For ‘Daily Show’s’ Jordan Klepper, comedy a tool to expose hypocrisy in polarised America

LOS ANGELES, June 18 — Skewering the oddities of President Donald Trump’s administration and his devoted American supporters has made comedian Jordan Klepper a household name in the United States, as a host of late-night satire The Daily Show.

He just wishes that the president and his followers wouldn’t make it so easy.

“There’s never a shortage of things to talk about, or characters in the orbit of Donald Trump to find humor within, but sometimes the absurdity lies more with him than it should,” Klepper told AFP in an interview in Los Angeles.

“I wish it relied a little bit more on us bringing comedy to the table. He doesn’t need to work as hard.”

Klepper is part of a revolving cast on The Daily Show who take a sideways glance at the day’s events.

He frequently goes to Trump rallies or other events in the Make America Great Again (MAGA) sphere, speaking to the faithful whose belief in the president seems impervious to facts.

“Donald Trump is a peacetime president and has never been wrong about anything, and yet we are in a war that we were promised not to be in,” he said, referring to hostilities with Iran.

“The Epstein files were supposed to be released, they are not, and yet you still have people who are trumpeting this idea of Donald Trump: ‘promises made, promises kept’.”

America’s balkanized media landscape is a major problem for the nation, Klepper thinks.

“People live in very different realities all across this country, and their realities are reflected by the news sources that they get, the friend circles they have, the social media that they interpret,” he says.

“My job is: Let’s point out that hypocrisy, have fun with it, hopefully do it from a place of empathy, but also a place of true curiosity about how people can hold certain truths that defy logic or reality.”

Late night

While US satire has tended traditionally to be a little tamer than its European counterpart, a handful of late-night shows have become redoubts over the decade-or-so since Trump came onto the political scene.

The president makes a natural target for hosts and their teams of writers, who churn out dense monologues that often have the dual purpose of informing an audience about events they might not have seen on a traditional news broadcast — all while mocking the major players.

Trump has repeatedly claimed the shows are unfair to him, and has campaigned openly for them to be taken off the air.

The 80-year-old declared victory after Jimmy Kimmel’s show was briefly suspended last year, and celebrated after the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show after three decades on the air.

As linear television shrinks in importance, many shows have cultivated audiences online, where clips can ricochet around the internet — something Klepper’s made-to-go-viral encounters benefit from.

The irony of his success coming from the same systemic design that traps people in their information bubbles is not lost on Klepper, 47.

“The algorithm speaks to us all differently. It whispers in our ears and tells us the things that we want to hear,” he says.

“We are products of the algorithms that get fed to us.”

While Klepper’s interactions with MAGA faithful are intended to highlight what he sees as the inconsistencies in their beliefs, he tries to treat the people he meets with respect.

Fundamentally, he says, it comes down to a conviction that people all over America – no matter who they vote for – have more in common than they often realize.

“I don’t have an answer as to how this country comes together,” he says.

“But I do know that we are closer in what we believe and care about than a lot of the things on our phone tell us.” — AFP