On Saturday, Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly held a debate. This in and of itself isn’t anything new, but what made the event special is that it wasn’t on either The Daily Show or The O’Reilly Factor — it was in Washington DC, and the only way you could watch the “Rumble in the Air-Conditioned Auditorium” was online. We sent our good writer friend Alexis Hauk, who has written for the Boston Phoenix, Time Out Boston, Washington City Paper, and the Atlantic, to cover the shindig. Here’s what she had to say.
It’s not every day that a debate can make your whole worldview shift in an instant. But folks, I’m here to tell you: the Rumble in the Air-Conditioned Auditorium did just that. And all in one measly press conference.
But first, let’s go back to a more innocent time — the “rumble” itself.
First point of awesomeness: I was seated in the midst of a healthy clusterf*ck of bros who hooted and hollered at everything that O’Reilly said, defying the expectation that everyone in the audience would be Daily Show die-hards. Lucky me! My favorite bro-quotes (or broques, if you will) of the night included:
“Doesn’t leave much room for my nuts!” – Bro 1, sliding into his seat.
Bro 1’s Brolleagues, trying to hash out some questions for Bill and Jon: “How do you spell affairs?” “A-f-f-a-r…no — i. Sh*t man, I’m drunk.”
When the guy who admonishes people to turn off their cell phones came out onstage and quipped that anyone caught heckling too much would be greeted outside by frat guys with paddles, the bros behind me chuckled, “Yeah. BEEN THERE.”
Then, when the moderator, one in the television news species of Babely Blonde Broad(caster), E.D. Hill, walked onstage, the bros (and their squelched-in-the-seat nuts, one supposes) snapped to attention.
Bro 1: “Oh yeah. I have a question for HER.”
This was followed by the bro-sensus that, given her womanly attributes, she surely works for Fox News, not CNN. They came to this conclusion via some misogynistic algorithm I’m LITERALLY afraid to explore in writing. Of course, the truth is that Hill has worked for both Fox News and CNN. So take that, sexism!
Moving on, here’s what we learned about Bill O’Reilly:
Dude has a crazy beef with Bill Moyers. Like, to the point that it made me wonder what kind of catty move Moyers pulled on O’Reilly back in the day. Did he elope with O’Reilly’s grandma? Sell meth to O’Reilly’s cat? (And yeah, I could Google research this, but…that would be journalism?)
Anyway, to illustrate that PBS is an evil that should be treated like a golf-ball-sized kidney stone, O’Reilly held up a sign with a picture of Moyers that said, “We are paying this guy.” Later, he said that, “Bill Moyers needs help — but not economically.” Then even later, he said, sarcasm dripping, that Moyers was the most reliable journalist working today.
Like Moyers, O’Reilly also has a grudge with Georgetown Law Student/notorious birth control freeloader Sandra Fluke, and invoked this presumption about her more than once (to the delight of my seatmates — what fun they were to sit with!)
As rebuttal, Stewart jumped in quickly with, “My friend, Mr. O’Reilly, is completely full of sh*t.” Then he pointed out that Ms. Fluke was actually advocating for insurance companies to cover birth control the same way they cover Viagra. After that, we managed to crawl back out of the Quantum Leap time worm hole that had transported us back to February 2012, before legitimate rape had eclipsed taxpayer-funded birth control as the hotbutton War on Women issue of the day.
Anywho!
O’Reilly doesn’t agree with Romney’s assertion that 47 percent of America are slackers. Meh, he believes it’s more like 27 percent. But “it’s a growing industry.” He also said/joked at different points that (a) he liked Obama and wanted to shoot hoops with the Prez; (b) what happened with Bush is in the past so GEDDOVERITALREADY; and (c) SPOILER ALERT, believes we never should have gone into Iraq (to which Stewart cried out: “Somebody better livetweet that, motherf*ckers!”).
What else did I glean? That O’Reilly really thinks the fact that lots of people have arthritis is a problem. Like, maybe a Moyers-level problem that’s bringing us down. And people’s teeth are falling out in Britain = argument against socialized healthcare. (To that we kindly submit counter-point, Kate Middleton).
“A good portion of this country is living in an alternate universe,” Stewart opened, beginning a hilarious allegory about a place called “Bullsh*t Mountain.”
“The winters on Bullsh*t Mountain are long and cold. And Christmas is under threat.” O’Reilly, Stewart said, is the “mayor” of Bullsh*t Mountain, but “I know you don’t live there year-round. I believe you have to leave for provisions. And you have a summer home.”
The best moments of the night were when O’Reilly and Stewart got personal. At one point, Stewart asked O’Reilly about his dad, who had colitis and had applied for disability help from his company.
“What do you do if your company doesn’t provide that?” Stewart asked.
“I don’t begrudge anyone asking for help that needs it,” O’Reilly defended.
“You’ve been begrudging all night,” Stewart snapped back. “Why is it that if you take a tax break for your company, you’re a smart businessman. But if you take something you need to not be hungry, you’re a moocher?”
“We’re an entitlement nation,” Stewart said later. “Have you ever seen Oprah’s Favorite Things?”
“If the U.S. was burning, what famous person would you save?” Bill O’Reilly said Oprah. Stewart said, “Uh, my family.”
What did they agree on? That drones and waterboarding both pretty much suck. And they can both dig on some Robert Kennedy.
Other choice quotes:
“Fox News is the Lupus of news.” – JS
“We’re only as good as the weakest link. (So) only as good as CNN.” – BO
“If you walk out of Fox News, it looks like Santa exploded.” – JS
“You won the war on Christmas.” – BO
Funniest ongoing gag: Stewart had a platform that he could raise and lower at will to equal O’Reilly’s significant height advantage.
Best uses of physical comedy: When Stewart hopped on O’Reilly’s lap, and O’Reilly responded, “What would you like for Christmas little boy?” And when O’Reilly said he thought Clint Eastwood would make a good president, and Jon Stewart knelt down to speak to imaginary Clint in an empty chair, a la the director’s bizarre RNC speech. “You want me to do WHAT? Dirty Harry…”
The thing that became most clear amid all of this verbal sparring is that, dude, these guys LIKE each other. When O’Reilly started talking about going on a “double date” with Israeli prime minister Netanyahu during the Iran/Middle East portion of questions, Stewart just about lost it. When he got called out for making a casual reference to Jerry and the Pacemakers, O’Reilly quickly changed his example to Lil Wayne.
In the end, this odd couple camaraderie was what made the 90 minutes of talk engaging—the sight of two friends who enjoy each other but have absolutely no idea how to understand the world the other inhabits (Bullsh*t Mountain or not).
***
The above was all that I had set to write when we finished up the Rumble. All wrapped up and ready to go.
But then we get to the press conference afterward and something crazy happened. A rumble in my air-conditioned perception of right and wrong and good and evil happened.
Several years ago, Fox News took a stab at a Daily Show-like program called Half Hour News Hour, which was canceled before the year was out and now enjoys a 2.1 average rating on IMDB. Like, it was bad. So I was dying to ask, in light of this, what both O’Reilly’s and Stewart’s responses are to the idea that conservative humor is somehow innately not as funny as liberal humor. Finally, I got a chance to ask my question.
And here was Stewart’s response: “That’s just silly.”
THAT WAS IT.
But then O’Reilly turned to me and made an attempt to answer it as if it wasn’t a silly three-word-response kind of question: “Some things work, some things don’t. The beauty of this is if you get two successful programs, Stewart’s program and my program, and you put it on in a much less constrained format and you just see what happens. I didn’t know about the mountain of the molehill that he was gonna do — thank God because I would have been on the first train back to New York.”
So there was the twist of events. While I may not like much of what O’Reilly has to say about the poor or women or people of color or the gays or karma or Katrina or…OK, you know what? I find everything that comes out of his mouth on his show pretty deplorable/unfact-y. But in this instance, he was the one who did not make my question seem unworthy of his time.
Touche, Papa Bear. Touche.
Follow Alexis Hauk at @fullofshark.
