credits, and writing a blog for ESPNcricinfo, a cricket website owned by ESPN.

But besides showing loyalty to an old friend, perhaps Oliver simply understands that Zaltzman is a brilliant comedian, one who distinguishes himself by his ability to mix low-brow, groaning humor with scabrous political satire. It also doesn’t hurt that despite the transatlantic divide between the hosts, the show remains incredibly popular, with listeners in 145-odd countries and, in 2011, an average of two million downloads per month.

Although The Bugle takes on world news—Oliver and Zaltzman take particular delight in going after the bloated pageantry of dictators like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un—it’s often at its best when skewering Anglo-American pieties. During the Olympics, Zaltzman filed near daily “micro-Bugles,” which formed a kind of alternative history to the host country’s displays of Queen-and-country empire-lite pride (“A grand effort all round by London. Just 346 years after it burned to the ground, this city has truly bounced back”)

But the pair are as well versed in American politics as those of their native England, and their episode on the LIBOR banking scandal is essential listening for its explanatory value alone. Zaltzman published a book of satire early in the 2008 financial crisis, called Does Anything Eat Bankers? which fielded financial questions from dogs and used a parable of Jesus feeding the hungry with fish fingers to explain the concept of credit. The comedian’s politics are of the left but he’s contemptuous towards any sort of party politics. He’s said that officials have been engaged in “elongated game of economic pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey” and called the US presidential election a “multi-billion-dollar squawking contest.”

But Zaltzman is a far more entertaining figure on radio (he also appears on the BBC Radio show “Tonight With Rory Bremmer”), where he’s better served by his relentless streams of cheap puns (five solid minutes is his record) and his swift back-and-forth with Oliver. The two bring out the best in one another—when together, Oliver moderates his Daily Show persona’s short temper, which has always mistaken loudness for cleverness; and Zaltzman can lean on a partner who gets his policy references and shares his gleefully self-hating attitude towards all things British.

The Bugle recently marked its two hundredth episode—“one of the greatest moments in the history of human civilization,” Zaltzman called it—and it seems unlikely to slow down. The show has survived being dropped by its former sponsor, the Times of London, and may start a membership program to recoup costs. For now it remains a highlight in what is an increasingly crowded world of comedy podcasts, radio sketch shows, and interview programs like Marc Maron’s WTF. A whole constellation of audio comedy has emerged in recent years, drawing as much on the tradition of old stage shows as on the latest sitcoms. Few of them, however, can make jokes about tax policy funny; Andy Zaltzman somehow manages.

(Art by Margarita Korol)

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The Top 10 Podcasts of 2010

There’s so much potential in the still nascent world of podcasting. We’ve seen successful podcasts sprout from the roots of pre-established media outlets as well as scrappy amateur talk shows make it through sheer ingenuity and wit.  For those of us who grew up with the movie Pump Up The Volume, with dreams of being a fleet foot radio radio sex rebel, podacsting has made those dreams easily realizable. Podcasts have the power to become the common thread that organizes and empowers the scattered, sometimes Escher-like world of information that the internet has produced.  2010 was a year where more than ever, the potential of the podcast was realized.

1. Slate Culture Gabfest

Three articulate and seasoned writers from Slate’s roster discuss news stories, TV/films, and books with enough wit to keep it entertaining, while holding back enough on the pretension just enough to keep it palatable.  At the end of every episode, each host, “endorses” a cultural artifact about which they are enthusiastic, be it a book about a TV series, article, or perhaps, an apple pie.  Whether or not you read Slate, The Gabfest hosts make for great company during your walk to work and Dana Steven’s tastes in film and TV tend to be right on the money.  The Slate Culture Gabfest is the perfect podcast for the modern discerning culture-phile.

2. This American Life

During an interview in the book Eating the Dinoasur by Chuck Klosterman, Ira Glass admits that doing his radio show as well as the TV version of TAL made him feel overwhelmed and unfulfilled.  Now, the TV show has been cancelled and Ira is back to focusing solely on the radio version, which seems apparent in the quality of recent episodes of This American Life.  Frankly, TAL is as good as it gets in the world of audio programming.  It isn’t number one on this list, because it’s as much a radio show as it is a podcast.  However, podcast listeners get the show sans commercials, which is, of course, a plus. But don’t let the numbers fool you, we like it so much, we feel the need to review it every week.

3. The New Yorker Fiction Podcast

More than any other media/art experience, when we finish a piece of literature we want to discuss. The New Yorker fiction Podcast gives contemporary fiction writers the opportunity to read some of their favorite short stories that have been published in The New Yorker and then discuss them with the magazines fiction editor.  This year has featured guests like Jennifer Egan, Cynthia Ozick and Joshua Ferris as well as stories by the likes of Donald Barthelme  and Leonard Michaels. Technology has offered few rewards to those of us who still choose to read.  The New Yorker Fiction podcast is one definitely one worth cherishing.

4. The Bugle

Think The Onion, but British.  This hilarious weekly podcast hosted by Andy Zaltzman Show corespondent John Oliver is full of enough revisionist history and wrong information, that Glenn Beck would have to tip his hat.   Check out all the episodes here.

4. Jordan Jesse, Go!

America’s Radio Sweetheart Jesse Thorne, and Boy Detective Jordan Morris, are two buddies who decided after their successful stint as college radio co-hosts, to give it a go in the world of Podcasting.  Thorne, who’s other talk show The Sound of Young America has been adopted by Public Radio, is very successful as anchor/interviewer but when Morris is thrown into the mix, there’s amazing talk radio chemistry that’s thus far unmatched.  Comedy is the thread that connects this show and often, successful comics

appear as guests (recent episodes featured Jen Kirkman and Paul Scheer), but otherwise, there’s not much of a theme, which is what makes the show’s flow and effortlessness all the more impressive.

5. The New Yorker Out Loud

On Out Loud, New Yorker writers discuss one or two stories from the most recent issues of The New Yorker.  It’s short and sweet but always fascinating and informative.  On one recent episode of Out Loud, Calvin Trillin talks for almost ten minutes about the intricacies and nuances of Poutine, enough said.

6. Ted Talks

The TED conference and subsequent podcast is one of the few shows in the podcasting world that has become a media force to be reckoned with in its own right.  Featuring a variety of talk topics in the realm of technology, economics and politics, episodes in the past few months have featured high profile guests like Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg and Julian Assange.  TED is one of those podcasts that you need to listen to in order to be in the know.

7. The Totally Rad Show

On this video podcast, three hosts discuss recent movies, TV shows, video games, and the like, but what really makes TRS notable is the unbridled nerd-passion of its hosts.  From time to time, video games and comic book chat can get a little esoteric for those outside of the geek loop, but usually the passionate discourse and quality production is well worth your attention for the span of your commute.

8. WTF with Marc Maron

Marc Maron is not a only a genuinely dark and funny guy, but a character who represents the gruff and grumpy yet hilarious New Yorker of yesteryear.  Maron’s show has featured a variety of top-notch guests including Zach Galafianakis, Aziz Ansari and Sam Lipsyte and continues to bring the thinking man’s funny to his growing listenership. [Check out our interview with Maron.]

9. Freakanomics Radio

One needn’t really be interested in economics to enjoy this podcast.  Someone who wouldn’t watch Mad Money if it were the last show on earth might still enjoy the witty and sprawling freak philosophy in which Dubner and Levitt specialize.  After all, the very reason we’re listening to a podcast instead of “All of the Lights” for the hundredth time, is expand our intellectual horizons, right?

10. Diggnation

Digg.com was once the perfect refuge for anyone overwhelmed by the vastness of the internet. A Digg reader would be likely to know what Wikileaks or Twitter was, long before the rest of the world, but after loosing a large chunk of it’s community, Digg has become much less reliable on all fronts.  On Diggnation however, there’s still plenty of interesting top stories that land on Digg before the rest, and the dynamic between charismatic yet awkward Digg founder, Kevin Rose, and his more confident and animated co-host, Alex Albrecht, is still a pleasure to watch.

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