The XX Factor

The Daily Show Had the Worst Possible Response to the Supreme Court’s Texas Abortion Decision

Trevor Noah attends the opening of the International Comedy Festival on November 25, 2015 in Muldersdrift. 

Photo by MUJAHID SAFODIEN/AFP/Getty Images

Monday was a great day for women and a bad day for the Daily Show. In response to the Supreme Court’s 5-3 decision striking down Texas’ disingenuous abortion restrictions, Trevor Noah’s social media editor tweeted this:

Where to start with how bad this tweet is? For one thing, it assumes that everyone reading it is a man. It proposes that “knock[ing] someone up”—a phrase that entirely erases a woman’s agency in the act of procreative sex—is a recognizable form of celebration, like clinking champagne glasses or blowing a party horn. It also plays into the right-wing myth that when abortion is safe and legal, women get pregnant just for the fun of it, as though getting an abortion were as simple, cheap, and painless as creating an Instagram account and then deleting it. All in all, the tweet manages to spin a vindication of women’s right to control their own bodies into an opportunity for straight men to have unprotected sex without consequences. How progressive!

After receiving complaints from feminists and anti-choicers alike, the Daily Show tweeted this follow-up reaffirming the show’s male-centric view of the world:

Leaving aside the mental gymnastics required to say simultaneously that you’re not promoting abortions and that you’re excited about the right to choose, this apology completely misses the reason the original tweet was offensive. Luckily, Washington Post writer Alexandra Petri offered an edit that would have made the original tweet unobjectionable:

Noah almost certainly didn’t write either the “joke” or the half-assed walk-back, but they are a perfect distillation of Noah’s sensibility, which hasn’t changed much since he tweeted a slew of anti-Semitic, fat-phobic, thoroughly misogynistic tweets—it’s a stretch to call them jokes—a few years ago. Noah’s Daily Show is marked by superficial comedy devoid of a moral compass underwritten by the assumption that Noah’s telegenic charm will distract viewers from the emptiness of what he’s saying. Today’s tweets embody the fact that without Noah’s cute accent and mugging for the camera, his jokes are, quite simply, unfunny.