In the latest episode of his show Patriot Act, he takes on the topic of civil rights. In particular, he points out that while much attention is focused on the circus atmosphere that surrounds Donald Trump, this has resulted in little attention being paid to the deliberate dismantling of civil rights protections for minorities and LGBT communities by the departments of housing and urban development, education, justice, health and human services, and commerce.
You can see the full episode.
It’s an important topic to discuss, but I found this programme somewhat annoying when I watched it. This man simply isn’t funny. You can tell that he’s attempting humour, but all the attempts he makes fall utterly flat. His delivery is way too fast, he gesticulates too much, and he comes across as exhaustingly hyperactive. The constant shifting from one camera to another is irritating and unnecessary, and the constantly changing graphics are uninformative and distracting. Worse still, the jokes are barely jokes at all -- there is no cleverness, no wordplay, no surrealism, no wit. It’s the sort of uninspired filler act you go to a comedy night and forget immediately when the good comics come on.
And that matters, because while effective humour can vary the pace and lighten the tension when dealing with difficult and important subjects, failed attempts at humour just make them seem awkward, and diminish the seriousness of the message. Important points mixed with good jokes work -- important points mixed with bad jokes don’t. At first I thought it might have been that all the jokes dealt with peculiarly American subject matter, so there was some wellspring of humour I wasn’t getting, but then I remembered that John Oliver and Samantha Bee and Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah manage it just fine.