After a season of faux Fox News assholery in the name of satire, Jordan Klepper closed down The Opposition for good on Thursday’s series finale. Or, rather, as Klepper’s peerlessly self-deluding, rabidly “us vs. them” pundit declared defiantly, “The ‘thems’ at Viacom are crudely attempting to silence my First Amendment right to have a TV show.” And while this Jordan Klepper, indeed, blinked out of existence at the end of Thursday’s show (after an appropriately delusional ninja battle against anthropomorphized versions of his enemies like the Deep State and the free press), the actual Klepper’s new show should be back on Comedy Central… sometime.
So what’s a willfully blinkered conservative firebrand to do when forced to sum up a season’s worth of slyly ironic political mockery? For Klepper, the centerpiece of his last show was a secret moment of introspection. After pronouncing a George W. Bush-esque “mission accomplished!” on the right-winger’s mission to install Donald Trump in the White House and steamroller American democracy, Klepper announced gleefully, “The good guys won!,” and threw to commercial. Except, after making sure all the Comedy Central liberals (the ones who giggle at the network’s more regular, Time Traveling Bong-style fare) had fallen for his ruse, a suddenly panicky looking Klepper had a different message for his MAGA-capped fans.
Throwing up a montage of all the people on conservatives’ side these days (murderous dictators, white supremacists), the unnerved Klepper launched into a wild-eyed speculation on how, in fact, maybe “the bad guys won.” Noting that Trump buddies Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un murder people (while White House advisor Stephen Miller “definitely has dreams where he murders people”), Klepper allowed his blowhard’s reality-averse shell to crack bit by bit, as he confronted the fact that, not only have “the good guys” put kids in cages, they also supported an accused child molester for senator, which is not a good-guy look. That those defeated by the “good guys” include teachers, Gold Star Families, “the most vulnerable,” Canada, NATO, scientists, political experts, and “all professional athletes except Dennis Rodman” gave the sweaty Klepper pause too. As he pointed out concerning the White House’s continued mockery of sometime critic John McCain, “We had a choice to side with a Republican war hero or brain cancer—and we chose brain cancer.”
Klepper (the actual Klepper) has expressed relief at being freed from this season-long experiment in Colbert Report-style abusive irony, and, in putting “Jordan Klepper” out to pasture (where he can fight those imaginary ninja feminists for all eternity), he feelingly allowed his alter ego a moment of clarity. After admitting that the “lock her up” chanters of the campaign trail now find themselves feeling like the dog who caught the car (and then didn’t know what to do, so then “panic-fucked the car”), he suggested that “maybe how you get those things also matters.” Luckily for this Jordan Klepper, his less-conflicted past self called to him, reasserting his comforting “word blankie” mantra, “May you only hear from others what you’ve already been telling yourself.”