During Tuesday's edition of The Nightly Show on the Comedy Central cable channel, host Larry Wilmore used a combination of bad comedy and vulgarity to criticize how the Cable News Network and the Fox News Channel covered the riots and chaos in Baltimore the night before.
With the phrase “What a Riot” over a picture of a burning car, the black liberal began the segment by stating: “We're talking about the devastating events in Baltimore” before playing a clip of a CNN reporter noting that Maryland governor Larry Hogan had declared a state of emergency, and school was canceled after the riots on Monday night.
“Nothing says public safety like 20,000 teenagers with nothing to do in the middle of a Tuesday,” Wilmore joked.
“The news coverage had been non-stop, and some reporters seem to be a little out of their element in Charm City," he added.
One of those people was “CNN's plucky kid reporter Don Lemon,” who “just needs to stop trying. Even the [Republican] governor of Maryland and the [Democratic] mayor of Baltimore walked away when Don tried to suggest they weren't handling the riots well.”
Lemon peppered Hogan and Stephanie Rawlings-Blake with such questions as: “Is there anything that you would do differently?” “When you say outside agitators, what do you mean?” and “How are you going to enforce the curfew tomorrow, when kids are out of school?”
“While CNN took the awkward approach to handle these racial tensions, Fox took the racial approach to handle their awkward tensions,” Wilmore noted before joking that stumbles by the channel's reporters and anchors were actually “a clip from Fox News' new hit program, Blacks Do the Darnedest Things.”
He then showed a clip of Megyn Kelly -- host of the weeknight Kelly File program -- saying: “This doesn't look or feel like the United States of America.” A male guest agreed: “This looks like some riot in some Third World nation.”
Wilmore repeated the comments in a whiny voice, concluding with “I can't relate.”
He continued:
Let me give you guys some advice: When sh*t like this goes down, you should just go home and show reruns of Killing Jesus, alright?
But if anything explains America, it's those pictures. Oppression, riot, oppression, riot is exactly the pattern that built this country, starting with the tax oppression that led to the Tea Party riot, the party you all seem so in love with.
Next came a clip of Shepard Smith stating: “I'd be interested to hear from those police about their level of frustration that they have to stand here and watch these thugs go thugging.”
“Thugs go thugging?” Wilmore asked. “What is that, the 13th Day of Christmas? Thirteen thugs a'thugging?”
He then asked which gang name Fox journalists like to say the most before airing several people from the channel repeating “the Black Guerrilla Family.”
“F**k you, motherf**kers,” he responded angrily. “That’s rolling off your tongues a little too gleefully. You guys sound like kids who have just learned the word 'vagina'” and repeat it over and over.
“However,” Wilmore added, “there was a legitimate reason to talk about gangs” because a newsman stated that FNC got “word tonight of a credible threat that several gangs in Baltimore have forged an alliance to engage in attacks on police officers.”
“That does not sound good,” the black host stated. “But you know what, it would be nice to hear from one of them.”
Then came a snippet of a young black man stating: “We did not come together against the cops. ... We got soldiers out here right now. We dirty; you know, we dirty. They threw bombs at us for trying to stop what's going on right now. You are not about to do that to us.”
Wilmore added:
There's a lot of anger and a lot of frustration, and yes, there are a lot of people who vandalized the city, but there's even more people who turned up to do some good.
Since Saturday, there have been thousands of people peacefully protesting, and today, over on Facebook, 3,000 people have volunteered to help clean up the city. So in Facebook math, that's almost 300 people.
“But it's going to take more that brooms to clean up the messes in cities like Baltimore,” Wilmore concluded.
Apparently operating on the premise that bad jokes and vulgar terms add up to great comedy, Wilmore can't be surprised that ratings for that time slot have fallen 40 percent since he replaced Stephen Colbert in January.
