nate corddry

The Gay Pride Parade took place in Greenwich Village over the weekend (making Jon feel very out of shape). Jon joked (I hope?) that he thought, "I bet my son would love a parade!" and took his little boy to the festivites. Jokes about juggling balls and balloon animals ensued.

Jon Stewart started off with some joke about auctions. It was a reference to an eBay comment from the pre-show warm-up, so the audience was pretty excited to hear it. I suppose it was nice that he began with a light joke because what came next was absolutely horrifying. They rolled a clip of Connie Chung's farewell from Weekends with Maury and Ohmigod What Have They Done with Connie Chung?! It was... disturbing, to say the least. If you really feel like watching the mess that is Chung rolling around on a piano, YouTube has video. The pianist looked too busy feigning enjoyment to actually play the piano.

"Sheikh's Feet Under": Big news! Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi (aka Stinky) has been found dead. When Donald Rumsfeld made the announcement, he sounded a little choked up because it's the first thing he's done right. The news was accepted quietly, but the press conference in Iraq was met with cheers. Correspondent Samantha Bee explained that the death of Zarqawi and eight other martyrs is going to make for a sucky day for virgin wranglers in Heaven. Some of the lower ranking guys probably won't get full complement... the cherry orchard may have a few bruised fruits... some of those girls might be whores.

Many of you speculated in the Saturday Night Live finale post that Tina Fey's celebration during Weekend Update and her "Thank You" t-shirt meant she was leaving. Well, according to this article, Fey has yet to make a decision on whether or not she will be abandoning her post on SNL as head writer and Update co-anchor.

I guess people assumed that she would need to leave to dedicate herself to her new show, 30 Rock... Or maybe she was going to leave, but changed her mind once she saw all the buzz for Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a show with a very similar premise. Hmm, very curious, indeed. We'll just have to wait and see what she decides. In the meantime, a warning to Fey: Look out. Aaron Sorkin can smell fear.

The FBI recently dug around a farm to look for the body of Jimmy Hoffa. Well, finally. We were wondering what happened to him. Jon Stewart managed to throw in a Sopranos reference, suggesting Hoffa is still alive and well in New Hampshire with his volunteer-fireman partner. If the FBI finds Hoffa soon, that means we'll get Osama by 2047... if we're lucky.

According to The Futon Critic, FOX ordered six episodes of The Winner, starring The Daily Show correspondent Rob Corddry, effectively wiping Comedy Central clean of all Corddrys (little bro Nate is on Aaron Sorkin's new show at NBC). The Winner is about a successful man who looks fondly back at 1994, when he was 32 and a slacker living at his parents' home. It was co-created by The Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane. It's a bummer to see Corddry go, but hopefully that means we'll get to see more John Hodgman.

FOX also picked up 13 episodes of Happy Hour, a comedy that sounds like a modern-day Odd Couple about two thirty-something roommates.

Not surprisingly, FOX also has renewed The O.C. for a fourth season. Those crazy Orange County kids will be going off to college, but it appears the writers may be breaking with teen-angst drama tradition and sending them to different colleges in different towns. FOX also picked up 13 more episodes of The Loop and more of The War at Home, though it's not clear how many episodes it ordered.

A few days ago, Jon started by poking some fun at the Terre Haute, Indiana's weatherpeople because they were wickedly competitive, airing attack ads against rival stations' weather teams. Well, Terre Haute's locals caught the jokes (they have cable in Indiana?) and the general manager that helped to make the commercial said that The Daily Show "must have been pretty hard up for material... I didn't quite understand the point." Jon sobbingly apologized for making fun of their precious weatherpeople and proceeded to show a clip of him doing something more meaningful with his time (he went to a hospital to cheer up a sick little boy by showing him the attack ad... Unfortunately, the little boy -- who looked more like twenty than ten -- died from laughing too hard at the stupidity). What have you done, Terre Haute?!

Jon started off with some coverage of weatherpeople on local news, specifically those from Terre Haute, Indiana's WTWO. They showed a couple of funny clips of WTWO bragging about their 45 years of combined weather experience, totally PWNing rival channel WTHI's puny 30 years. "Man! I bet they can't tell snow from dingleberries!"

Hey, here's news that probably won't shock you. NBC has picked up Studio 60 on Sunset Strip, the new Aaron Sorkin-Thomas Schlamme show starring Amanda Peet, Matthew Perry, Bradley Whitford, Timothy Busfield, Steven Weber, DL Hughley and Nate Corddry. The show is set behind-the-scenes of a Saturday Night Live-style sketch comedy show. Perry and Whitford will play the head writers and Peet will play the new entertainment chief who "inherits a massive public relations disaster on the series."

Mexico's Vincent Fox is planning for the legalization of several drugs in small amounts for personal use. Yup, this will include cocaine, heroine, and marijuana (craziest Spring Break ever). Jon was kind enough to warn us to drink only the bottled bong water in Mexico. He also showed us that the legalization will serve very well with our immigration issue: Mexicans will keep flocking to America for jobs, Americans will flock to Mexico to get hammered and fall into the Gulf. Excellent.

Jon Stewart first touched upon the news of Anna Nicole Smith's Supreme Court trial. First trial to ever use the words "in consideration of the plaintiff's stupendous bazongas..." I thought it was "gazongas". Hm. Maybe I don't know my different boobie-words as well as I thought.

When Jon mentioned that the night's guest was going to be Natalie Portman, the audience seemed really excited. She was here to promote her new movie, V for Vendetta, which, as Jon noted, is rarely seen in children's books. "V is for Vendetta! Billy carried out a 'vendetta' against all those that he thought had wronged him!"...  "V is for Vagina" is also surprisingly rare.

In these dark times, it is always nice to find some news to be giddy over... Jon Stewart was kind enough to remind us that there are less than a thousand days until the 2008 elections. Of course, there was much rejoice in the TDS crowd.

"Indecision 2008 -- Poll Dance": The victor from the Tennessee straw poll was none other than Senator Bill Frist. Yup. That Bill Frist. The audience didn't seem to appreciate the graph with the straws as much as I did... Maybe they were still trying to take in the news. President Bush tied for third place with 10%, even though, according to the Constitution, he cannot run for a third term. Eh. But what do we care about the Constitution?

Jon started with some good ol' presidential humor by covering Bush's visit to Asia. The president went there to sign a nuclear cooperation (or as Bush would say it, "a nuke-ular kwap'ration") with India. America will help India build nuclear reactors if they promise to stop their children from crushing us in spelling bees. Bush also learned about Indian culture, seeing cloth made the old-fashioned way on looms, visiting farms, and facing one hell of a huge potato. "Compared to India, our potatoes are literally small potatoes!"

If I had a Video iPod and a 22-minute commute on the light rail each morning, this would totally make my day. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are the latest programs to reach iTunes. And since they're, um, daily, the deal is a little different than traditional iTunes downloads. You can get a MultiPass for $9.99 to receive 16 new episodes of one program. Otherwise, individual episodes cost the usual $1.99.

Here's the problem with this one: The Daily Show and The Colbert Report replay so many times on Comedy Central the following day, that it's almost impossible not to miss them. Other than the reason I gave above, why would you pay for this?