Recently the Jezebel blog, which is a bunch of girls with cooties, accused The Daily Show of being jerks because the staff doesn’t include enough girls and their cooties:
The Daily Show is many things: progressive darling, alleged news source for America’s youth, righteous media critique. And it’s also a boys’ club where women’s contributions are often ignored and dismissed.
If Olivia Munn, the former videogame show host introduced to Daily Show viewers three weeks ago, survives her tryout, she’ll be the first new female correspondent on the show in seven years. With the notable exception of Samantha Bee, who’s been on since 2001, female correspondents have been a short-lived phenomenon. As fiercely liberal and sharp-eyed an observer as Jon Stewart can be, getting women on the air may be his major blind spot.
Plus, they only hired Munn because she’s hot. Men!
You wouldn’t think such a call for quotas would merit a response, assuming you’re not a liberal. But Jon Stewart’s audience includes a lot of people who think it’s wrong for a private individual to hire employees based on his own instincts and experience. That’s not fair! Every workplace needs to have a certain number of this kind of person, and a certain number of that kind of person, and so on, until the pie chart isn’t all lopsided. This is especially true for an enterprise like The Daily Show. Everybody knows comedy is based on fairness.
Anyhow, TDS kinda had to respond to keep their fans from thinking they’re libertarians or, even worse, conservatives. (Ewwwww!) So they just put up something called “Women of The Daily Show Speak,” under this picture:
“Check it out, most of us have never had functioning male genitalia!” I can relate.
Here’s a bit of what they had to say:
Dear People Who Don’t Work Here,
Recently, certain media outlets have attempted to tell us what it’s like to be a woman at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. We must admit it is entertaining to be the subjects of such a vivid and dramatic narrative. However, while rampant sexism at a well-respected show makes for a great story, we want to make something very clear: the place you may have read about is not our office.
The Daily Show isn’t a place where women quietly suffer on the sidelines as barely tolerated tokens. On the contrary: just like the men here, we’re indispensable. We generate a significant portion of the show’s creative content and the fact is, it wouldn’t be the show that you love without us.
You mean I can enjoy Jon Stewart’s cutting-edge comedy, sociopolitical analysis, and yelling, without guilt that I’m enabling a tool of the patriarchy? Whew!
I especially like their closer, right before the signatures of all the women who work there and want to keep working there:
The truth is, when it comes down to it, The Daily Show isn’t a boy’s club or a girl’s club, it’s a family – a highly functioning if sometimes dysfunctional family. And we’re not thinking about how to maximize our gender roles in the workplace on a daily basis. We’re thinking about how to punch up a joke about Glenn Beck’s latest diatribe, where to find a Michael Steele puppet on an hour’s notice, which chocolate looks most like an oil spill, and how to get a gospel choir to sing the immortal words, “Go f@#k yourself!”
Wow, they really do take on both sides of the aisle!
Just kidding. They’re not obligated to mock people or ideas they don’t want to mock, anymore than they’re obligated to hire, say, more than one Asian-American. Just because their staff is whiter than a month’s worth of Tea Parties doesn’t mean they hate Asians. Why would you think they have anything against Asians? They love Margaret Cho! I’m here to say right now that Jon Stewart and the staff of The Daily Show definitely do not hate Asians, and Olivia Munn is not a token hire to throw off accusations of racism.
Although it does look suspicious…
P.S. Munn: “I’m easy to hate. I get it.”
P.P.S. This is, without a doubt, the funniest nervous breakdown I’ve read all day.