It has been a long road for Jordan Klepper to get to this moment: another “most important election of our lives,” another Fingers the Pulse special on Comedy Central (now streaming on YouTube and Paramount+), and a regular spot in The Daily Show hosting rotation.
While most writers and comedians working in late night joke about the weird twists and turns of American politics from the comfort of a studio, Klepper walks amongst the merch-making marauders and MAGA loyalists at Trump rallies, asking questions and brandishing a resting befuddlement face when those conversations go careening off a logic cliff.
It is yeoman’s work and fascinating each time he commits himself—mind, body, and soul—to the effort of finding the funny while bringing dimension to something (and someones) others simply write off as totally unhinged. Through Klepper, however, we have gained illumination. But we’ve also seen someone dedicated to both the bit and a rejection of cynicism that is, nevertheless, tempered by realism.
Klepper isn’t trying to save the Donald Trump-loving rallygoers who he observes like a pop-political Jane Goodall. “The hat shouldn’t say ‘Make America Great Again.’ They should say, ‘I Know, I Don’t Care,’” he tells me when talking about how new information isn’t going to shake the most dedicated Trumpers who show up in these specials and Daily Show segments. Instead, they seem to have become cautionary tales for the rest of us, demonstrating what can happen if you surrender to the silo and bury both your moral compass and intellectual curiosity in the sand.
In his latest Fingers the Pulse special, titled Rally Together (which premiered last night on Comedy Central), a new element is introduced that brings fresh eyes to this seemingly intimidating army: Klepper takes Thomas Lennon as Reno 911’s Lt. Jim Dangle, playwright Jeremy O. Harris, and Guys We F**ked podcasters Corinne Fisher and Krystyna Hutchinson up close to discover, well, exhaustion—and a few things to laugh about in between crying jags.
Just hours before the premiere of his new special, LateNighter caught up with Klepper to chat about being a modern-day Sisyphus; the lessons he learned from his former show, The Opposition, and how he’s using those lessons when hosting The Daily Show; and Jon Stewart’s (newly-extended) return.
LateNighter: Comedy Central just announced that Jon Stewart will be staying on as The Daily Show’s Monday night host through 2025. After all the stuff that’s gone down over just the last week, what does it say about Stewart that he’s like “sign me up for more”?
Jordan Klepper: The guy wants to talk! He also wants to hang out with me. I think he’s had such a great time with me, Desi [Lydic], Ronny [Chieng], and [Michael] Kosta. We’re just a good hang. You don’t get this hang-out in New Jersey. Come into town. Let’s hang. Let’s talk about the end of the world together.
The Daily Show is a great institution, but graduation day comes for all of you. The opportunity to host the show and get behind a desk again after The Opposition—was that something that was necessary for you to extend your time there?
To get to sit behind that desk is a dream. I absolutely love it… To sit behind the desk of a show that I’ve been a fan of, that is a true institution, is a true honor. And with that comes being the captain of a big old ship with a bunch of talented people. Bringing your opinions and thoughts to that… and getting to have a microphone and speak to the world is a thing I don’t take lightly…
When I left The Opposition, the one regret I had was that I didn’t enjoy it. I think it was exhausting and I burned myself out trying to host that show. I got to work with so many friends and talented people and I loved doing that show, but I was always thinking about what was next. So when I first got the chance to host The Daily Show for a week, I wrote it down: You have to enjoy this. This is special. Everything ends. The entertainment industry is chaotic and people don’t get opportunities to work with friends and say what they want on a show they truly love. Enjoy the crap out of this.
I’m so grateful for the chance to host; I love it. I also love being in the field, working with my friends who are also hosting, and cheering them on. I wish I could be more cynical about it and more greedy about the things that this thing could be, but I’m totally grateful for what this thing is and it’s sort of morphed its way around the ethos of the show in a way that has been really worthwhile, I think for everyone.
It’s why you see Jon coming back. It’s why you see Desi doing so great and Kosta and Ronny. We all like each other—except for Ronny. We don’t like Ronny. [Laughs] But everybody else: we like each other and we like working on this thing together.
What’s Jon’s involvement on the non-Monday shows? Is he in the room?
Jon is hands-off. He’s here on Monday and we’re here and we’re in the morning meeting, but Jon has a vision for his show and then he’s hands-off. We’re all hands-off for the other people’s weeks. So when you come in for your week, it’s your week and you’re using the other correspondents and the rest of the news team to be a part of the week. And that’s sort of how we see it as well.
We try to be a part of the other hosts’ weeks so that we’re a part of the show as well. Sometimes we’re in joke meetings in the morning to give our two cents to try to find something fun. I’ll send Desi articles, she’ll send me articles or people or stories so that we’re making the show collectively, in that sense. But it’s hands-off when it’s not your week.
The show is complicated enough. It’s a lot of work when you’re hosting that you kind of don’t have the time to be overly democratic with a bunch of outside ideas. You’re like, ‘Alright, it’s my show. We’re all going to work together on this. Let’s go.’
Are you basically locked into this mortal cage where if Donald Trump wins, you just have to keep going out to these MAGA rallies until the end of time?
Albert Camus said, “imagine Sisyphus happy.” We all push our rock up the hill and then it comes back down. We push the rock back up yet again and yet it comes back down again. This in and of itself is life. The real world of life. You have to imagine him happy.
I walk into these MAGA events smiling and happy, and perhaps that rock will get to the top and it will just balance there and it will never come down again. Or perhaps it will roll down again and again as election results are not accepted again and again. My job, as Sisyphus, is to push that thing back up there with a big old smile on my face.
I see more of an Indiana Jones analogy. I think the large rock is still present, but I feel like you are running from the rock forever and Alfred Molina has betrayed you.
[Laughs] Yes. I have a stolen antiquity in my pocket that we’re never actually going to reckon with culturally.
So, hard turn to seriousness. How does the assassination attempt on Trump at a rally change the calculus for you going into these? Not so much logistically, but just emotionally? Because that plus January 6 would seem to make this a very different proposition than what it used to be.
You’d think. But after the assassination attempt, our show—rightfully so—was questioning whether or not everything had changed. Could we go and talk to people about this? Has the tenor shifted? Clearly there’s more danger out there, there’s a seriousness that will certainly befall the MAGA folks to talk about important issues and the consequences of dark dialogue, maybe even a referendum on gun control and access to weapons of war. Certainly, things have changed. And a couple of weeks later, you know what that assassination attempt is at a Trump rally?
Ear tampons?
It was ear tampons for a heartbeat and now it’s a goddamn T-shirt. It has become a commodity, a thing to sell, a thing to neg people you dislike, an opportunity for financial gain and rah-rah nativism. So, in some ways, I was hoping for a shift in rhetoric and conversation and in fact we braced for giving America space to have conversations around that. And you walk back into the MAGA world and it has been commodified. There’s been no self-reflection as to what it actually means or what it actually was. It suddenly became a commodity—just like that.
So you brought some friends along for the special, which is great. It’s 30 minutes though, so you can only show so much. What was the reaction of people who were seeing this for the first time in this setting? How do you talk to someone after that? What’s that conversation like?
Fascinating. It really was. When we talked about what I wanted to do for this special this time, it was like, ‘Let’s get somebody else in here that I can work with, talk to, learn from, but also see if they’re seeing it the way that I am.’ And each person had a different takeaway that we touch on in the special. But Thomas Lennon [as Reno 911’s Lt. Jim Dangle] was fascinating to see. One, how that character is beloved by everybody. He was like Santa Claus when he moved through the MAGA space. But then he talked about the things he took away from it and how it felt like it was tired to him. It felt like people had been around the block before.
Jeremy O. Harris was pretty shocked, I think, by some of the characters we engaged with. He has a quote in there that it felt like it was performance for performance sake. He says it better than I am, but essentially their presence in and of itself was validating their choices to be there; that it was sort of like a snake eating its own tail. And I think we started to get that from a lot of the folks we talked to.
People could sense this rebellious spirit, but they didn’t necessarily feel like it was grounded or specific enough. People had been doing this performance over and over and over and over again. It lacked a freshness, which we’d started to notice the last few months… You just got a lot of people whose grievances and trolling were the thing that was fueling the conversations.
I was also surprised by how Corinne Fisher and Krystyna Hutchinson from Guys We F**ked really hit it off with people. They had good conversations and they were welcomed into these conversations. Sometimes when you remove people from the fervor of the mob, and you’re face-to-face with someone and you actually have a conversation about people, you can talk. You can get away from the din and that was nice to see happen at a few different moments.
Is it hard, though, to have those conversations and realize that nothing’s changing? Everybody’s going to retreat back to their own corners and vote how they vote and think how they think and not really take anything away from it. Is that disheartening?
I think the hope that I have within it is you can connect to the people and see the people underneath that. It’s easy for them to become two-dimensional on our social media devices, but you see that they are in there.
I think you’re right: We all do retreat to these places of certainty. And then when we actually meet each other—more often than not off-camera—and talk to one another, we are like, ‘Oh, right, I know you. You’re my neighbor. You’re my uncle. You’re my cousin. I can kind of see that moment within you.’
But the world you go back into is one dictated by a Facebook feed that tells you one thing—a newsfeed that really makes you scared of “them” in some form—and a bunch of people around you who tell you how smart you are because you believe those things. That really is so dangerous and scary to me. And no matter what happens in this next election, I think we’ve created this structure of conversations right now that is based on grievance. It’s warped by social media and trolling culture and it’s bringing out the worst in people. I don’t see too many platforms where those conversations are had in more productive ways.
I want to follow up on something you said before about The Opposition. Currently, I don’t think it’s available anywhere online. Do you know anything about when, or if, that’s going to come back online or to streaming?
I have no intel about how somebody gets their hands on it. I hope it’s not lost forever. I feel if somebody finds a way to monetize that in the future, they will. And so capitalism shall bring our nostalgia back.
I’m so proud of that show. It really bums me out that there’s no access to it right now. But it is a reminder to appreciate what you’ve got when you’ve got it because just like that, it can all be—poof—gone.
I’m going to make one closing suggestion: DVDs. Merch table at a Trump rally.
You know what? It’d probably f**king kill.
I bet you can be on a T-shirt, too. You got the mugshot from that episode of Klepper.
That’s true! Alright, you know what? If Trump wins and we get another four years, thank you for the money-making opportunity.
