Inaugurating Stewart

No one really knows how many people attended the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.

According to John Stewart’s calculations, there were about 10 million people in attendance.

While his judgment is sound, more traditional news outlets have the count around 215,000.     

The permit obtained by Comedy Central was only for 60,000 tempered individuals to protest the nasty rhetoric of Washington.
 
Instead, hundreds of thousands more showed up.
 
Spilling out from the designated rally area these rational men and women hung from trees and sat on porta-potties to get a better view of the scene. 
  
But what was the spectacle really?  Well, nothing more then a glorified skit. 

(Full disclaimer, I didn’t attend the rally. However, I did stream the entirety of the event on Comedy Central’s website in HD, so thank you Viacom for embracing the future of television.)

But even watching the rally on a computer screen, I could still sense the tension in the crowd.

The apprehension of the multitude as musical acts filled up the first hour of the afternoon. Their uneasy enthusiasm when the hosts from Mythbusters referred to them as “20 million pounds of meat.”

The tension lifted, ever so slightly, when Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert took the stage.

Their familiar presence and disregard for the politically correct seemed to sooth the crowd.

But there were missteps, some jokes fell flat and interactions with the guests that weren’t as powerful as it would be with a studio audience.

Take for example, the last skit where Colbert hijacks Stewart’s keynote speech and then “kills” him with a video montage.

The sketch drags on and Stewart appears unengaged throughout the segment as though realizing that at this point, we all get the point.

But glimpses of brilliance were seen throughout.

The Medals of Reasonableness and Fear-y’s were poignant moments in the event that offered though provoking material. 

It wasn’t until John Stewart shooed all the actors off the stage and casually addressed the crowd that it at all suddenly clicked.

In his own, eloquent way, Stewart waxed poetic about the state of our nation. He exemplified the common folk, extolling the little compromises we make every day to persevere.

And, he criticized the Washington and media establishments, who failed to do so even when that’s all we ask from them.

So this is what we all tuned in for. To watch John Stewart finally embrace the role of a pundit.

While many have argued that he had been there all along, this was the first time that he himself acknowledged the fact that he was stepping up to the role.

Perhaps it was a little grandiose of him to do it in a rally, but we’re all still talking about it, aren’t we?


E-mail: danfleis@indiana.edu