Jon Stewart took an “unsurprising” stance when he defended MAGA comic Tony Hinchcliffe following his racist jokes at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally last week, according to former Daily Show correspondent Wyatt Cenac. But as Cenac wishes he could expect better from “America’s most trusted voice.”
Cenac, who was a writer and correspondent at The Daily Show for four years, used his Substack to take on his former boss for excusing the racist jokes.
“People seemed surprised Jon’s criticism was towards the media and not Hinchcliffe, who he called ‘very funny,’ excusing the comedian’s participation in a xenophobic rally as the fault of the organizers for booking a ‘roast comedian,’” Cenac wrote. “Having worked for Jon, his response wasn’t really surprising. Disappointing but not surprising.”
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After Hinchcliffe took the stage last Sunday and called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” and joked about a Black man “carving watermelon” for Halloween, among other racially insensitive comments, Stewart shared a clip from Hinchcliffe’s set at Tom Brady’s roast on The Daily Show.
“I find that guy very funny. I’m sorry, I don’t know what to tell you,” he said, laughing at the clip. Stewart saved his fiercest critiques for Trump rather than Hinchcliffe, since “to be fair, [Hinchcliffe]’s really just doing what he does.”
Cenac said Stewart’s position on the matter is the just the latest time he’s refused to criticze other comedians, citing Stewart’s taking issue with the “algorithm of misinformation” instead of criticizing Joe Rogan’s spreading of it, or emphasizing Dave Chappelle’s good “intentions” as the trans community expressed their disdain for jokes targeted at them.
He then summed it up this way: “Jon, in his unique position, often chooses to close ranks the way cops do when a fellow officer is under investigation for impropriety.”
Cenac has a history of criticizing Stewart, going back to his time on The Daily Show. He shared on the WTF With Marc Maron podcast that as the only Black writer working on the show in 2011, he’d pointed out that a “voice” Stewart did to impersonate Herman Cain made him “cringe.” Cenac said Stewart “got incredibly defensive,” and “screamed” at him to “f**k off.”
Though he acknowledged then as he did in the blog post that he doesn’t believe Stewart’s actions come from a “malicious” place, Cenac argued that the late-night comic should hold himself to a higher “standard” when it comes to condemning his fellow comics for helping Trump bring hateful rhetoric into the mainstream.
“On Monday, ‘America’s trusted’ voice wasn’t defending comedy,” Cenac wrote, “as much as suggesting to racists [that] maybe if their hate speech had made him laugh, he might have their backs too.”
