Daily Show: Poigniant, Not Racist

Confession: I'm kind of obsessed with the Daily Show.

Something about Jon Stewart's nerdy-nebishy Jew shtick just gets to my funny bone. And they called Ted Kennedy the liberal lion? Stewart has the power to bring down right-wing media institutions, make you laugh until it hurts, and dissect the world's most complicated issues with eloquence and wit.

Now here's the controvertial part. Until recently, Stewart had little to no diversity on his show. It was a bunch of well educated, smirky old white comedians with a strong liberal bias. Ok, so the liberal bias is still there, but the show has gotten much better in the diversity department. He added a woman (Samantha Bee), an Indian man (Aasif Mandvi), two African American men (Wyatt Cenac, Larry Wilmore) and even.... a Brit (John Oliver)! Ok, so maybe he didn't add the two black guys until 2008 and 2006 respectively, but better late than never.

But then there was more controversy. Poking fun at criticism for his show's lack of diversity, Stewart dubbed Larry Wilmore the show's "black correspondant" in the tradition of funny correspondent names. Now why is this controvertial? To me it is so obvious that Stewart is joking, and Wilmore is leading the way on this. Racist? I think not.

Stewart constantly takles gay marriage, racism in politics and other minority issues, so maybe it wouldn't be so bad to give the guy a break. He's trying. And come on, he's the man who gave the world Steve Carrel and Stephen Colbert.