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Whether you’re laughing through the pain or screaming into the void, the U.S. Presidential Election has everyone and their MAGA-loving mother on the verge of throwing up. For “The Daily Show” correspondent Jordan Klepper, nerves are the name of the game in 2024 — even if he’d like to be talking about anything else.
“I wish there wasn’t a man baby who is a totally unserious person who runs on grievance and has been given a giant microphone and half of this country,” Klepper told IndieWire. “I wish he wasn’t talking about fascism and praising Hitler’s generals or whatever. If he wasn’t, we’d be able to craft comedy and insight about other things that people care about. But until that day happens, this is the road I have to hoe.”
For more than eight years, Klepper has come back to the campaign trail to grapple with the conflicting viewpoints of a pissed off electorate. To say nothing of the quality of his work, Klepper admits that most Americans are tired of Trump jokes. That generalized sense of exhaustion can be seen not just on the left, but also on the right — as reflected in “Jordan Klepper Fingers the Pulse: Rally Together.” That new special from Comedy Central aired on November 5, and “The Daily Show” team will be commenting on election night in a live show on November 6, set to air at 11 p.m. ET.
“That man has taken up so much space in people’s minds and lives that we could all use a breather from it,” Klepper said. “The role of the comedian is to call out the elephant in the room, read the room, and find humor within that. Donald Trump is the one who consistently walks into that room and starts taking a shit in the middle of it.”
Like so many, Klepper is feeling frustration and, at times, even rage. Speaking with IndieWire a week before the election, the comedian reflected on the so-called “jokes” made by Trump supporters like Tucker Carlson and Tony Hinchcliffe at a New York rally on October 27.
“Every time you want to move on and cast aside the ramblings of Donald Trump as incoherent or inconsequential, something else happens,” Klepper said. “Like [at Madison Square Garden], a lot of people got together and laughed at some pretty hateful things as a community. You see these conversations that happen both in public and behind closed doors, which to me are dangerous and not reflective of what I love about this country. We keep getting pulled back into that rhetoric and it reveals something about our country and the problems that we have — the deep-seated hatred and the dark side of the things that this country still hasn’t dealt with.”
In a wide-ranging discussion, blanketed both in dark humor and a sense of shared nausea, Klepper walked IndieWire through his plans for Election Night and the days to come. He also talked about the emerging “cottage industry” of political influencers, how billionaires like Elon Musk are using social media to poison American culture, and shared what he does to cope with the terror consuming his audience.
“Jordan Klepper Fingers the Pulse: Rally Together” aired November 4 on Comedy Central. “The Daily Show: A Live Election Special — Indecision 2024” goes live November 5 at 11 p.m. ET.
The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
IndieWire: In your new special, you talked about Trump having perfected a routine performance and there being a sense of fatigue from that now, even in parts of his own camp. How has your evolution of him and the political landscape he’s created changed over the years?
Jordan Klepper: It’s been interesting covering it over the last eight or so years. I started covering Donald Trump and going to rallies when Jon [Stewart] was at “The Daily Show” the first time — and I always laugh because the correspondent role at “The Daily Show” originally was one of a blowhard media personality who acts naive and goes out into the field.
Fast forward to Trevor Noah coming in and going to these rallies where now there has to be a sense of real authenticity. Trump basically ripped us away from any detached sense of irony in interacting with and covering these things. So starting out at “The Daily Show” and then playing a character on “The Opposition” and landing here now, in 2024, I just go to these rallies as myself with curiosity, trying to figure out why people believe these things or where the hypocrisies lie. I’ve seen my own evolution in that sense.
As far as looking at the movement, the special does speak to a tiredness and exhaustion within it. Part of the premise was to see what other people think of this, and each event is different. If you watched [the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on October 27], you can make an argument for there being excitement in the base — a nativist excitement.
But if you go to an event in Detroit or in Reno, we saw numbers way down. There we saw the diehards feeling really tired and going back to old talking points that Trump gave them eight years ago that they’ve spit out time and time and time again. What you are seeing, what I am seeing is dwindling numbers and a certain amount of exhaustion. And of course, conspiracy theories still abound as they did before.
You used the word “covering,” which is always an interesting nexus to get into because so many people who specialize in your type of political comedy have a complicated relationship with journalism. Do you see yourself as a journalist?
I’m not a journalist. I have total respect for journalists. I always point out that, at “The Daily Show,” good journalism is what we’re covering and what we’re talking about. We use that for our stories. A lot of our field pieces are not us discovering this field piece. They come from good journalists who will highlight a story that we then bring our comedic lens to.
Now, we take that very seriously. We do our research and go out there. But we want to analyze it from a comedic perspective — from my own perspective. I have a bias as a comedian, as a mid-westerner, as a New Yorker, as an elitist on a TV show. [Laughter.] I think what we have that some journalists don’t have is the ability to consistently hammer down on a topic and to use comedy to hopefully find moments of revelation that people wouldn’t have otherwise — with like a traditional combative interview on CNN. I use the fact that I’m a fucking improv comedian who says “yes” to ideas and makes people feel comfortable to see what happens beyond that.
More often than not, the interviews that I do start from a place of like, “Tell me more. I want to hear more.” And people get comfortable with me and they say things they might normally not say to [a journalist], but they would normally say at their dinner table with their pals or over at a bar hanging out with their buddies. To me, those are the tools that I use to get people to show themselves. Comedy is the bias that I use to try to find some humor in this thing. We are an editorial show and at “The Daily Show,” we use comedy as our bread and butter. To be clear, I came up studying math, theater, and improv comedy. Give that as much credit as you can and as little credit as you want to.
Comedy is a way for not just professional entertainers to process that existential grief, but a tool for anybody working through this massive threat to our democratic system. How have you seen the influx of meme culture and “stan” culture and shit posting play out in your interviews?
The political conversations that I’m having have turned into trolling conversations. You see what plays in the dark recesses of the internet and it’s all trolling, it’s being negative, it’s being as mean as you can to get eyeballs and attention and retweets. Those things are then taken to the kitchen tables to piss off family members to get attention, to get identity, to get character. Those things are then taken into office spaces and out into rally points.
Watching what happened at [Madison Square Garden], there’s a lot of hubbub around the things the comedians said — which were pretty dark comments about Puerto Rico and dark comments about Latinos in America. And yet again, we’re having the same conversation about, “It’s a joke. You can’t take a joke!” But to me the question isn’t whether it’s a joke or not: the joke is the tactic. It’s being accepted by so many people there because inherent in this movement is this love of trolling.
[Journalist] Adam Serwer talked about cruelty being the point. I think that is one of the most prescient articles written about the Trump administration. We can talk about what people need. They need a sense of meaning, they need a sense of community, they need their lives to be better, and they want to point at somebody else to say, “That’s the person that’s getting in the way — and it’s not me, it’s them.” That’s built into American political discourse, but we also have these phones that have created such an obsession for human beings and have warped the ways in which we communicate.
The number one way in which I see people interacting and getting a reaction is shit posting. It’s being mean. It’s being a fucking asshole. When you take that and you take that kind of speech — which is more often than not on a platform [X] that is owned by a person [Elon Musk] who is single handedly trying to get another person elected president — and then you go into a field and you talk to people, it’s like, “Oh, why are they talking about Puerto Rico like this?” you realize it’s because this is how people want to talk right now.
Trolling is not just a hobby, it’s becoming a profession for many of the folks out there. And this is the new conversation. We don’t have platforms that are enabling nuanced conversations. We have platforms that are asking you to be the worst part of yourself to get any kind of attention, and that is being controlled by some truly amoral folks who are using this shit posting to control people and to manipulate people for their own means.
That baseline business interest — manipulating the dopamine drip of people constantly needing to react and wanting to be reacted to — do you think the capitalist core of that is snapping into focus for the left? Are liberals able to talk about that more?
I think we are all becoming very aware of the way in which the attention economy is warping conversation and in some ways that’s the only thing that fricking matters. Take it away from the political conversation. In Jonathan Haidt’s book, “The Anxious Generation,” he talks about how all of these things are destroying how children talk to one another and feel about themselves and their gender norms: how those are suddenly being warped because of these machines and these platforms that are all based on whether or not they get your attention and how angry they get you. Everything filters through that.
Then look at the media. We are doing an interview right now and our jobs are based on how many people see this interview. How many eyeballs will see that? How much time does somebody spend with that? And [you, IndieWire] need to craft the headline so that it creates a story that more people click will into it. Even with good intentions, we are still at the mercy of an attention economy that feeds our worst instincts. That is something that the right has figured out and weaponized and the left is grappling with and wading into. If they haven’t weaponized it completely yet, it’s going to be the only form of battle in the near future.
Talk to me about maintaining your poker face going into the field. You’re often having to partner with other personalities and get totally on the same page with that shared veneer. Is that something that’s mostly rooted in your improv background — or is it a different art form?
That’s a great question. It is a little twofold. Part of the job is going in with a stoic persona and letting somebody else project that onto you. Early on in “The Daily Show,” the job was not to laugh at the absurdity. The job was to be serious and to be real in that moment so that you can elicit an interesting response. But these days, it is more rooted in baseline curiosity from myself and wanting these interviews to go into compelling territory.
When I walk out into the road, I’m truly curious about what this person’s going to say. In the last eight years, it’s always been something that I would prep for in New York and then am surprised in Latrobe, Pennsylvania as to what actually comes out of people’s mouths. So the improviser in me is like, “Make this person feel welcome. Say ‘yes’ to the things that they’re curious about and see what they then tell you and be open in that moment to listening and contextualizing that in an interesting and hopefully comedic way.”
Emotionally, curiosity leads the way and I do get frustrated and angry on the road as anyone does. I’d like to think I have a general compassion and empathy for the folks who are out there. It’s the people who are manipulating them that I have a real anger towards. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t moments that get intense, get pushed beyond where they need to go, and that we need to put the cameras down and walk away. That happens as well. But more often than not, the engagement is more interesting than the arguments. I can have arguments any time of day, but that doesn’t really get us anywhere.
Let’s talk advice when it comes to coping. I feel like “touch grass” is so trite at this point, but what’s the move for people feeling anxiety? What do we do right now?
You vote and you get out there. Apathy in this moment is disastrous. The culture wants you to be apathetic and not to be engaged. So I encourage anybody who feels angry to not let that have you check out, but have you invest and be a part of this conversation. Again, our phones are not a reproduction of real life. They’re manipulating us to believe one thing. What I’ve learned covering gun control for so long and the NRA is that if you show up, shit can happen. If you show up in that courtroom in the middle of the day during boring times, things can change. There’s still so much of this country that is based on the boring parts of governance that the people who show up and speak out can affect.
Outside of that, I think “touch grass” is not terrible advice. If you’ve got a kid, talk to your child. My four-year-old is not at all interested in Donald Trump — and that is really a lifeline for me. He talks about Jill Stein a lot, but I’ll take it at this point. [Laughter.]
What I’ve found, outside of drinking perhaps more than I should, is that a healthy dose of stoicism and abstract art can be a really great way to get beyond the media bubble and look at something that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense and lets your brain escape. I even feel myself just getting into this loop — this anger loop, this binary loop, this political loop — that really is hard to break your head from. It doesn’t mean you disengage, but it means you understand the wider world outside what Donald Trump and the media tries to tell you. Those have been my recipes for finding a little bit of sanity in this chaotic time.
You bring up how all of this is impacting future generations. What do you make of younger voters turning their experiences into content? You’ve got early twenty-somethings and even teenagers on TikTok going out and trying to do what you do.
There’s a cottage industry where people see this now as a way to garner attention — again, to get those eyeballs. What I’ve noticed at these MAGA events is that [influencers] become friendly with many of these folks. [Trump superfan] Edward Young is somebody I’ve known for a long time now. You talk to Edward who goes to 93 events and part of what he gets out of this is a sense of community and purpose. Q thinks that [Edward] is JFK Jr. and that has made dozens of people take pictures with him at every rally that he goes to. He likes that. He gets attention from it. A buddy of his was trying to self-publish a book and went to Edward to get his TikToks out because he has more TikTok followers and that’s a little bit of energy that he gets. I run into MAGA influencers all the time, frankly, who want to engage with me because it’s not the politics that matters, it’s the fact that they found a lane to talk about things.
Frankly, many of these people are not angry or upset. They’re just like, “I can talk about this. I have 200,000 TikTok followers or I have 50,000 Twitter fans. I have a blog post. I have four people who want to take selfies with me. Talk to me.” You see how intoxicating that is for people. They see this movement as something they can jump onto and weaponize it for their own capitalistic purposes, which in many ways is the ultimate Trump lesson — to go out there and be as loud and obnoxious as you can be, even if that doesn’t align with your inner desires and thoughts and ideologies. You can weaponize that willingness to get as much fucking money or attention as you want in a short amount of time. That feels very American, but it’s not going to lead to any place good.
The news cycle moves so quickly and yet so much of what you talk about in your latest special manages to stay current. At “The Daily Show,” how do you make sure that you’re not reacting too much to the latest headline?
When I host “The Daily Show,” I’m talking about what’s happening in the last 24 hours and we’re crafting storylines from 48 hours ago or what have you. We can move at the pace of cable news, and we are able to be of that moment. But when I do a field piece, I get to tell slightly longer stories and it feels more like, “What is the talking point of this week? Let’s see if we can contextualize that.” We can usually turn around those quick enough where that is still part of a larger conversation. And then I get to do specials like this one [“Jordan Klepper Fingers the Pulse: Rally Together”] or the one I did on Russian misinformation [“Jordan Klepper Fingers the Pulse: Moscow Tools”] where I want to do deeper dive that isn’t going to work at the desk on “The Daily Show.”
I feel very grateful that I actually have a couple of different mediums that can be reflective of the types of stories we want to tell because it’s hard to stay current. Social media makes joke-telling happen in the moment and you’re never going to be faster than what happens on Twitter. With specials, we have the luxury of a television show and a staff where we can dig deeper into stuff that hopefully has more resonance. The pieces I’ve done on like gun control for example, I wish some of those would age, but they don’t. It’s stuff that we spend a lot of time researching and piecing together so it can be weightier and stand up for a little bit longer.
On a vaguely lighter note, what’s a recent moment that gave you catharsis? A time where you said, “I just did my job” and felt gratified?
Perhaps this is hokey, but I do love my job. As chaotic as this world is, I get to watch the news at night, I get to live it outside, and then I get to come to work and sit in a room with 30 other people and we get to make something out of that. That is really satisfying. You get to add a little bit of art and context and perspective around something. It is in those moments, where we’re working as a team and we are building something.
I hosted the live show a month or so ago after the Republican National Convention, and frankly, being a part of that, it’s so easy to get into these conversations where we are analyzing American political culture. But I also got into this thing as an improv comedian who loves working with other people to try to find humor. Whenever I get to go back to finding some of that joy in the spontaneous moment and working as a team, that is the most cathartic and rewarding element of my job.
Without putting a timeframe on it, do you hope to ever leave the political realm of comedy and move into a different space?
Well, I’ve aged into it and this is what I care about now. There are different ways to talk about these things and I love exploring that, whether it’s through slightly different lenses for specials or stepping outside of it. But the things I cared about when I was 22 are different than things I care about now when I’m 45 — and I do care about the world. I care about important, big, hefty things. I care about politics and the people affected by them. So I love being in this space. I don’t feel the need to do something silly anymore, but I would love to find a little silliness that I could bring to important things. Life is short, it’s getting shorter and shorter by the minute. It feels like we’re all going to die within weeks. So I’d like to find some joy, but still talk about the things that matter.
Walk me through your plans for election night. What can we expect?
Personally, I’m expecting Donald Trump will declare victory any minute now — so that’s going to happen first. [Laughter.] I think we’re first going to deal with Donald Trump’s “victory” then election night and then whatever happens afterwards. For this show, we’re doing a big live show during election night and who knows how you even prepare for that. I think it’s just staying hydrated and rested. I’m sure this election night will be dynamic and lead into the next morning and the day after. Quite frankly, we’re all staying on our toes knowing that last time this didn’t end that night. It kept going. The story evolved. I went on the road and I went to Stop the Steal rallies. I went to January 6th. I went to those events. I’m not saying necessarily that’s what’s going to happen, but I do think American democracy is no longer a one-day event. We’re ready to cover whatever happens afterwards.
Maybe we’ll catch up again after the results. You know, assuming we both still have jobs.
For sure, November 6, let’s talk. Get it in there before the new constitution is written in blood.
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