The best episode in many moons. I laughed my ass off from start to finish. He brought out all the big guns: Asif Manvi, Wyatt Cenac and Sam Bee at the top of their game, a new correspondent named Madrigal, who seems like a good bet, and Ricky Gervais at his most irreverent. I think this was their opening broadside in the post-Santorum, Romney-Obama election battle, and they nailed it.
I stopped watching after the opening segment and forgot to ever go back, but it is a bad sign for Al Madrigal that you list him as a new correspondent since he’s been with the show for nearly a year (though not on that often).
Never seen him! But I don’t watch the show every night.
nitpick: This was the 4/11/12 episode.
Madrigal has been on the show since last May, but he’s really just now getting some airtime. I for one, think he is an awesome addition. His piece on the Mexican-American Studies ban from a couple weeks ago was excellent:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-april-2-2012/tucson-s-mexican-american-studies-ban
Jessica Williams has been pretty good. She’s got some comedy chops.
Thanks. I always watch the show the following day, so got myself confused.
Madrigal made me do a spit take with his line, “I’m sperm Hitler.”
Does anyone know if Al Madrigal is the game guy who used to work for a video game magazine about 10 years ago? When I saw him on TDS, I swore the name was familiar, and somehow managed to connect it to the video game guy from a magazine I used to read. His bio doesn’t really tell me much, so maybe one of you knows?
Don’t know but he does seem to be into video games (as evidenced by this podcast).
She is awesome. She’s the most natural and comfortable of all the new people they’ve ever had.
Al Madrigal definitely doesn’t get a lot of airtime. They usually only bring him out for Hispanic-related stories. I like him well enough, and his masturbation piece was hilarious.
Jessica Williams is easily the best addition to the crew in a long time, though. She’s funny and enthusiastic and works well with Jon and the other correspondents. The only thing I think she really needs to figure out is where to look when she’s at the desk with Jon; half the time she’s staring at the wrong camera and it looks really unnatural.
Jessica Williams is young and doesn’t have a personality yet, or at least not a persona. She seems to be trying not to get typed as the sassy black female without complete success.
Of course, I’ve never understood for a second what Samantha Bee’s persona was supposed to be, and she keeps appearing. The 90% male writers’ crew is only partly responsible, though they sure don’t know how to write for a woman.
What ever happened to Dimitri Martin? I thought he was very funny. I also saw his Comedy Central special on HBO which I thought was genius, and not like any other standup comedy special I’ve ever seen.
And yes, Al Madrigal has been on the show for quite a while already.
They also had two guys who had more or or less the same role – dumb macho guy correspondents – Jason Jones (who’s Samantha Bee’s husband, I think) and Rob Riggle. Rob seems to have disappeared lately.
Hey, they were totally different. Rob Riggle was a dumb real macho guy and Jason Jones was a dumb fake macho guy. The nuances matter!
She’s always had that extremely-ball-buster-y thing going on. And don’t the correspondents mostly write their own material? I agree Jessica Williams hasn’t completely found her voice, but I think she’s partway there. She seems like a natural.
He got his own show, which lasted a season or two. (I wasn’t a fan.) I think he recently put out a book.
He left the show a couple of years ago. I remember he was developing a show for CBS, but I don’t think it got picked up.
Samantha Bee is “extremely-ball-buster-y”? We can’t be talking about the same person.
They do their own lines while on assignment, but the studio stuff is all written.
Rob and Demetri both left in 2008 (Demetri was never a correspondent, just a contributor). I don’t know why Olivia Munn is still listed as a correspondent. She hasn’t been on the show in almost a year.
I thought Dimitri was their “youth” correspondent.
Madrigal is extremely funny. Good voice, clever, and doesn’t seem too goofy or too pompous (almost every correspondent falls into one of those two for me).
I haven’t made my mind up on Williams yet, but I haven’t been a fan so far. She’s naturally funny, but she’s being used as a “voice of the Millennials” and just plays broad cliches.