Jon Stewart returns from the brink to ask where the Republican’s A-game went

What a difference a week makes. As performed by Jon Stewart in his Tony-eligible one-person show, Woe On The Shtetel, the Democrats’ reversal of fortune election-wise has turned his fear into excitement, his despair into hope, and his focus back to Republicans. After Joe Biden dropped out of the race, Democrats around the country began vomiting uncontrollably as they experienced something resembling hope for the first time, we don’t know, 15 years?

Throughout this “It’s Joever” period, The Daily Show has been a tough watch. It’s always funny, but coupled with Democratic lawmakers announcing that they’ve thrown in the towel, those old 2017 feelings were creeping back in. Oh, the despair. Oh, the horror. Oh, the tackiness of Trump’s America. Then America got coconut-pilled, and the Democrats finally realized, hey, these guys are weird.

The “weird” debate still rages on the American social media landscape, where Republicans insist they’re not weird by doing weird things, like obsessing over genitals and whether or not strangers want to have kids or not. But here on The Daily Show, Stewart focused on what conservatives would do to combat this airtight “they’re weird” argument. First, they spent the week saying replacing the candidate amounted to an unfair coup, which is pretty rich coming from the January 6 guys. Then they moved onto that old chestnut misogyny and accused Harris of “sleeping her way to the top.” But when that got a little too complicated, they went for classic, tried-and-true racism. Play the hits, that sort of thing. But their calls of “DEI hire” were confusing their other argument. Kamala is bi-racial, so they’ve started saying she’s not actually Black or something. Faced with the reality of campaigning against someone from multiple ethnic backgrounds, former President Trump brought out the big guns and called her “lyin’ Kamala.” Don’t worry. He made sure to let everyone know how “lyin’” is spelled. That’s right, this bad boy is done with the letter G.

Yeah, they got nothing. Stewart and his crack news team dug through a whole week of clips from Newsmax to Fox, from Meghan Kelly to Ben Shapiro, only to learn that Kamala Harris is, get this, a Black woman (or as correspondent Josh Johnson puts it, “She’s B-l-a-a-a-a-c-k!”).

Two weeks ago, when it was looking like one of the oldest, sleepiest, and most incoherent guys on Earth were our choices, things were pretty bleak. Stewart notes that Democrats have something better to look forward to: a statistical tie.