Sunday 26 September 2010

Union busting - Daily Show edition



From The Daily Show. Their intrepid reporter finds that UFCW Nevada hires temporary workers at minimum wage with no benefits to protest outside WalMart against WalMart's work conditions, then cuts their hours without compensation because the union guy who would deliver their placards two days a week is on holiday.

The Daily Show was featured in New York Magazine recently:
It’s hard to top a kick in the nuts.

Especially when the kicker is Linda McMahon, the Connecticut Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate. Pure comedy gold.

Jon Stewart watches the tape and doubles over with laughter. He and fifteen of The Daily Show’s writers, producers, and performers are gathered around a 40-inch flat-screen TV inside the show’s Eleventh Avenue offices early on a Thursday morning in August. Creating a segment for tonight’s Daily Show around this footage, from one of World Wrestling Entertainment’s harmless little skits, would seem to be easy. Maybe they can just run the nut shot repeatedly. Along with another clip of McMahon, the co-founder and former CEO of WWE, chugging a beer and drooling foam down her cheek.

Except that the goal here isn’t simply topping the kick in the nuts—it’s using the scrotum slam in the service of a larger point. Oh, Stewart & Co. enjoy a lowbrow laugh as much as the folks over at South Park; heck, next week they’re publishing a book that includes some excellent masturbation jokes. But Stewart and The Daily Show became America’s sharpest political satirists by aiming at least a little bit higher.
The whole article is excellent.

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