Last night, The Daily Show host Jon Stewart decided to skip jokes during the first segment of the show to comment on the tragedy in Charleston, South Carolina Wednesday night. Nine people were killed at a historic African-American church and later, the suspect, Dylan Roof, 21, was arrested in North Carolina.
In recent months, Stewart has had to turn serious on a show that is supposed to be about comedy. On Thursday, Stewart told his audience that he did not do his job, which is supposed to be making jokes about the news.
“Maybe if I wasn’t nearing the end of the run or this wasn’t such a common occurrence, maybe I could have pulled out of the spiral, but I didn’t,” Stewart said. “And so, I honestly have nothing other than just sadness that, once again, we have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other in the nexus of just a gaping, racial wound that will not heal, yet we pretend it doesn’t exist.”
Stewart called this an act of terrorism and he fears that nothing will actually be done. What “blows my mind is the disparity of response between when we think that people who are foreign are going to kill us and us killing ourselves.”
“I hate to use this pun, but this one is black and white,” he later told viewers. “There’s no nuance here.”
He later noted that irony of black citizens in South Carolina driving on roads named after Confederate generals and that the Confederate flag still flies over South Carolina. His guest on the night was Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, who he said was the best person to talk to after the attack.
Watch the full segment below:
Roof allegedly shot nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Gov. Nikki Haley has already called for the death penalty in the case and called it a hate crime, notes The New York Times.
screenshot from Comedy Central video