Jon Stewart: Obama's Race Speech "Spoke to Americans as Though They Were Adults" [VIDEO]

By Rachel Sklar, Huffington Post
Posted on March 20, 2008, Printed on December 5, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://www.huffingtonpost.com//80316/

Jon Stewart and the Daily Show gang have had easier targets of mockery than Barack Obama delivering one of the most warmly received speeches of the campaign (if not that most warmly received speech — though it's duking it out with Barack Obama after winning the Iowa primary and Barack Obama after winning the South Carolina primary). Still, they gave it their best shot, even including a "Whatchoo talkin' bout, Obama?" and imagining how crazy it is over the holidays with all of Obama's many multi-ethnic and "many-hued" smörgåsbord of relatives running around. Yeah, I said smörgåsbord.



The clip also showed the difficulty in joking about "black anger"; a joke involving locking the car didn't quite hit (in our estimation), and the response to a KKK sight gag can onloy be described as "clapter." Still, it all fell away at the end when Stewart revealed how he really felt about the speech when he let the arch, eyebrow-cocked exterior fall for a moment and quietly marveled at the fact that "at 11:00 on a Tuesday, a prominent politician spoke to Americans about race, as though they were adults." Was it Jon Stewart funny or Tina Fey funny? Watch it to your right and decide for yourself.

Rachel Sklar is the Media & Special Projects Editor for the Huffington Post and is the editor of the site's Eat The Press page.

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