SpicyTricks

Jon Stewart, the host of The Daily Show, is one of my favorite comedians. I watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, late-night TV shows on Comedy Central, every Monday through Thursday. The shows relentlessly make fun of politicians and global events using biting satire. I recently became aware of an event at the Durham Performing Arts Center (DPAC) called An Evening With Jon Stewart that took place March 2. I jumped on the chance to see one of my idols live, and I’m glad I saw him. The show was hilarious, and my sides still hurt hours after the show ended because I laughed constantly at Stewart’s jokes.

I almost wasn’t able to go to the show. The events leading up to my arrival at the DPAC were miraculous, and, if it wasn’t for the kindness of multiple strangers, I would never have been able to see Stewart. I learned about the show in late February, after the tickets were sold out. Some people were scalping tickets at extremely high prices, trying to make desperate fans pay double or triple the original cost of the tickets. My parents told me that they’d only buy reasonably priced tickets.

One week later, a day before the show, I gave up on finding tickets. I grudgingly accepted the fact that I’d probably never get to see Stewart while I was in high school. As I sat in my room, upset about the show, my mom knocked on my door. A woman had been on a waiting list for tickets and she had an extra. She sold it to my mom at slightly over face value, which was much cheaper than any other tickets we’d seen.

My parents didn’t buy a ticket, because the woman only had one to sell, so I had to watch the show on my own. The DPAC is a pretty large theater, and I was lost the minute I walked in. Kind attendants helped me to my seat, which was in the front row of the highest balcony. The employees at DPAC were great, and they definitely enhanced my experience at the show.

Stewart was about ten minutes late, but I was so excited to see him that I barely noticed the delay. When he ran out onto the stage, the audience rose and cheered for him. He immediately began cracking jokes about the pope and said that America “is a popeless country.” The jokes were even funnier than the pope jokes he made on The Daily Show a few days later.

After he made a few more remarks on the pope, he moved on to the sequester. He explained why he believed that Democrats gave up much more than the Republicans. The Democrats said that, if the government wasn’t going to operate effectively, they’d pass a bill imposing harsh spending cuts on education and medicine. The Republicans, who often argue in favor of spending cuts in these areas, pretended like they were scared of cutting spending. Stewart implied that Republicans were actually extremely happy about the cuts, because they were able to cut spending in areas they wanted to cut spending in without suffering from the sequester themselves. “What were [the Democrats] thinking?” Stewart asked at one point.

Stewart discussed many other subjects at the show, including parenthood. “You’ve created an entire new being that thinks you’re amazing. Kids think their parents are amazing. Especially when they’re little. When they’re little, you’re Superman.” He described having kids as a chance to ruin someone from scratch. Stewart has two kids, a boy and girl, and he said that girls are sophisticated and charming. When he had a boy, he realized that “boys are idiots.” He told the audience a story about a ‘joke’ his son played on him that wasn’t even slightly funny, but I can’t remember the story.

Stewart also discussed video games. Earlier in the show he decided that the audience was as nerdy as him, and we proved him right. The discussion started when a girl asked him why he isn’t on Twitter. He told her that he has a television show. He started talking about video games, and he said that he’s currently playing Borderlands 2. Almost everyone in the audience cheered loudly when he said this. He said that he likes video games because “I like saving the world, for the most part, and I like waking my wife up at 4 o’clock in the morning and going *excitedly* ‘I saved the world!’ And then I like her going ‘Have you been playing for seven hours?’ And I’ll be shrinking away going *dejectedly* ‘I saved the world.’”

He also talked about how quickly computers become outdated. He bought a computer from a store and an employee said that it had “the same computing power that they used to launch the space shuttle. What? That’s so great because I have a space shuttle.” He bought the computer and played all of his games on it. Five months later,  he bought a new game and he discovered that “this game is more complicated than the space shuttle.” The computer froze up when he put the game in it, and he ended up having to return the computer. Employees looked at the five-month-old computer when he brought it in like it was ancient, and he realized that he’d never be able to have the newest computer for more than a few weeks.

The show lasted for over an hour, so there are many other topics Stewart discussed. These were most of the major segments. He talked about the Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear, and said that he probably will not do another one because the last one was so difficult to put together. He also discussed an inappropriate piñata video he found online. Everything in the show was hilarious. It was one of the best experiences of my life, and I’d go back again in an instant. If you like The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, or any political satire, you should definitely see one of Jon Stewart’s stand-up shows.