Jimmy Kimmel
Jimmy Kimmel celebrated Super Bowl Sunday, “AKA cryptocurrency awareness day”, on Monday evening, a day after the LA Rams topped the Cincinnati Bengals 23-20. “It’s all crypto now, even the half-time show – Bloods versus the Cryptos,” he joked, referring to plethora of advertisements for cryptocurrencies.
“It was crypto and Peacock [NBC’s streaming platform] all day long,” he continued. “There were more ads for Peacock than there are living peacocks on the planet Earth.”
Kimmel also praised the half-time show performance, a medley of 90s and early 2000s hip-hop hits by Dr Dre, 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J Blige and Kendrick Lamar. “You know a musical performance is cool when every 45 seconds your mother asks, ‘Who is that?’” said Kimmel. “They’re going to be talking about this one on Fox News for many years to come.”
And in other news, after days of events on manufactured snow, the Winter Olympics postponed women’s downhill, delayed giant slalom and women’s slopestyle events this weekend because of actual snowfall in Beijing. “That’s right, snow disrupted the Winter Olympics,” said Kimmel. “This is like water disrupting a swim meet – it doesn’t make sense.”
Stephen Colbert
“Everyone’s still talking about the amazing half-time show starring Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg,” said Stephen Colbert on Monday’s Late Show. “Two legends of hardcore gangsta rap, or as the kids call them today: Martha Stewart’s friend and the headphones guy.”
“But as always, the star of the game was the commercials, and this year a ton of them were pushing crypto,” he continued. Coinbase aired a spot with a floating magenta QR code, Larry David shilled for FTX, and a crypto.com ad featured LeBron James advising his younger self to learn more about the site. “If he really wants to look out for young LeBron, tell him to avoid Space Jam 2,” Colbert joked.
The Monday after the Super Bowl is traditionally one of the least productive workdays of the year, but “that queasy feeling might not be from the queso you ate last night,” Colbert said. “It could be because US officials are warning that Putin could invade Ukraine at any time.
“That’s not the kind of will-he-or-won’t-he that I look forward to on Valentine’s Day,” Colbert noted.
Trevor Noah
And on The Daily Show, Trevor Noah scrapped plans for commentary on the Super Bowl and Ukraine in favor of an extended interview with the singer India Arie, in what he described as “truly one of my favorite conversations with a human being that I ever thought I could have”.
Trevor and @indiaarie discuss Joe Rogan’s responsibility to his audience, redemption, and the need for "messier conversations." pic.twitter.com/GtziY0HDwu
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) February 15, 2022
Last week, the singer announced that she would remove her music from Spotify in protest of the platform’s financial support of podcast host Joe Rogan, because she objected to his “language around race”. She also posted a compilation of clips to her Instagram account of Rogan, who is also under fire for promoting vaccine misinformation on his popular podcast, using the N-word more than 20 times. Rogan subsequently issued an apology, calling the compilation “the most regretful and shameful thing that I’ve ever had to talk about publicly”.
Noah had previously devoted a 15-minute segment to the controversy around Rogan’s apology and continued support on Spotify, in which he concluded Rogan was “using racism to be entertaining”.
Arie delineated between “conscious” and “unconscious” racism, offering “forgiveness” for the latter, and also arrived at the conclusion that for Joe Rogan, “he is being consciously racist”.
“I think he was saying it because it got a rise out of people,” she said. “That’s why he would say it. He knew that it was inappropriate. And I think the fact that he did it repeatedly and was conscious and knew, I think that is being racist.”
Arie said she was initially inclined to give Rogan the benefit of the doubt with his apology, since “he tried”, but “when I go deeper and ask myself what I really think from my commitment to truth that I’ve made this last year, what I really think is that he was being consciously racist and it makes me wonder what he talks like behind closed doors”.
“I don’t think being a racist makes you a bad person, necessarily,” she later added. “It makes you a person who was raised in our society. But when does it cross over into being a bad person, or being harmful?
“You have racist thoughts that you can institute with power, and that’s racism,” she said. “And so if you’re Joe Rogan and you have this huge listening audience, by you doing that, you embolden them to do that. And now we’re in trouble as a society.”
Noah expounded on this view, and wondered aloud if society could cultivate compassion for redemption. “I think we should all be able to critique, criticize, talk shit and still live in a world where you go, even thought you fucked up I still don’t want you to be ostracized into a world that will encourage that behavior only,” he said. “Maybe that’s how I see it.”
“That’s how I see it, too,” Arie responded, though she doubted Rogan “fully understands what he did there”.
The singer noted the barrage of racial slurs from his fans in her DMs. “Joe Rogan needs to do more than just go, ‘Oh yeah, I’m sorry,’” she said. “If you want to really lead your listeners down a new path, then lead them! To the point where they don’t feel that is the right language to come in my DMs and call me an ‘N-word’ in defense of him.”
