Thaindian News

WASHINGTON, D.C. (BNO NEWS) – Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, comedian pundits on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, on Friday said that their respective Rally to Restore Sanity and March to Keep Fear alive is not in counter to Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally event held in August.

Stewart said that the march is like everything that he and Colbert do on their shows, and is just a construct to translate the type of material they do. He said that the rallies are meant to satirize the political process, as well as the news coverage that often spurs from it.

“I’m less upset about politicians than the media,” Stewart said, according to The Hollywood Reporter, noting that he wanted to avoid claims that his rally was in response to Beck’s. He further indicated that he didn’t want to ridicule political activism. He said that the politicians are expected to behave a certain way, comparing them to monkeys, but said that the media should play zookeeper and say “bad monkey” when necessary.

When asked if he was worried about possibly taking away from a march organized by people like The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), he said “Yeah, tough shit.” He claimed that helping unions or any political organization wasn’t his job, adding that “We are not warriors in their cause.”

The Rally to Restore sanity website says to “think of our event as Woodstock, but with the nudity and drugs replaced by respectful disagreement; the Million Man March, only a lot smaller, and a bit less of a sausage fest; or the Gathering of the Juggalos, but instead of throwing our feces at Tila Tequila, we’ll be actively not throwing our feces at Tila Tequila.”

Conservative host Bill O’Reilly declined, while on the Daily Show, to appear at the rally. President Barack Obama, on the other hand, said that he was amused by the idea. He spoke to students on Thursday about how the media had become “very splintered,” with extreme tones from both conservative and liberal commentators. During that exchange, he noted that Jon Stewart would host the rally and said that Stewart’s point was that seventy percent of people are working class Americans that are “working hard every day, they’re looking after their families.”

During an event, Stewart indicated that he may leave the show sometime in the future after an audience question posed the idea that the show would have to end at some point. He mentioned a return to standup as a possibility after noting that The Daily Show was “invigorating” but “exhausting”, but didn’t give any time frame.