"My identity in this business, for me, will always be stand up.” - Jon Stewart #Clusterfest
— Clusterfest (@clusterfest) June 3, 2018
(📸: Josh Withers) pic.twitter.com/CJgBo1FbQQ
This weekend was Comedy Central's second annual festival of comedy, music, and some more comedy known as Clusterfest. The inaugural event was a pretty tough one to beat and Comedy Central pulled out some major stops to make it happen. One way they did it was to have the one and only, Jon Stewart on hand to perform some stand-up comedy for the first time in many years and before he kicks off a week run of stand-up dates with Dave Chappelle.
In addition to ending the night with stand-up, earlier in the day Stewart held an audience Q&A with the San Francisco Chronicle's Peter Hartlaub. During which he the question of former Daily Show correspondent Samantha Bee's calling Ivanka Trump a "feckless cunt," in a recent episode of her show, Full Frontal. Stewart's response was basically a call for folks to not get sucked into the outrage culture and play into the moral double standard. “They don’t give a sh*t about the word ‘c*nt,’” Stewart stated suggesting that the President "says that instead of ‘please,’ I’m guessing."
Stewart furthered, "Please understand that a lot of what the right does, and it’s maybe their greatest genius, is they’ve created a code of conduct that they police, that they themselves don’t have to, in any way, abide.” Stewart mentioned that during his time as the host of The Daily Show, he was often accused of being a “tool of the Obama presidency” after visiting the White House. Yet at the same time people conveniently forget that Trump would boast about speaking to the heads of FOX to strategize on a weekly basis. Stewart urged those in attendance to not "get caught in a trap of thinking you can live up to a code of integrity that will be enough for the propagandist right. There isn’t. And so, create your own moral code to live by, but don’t be fooled into trying to make concessions that you think will mollify them."
The comedian later ended his answer by telling people to make folks give up this "we’re the real victims" game by being the bigger person. He ended by stating that he's optimistic about the state of affairs in today's political climate due to his travels across the country he feels "the divisions that occur are real, but the toxicity is not necessarily."