![]() He mostly went easy on Joe on a tour of the president’s private quarters off the Oval Office, but not everything boiled down to bog-standard liberalism. “I love comedy for comedy’s sake, so I imagine there are going to be a fair amount of jokes for everybody if there’s fodder there.” To kick off night two, he read some “encouraging words from his political colleagues” on air, specifically an email from Nancy Pelosi: “Kal, if you don’t donate $5 by tonight we’re all gonna die.” At various points throughout the week, he’d follow up a particularly crude joke with a smirking, “I used to work at the White House!” In a conversation in the green room after the show, I asked Penn-by then blazerless, tie somewhat askew at the end of a long day-whether he felt his past in conventional politics, and his ties to the Democratic Party, would affect his satirical output. For years more, he’s campaigned for Democrats of many stripes. But the 45-year-old Penn, born Kalpen Suresh Modi in northern New Jersey, served a couple of years in the White House, deep in the bowels of the machine. And that includes all those Obamaland types.Ĭomedians often benefit from a philosopher’s detachment, the capacity to observe our peculiar social machine from an outsider’s remove. (He also said the third row looked like a community college brochure.) Some folks were the kind of out-of-towners who always fill seats at these tapings, eager to see how the TV gets made, but the crowd here also represented the atypical background Penn would bring to the job. Sometime later, warm-up comedian Vince August came out and immediately noted the diversity in the audience. The jumbo speakers over the risers blasted Kool & the Gang and some hip-hop until a parody airplane safety announcement from the show’s crew of correspondents played on the big screens. Word came down that it was time, and those of us with purple wristbands reading, “Not a threat to The Daily Show-or national security,” streamed out to join the rest of the studio audience. It was an interlude to the chatter about politics and post-politico life from the Obama-administration alums who’d come to see their old work buddy host the show for the first time. ![]() “Naatu Naatu,” from the Indian production RRR, beat out work from Lady Gaga and Rihanna to claim the statue, and those assembled here were chuffed. Comedy Central’s The Daily Show/Matt WilsonĪbout an hour before showtime, in the VIP waiting area at the Daily Show studio in Manhattan, Toronto Raptors superfan Nav Bhatia was chatting with an assortment of former chiefs of staff and undersecretaries of this or that about the Best Original Song winner at the previous night’s Academy Awards. The production staff meets around Penn’s desk on stage during a rehearsal. His first guest that night was a former colleague of his named Joe Biden, now the President of the United States. “This week is going to be stressful,” he told his second guest on Monday night, Grover the Muppet. But Comedy Central certainly won’t be giving him the job until they see that he can do it, which leaves him in the position of auditioning for it on air across four consecutive nights. He is the 8th guest host following Trevor Noah’s departure, one of only a couple to signal a real thirst for the job, and there are murmurings he is firmly in the network’s frame. It’s probably not fair to describe the job Penn is seeking as “permanent,” since nothing in this business is, but he is unabashedly campaigning to secure it beyond this week. Penn told me about his federal faux pas shortly after taping his first show as a guest host of Comedy Central’s long-running fake news program, The Daily Show. That approach won’t work in the job he’s gunning for these days. “I’m like, OK, cool, I’m just not going to make any more jokes.” “And she goes, ‘We do have a sense of humor, you know.’” Penn immediately replied to clarify he was kidding, he told me this week. ![]() In an email to an FBI agent during his background check when Kal Penn first joined the Obama White House as an associate director of the Office of Public Engagement in 2009, he made a joke so innocuous he can no longer remember it.
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