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| Late night hosts lament Charlie Hebdo tragedy: Comedy ‘shouldn’t be an act of courage’ | |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| Jon Stewart sobered up again on “The Daily Show” on Wednesday night to reflect on the tragedy of the terrorist attack at the Paris office of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, which left some of France’s most notable journalists dead. | |
| “I know very few people who go into comedy as an act of courage,” Stewart said. “Mainly because it shouldn’t have to to be that. It shouldn’t be an act of courage, it should be taken as established law.” | “I know very few people who go into comedy as an act of courage,” Stewart said. “Mainly because it shouldn’t have to to be that. It shouldn’t be an act of courage, it should be taken as established law.” |
| “But those guys at Hebdo had it, and they were killed for their cartoons,” he added. | |
| Twelve people were killed when gunmen stormed the newspaper’s headquarters in Paris on Wednesday. Among the dead were the paper’s editor, Stephane Charbonnier, and several notable cartoonists. | |
| Other late-night hosts chimed in, noting that their jobs — to poke fun at people who are often viewed as untouchable — make this tragedy all the more chilling. | |
| “In this county we just take it for granted that it’s our right to poke fun at the untouchable and the sacred,” Conan O’Brien noted. “It’s a right that some people are inexplicably forced to die for.” | |
| The deaths at Charlie Hebdo have forced people around the world to “think twice before making a joke,” O’Brien said. | |
| “That’s not the way it’s supposed to be,” he added. | |
| Speaking on Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show, Bill Maher, who described himself as a “satirist,” took it even further. | |
| “To bring it home to us, because we are satirists — and I am a satirist who deals with this subject particularly – it’s kind of scary that some people say you cannot make a joke,” Maher said. “We have to stop saying, ‘Well, we should not insult a great religion.’ First of all, there are no great religions; they’re all stupid and dangerous. And we should insult them, and we should be able to insult whatever we want. That is what free speech is like.” | |
| Stewart’s comments came in the opening moments of the show, in which he noted that 2014 had not been a “great year for people.” | |
| It is a “stark reminder that for the most part, the legislators and journalists and institutions that we jab and ridicule are not in any way the enemy,” Stewart added. “For however frustrating or outraged the back and forth becomes, it is still back and forth, a conversation among those on, let’s call it, ‘team civilization.’” | |
| “But this kind of violence only clarifies this reality,” Stewart noted. | “But this kind of violence only clarifies this reality,” Stewart noted. |
| Jon Stewart: | |
| The Daily Show Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Daily Show on Facebook | The Daily Show Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Daily Show on Facebook |
| Conan O’Brien: | |
| Bill Maher: |