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-So, uh, 9/11...

what's your stance?

-Anti.

It was a tragedy.

I mean, we lost 19 of our best guys.

- Huh? - That was a joke, obviously.

9/11 was a terrible tragedy,

and it's not funny to joke about it.

-When I hear people make

9/11 jokes now,

I feel like, "Oh, what a bunch of pussies."

Back then was the time to make them, yeah.

Donald Trump has done so much damage to the New York skyline,

instead of calling him The Donald,

they should call him the 20th Hijacker!

[ Laughter ]

-It wasn't just an elephant in the room.

It was a burning pile of bodies and steel,

you know, less than a mile away.

-I saw the chief of the New York City Police

on the news.

He said, "We will never forget 9/11."

I thought, "I should... hope not.

It's your phone number." [ Laughter ]

-It was a need.

It wasn't like, "I'll do a chunk on my mother-in-law,

and I'll do this thing about crazy taxi drivers

and, yeah, I'll fit some 9/11 material in there."

It was like I had to talk about it.

-The job of the comedian is to push the envelope.

-Irony is always kind of anti-establishment,

and it's difficult when the establishment is lying

in smoking ruins at your feet.

I mean, that's what "Saturday Night Live"

is most famous for,

is addressing what's most topical.

How are we going to do that?

-I remember seeing just tears

streaming down people's faces and a lot of the cast.

-You know, you don't realize

the whole world's about to change on you.

-There were a ton of people that said,

"You cannot do comedy. You... No one can mention it."

-Maher's comments ignited a firestorm.

-They need to... to watch what they say, watch what they do.

-I mean, I could see the writing on the wall.

This wasn't something that we were going to send

a couple of cruise missiles and call it a day.

This was a big deal.

-I was not a high-risk person

just by uttering the word "Muslim."

-I didn't want to go to war 'cause, you know,

I got the selfish reasons. I'm... I'm originally from Iran,

and "Iran" sounds a lot like "Iraq."

And I was worried that, if there was one president

who was going to mess it up and bomb the wrong country...

[ Laughter and applause ]

-It's more satisfying to point out someone's hypocrisy

while keeping a smile on your face the whole time.

-"Have you ever been or are you now involved in espionage

or sabotage or in terrorist activities or genocide?"

Yes. How'd I get caught? I accidentally checked "yes."

-If four dudes from the Middle East

go down to Florida to learn how to fly

and don't nobody want to learn how to land or take off...

[ Laughter and applause ]

something is [bleep] up. [ Laughter and applause ]

-All of a sudden, it's more complicated

getting to the plane than flying in a plane.

-You can't even carry a nail clipper on a plane.

Are they afraid you're gonna go, "Alright!

Give me the plane or the bitch loses a cuticle"?

-Part of what comedy does is it says,

"Yes, this is terrible, but you can laugh about it."

-I could eat pussy in a horrible mood.

Shit, I ate pussy on 9/11.

[ Laughter ]

Where were you?

[ Laughter ]

-It's 20 years on, and for some people,

it's still now too soon. - Too soon.

- Too soon. - Too soon.

- Too soon. - Too soon.

- Too soon. - Too soon. [ Chuckles ]

How... How about that? Hey.

I did the name of this documentary.

♪♪

-The year before 9/11, my boyfriend, Joel Soler,

made this film, and I produced it,

and I wrote the narration for it...

It was a documentary about Saddam Hussein's family,

treating them as if they were the Kardashians.

-♪ I see la vie en rose ♪

♪ Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah ♪

♪ When you press me to your heart ♪

-People, even though they were afraid to speak

and they know the price.

-November the 1st, 2000,

we were sleeping, and some group came to our home,

took the giant garbage cans,

filled them with gasoline, and they set on fire.

They had come in the house,

and they put a piece of paper on the floor that said,

"In the name of Allah, the merciful and compassionate,

burn this Satanic film or you will be dead."

♪♪

I thought, "Can I make a comedy out of this?"

So I wrote monologues for all these characters

dealing with terrorism.

It was called "The Lowest Show on Earth."

And the very first monologue was Buddy Cole

going to Afghanistan to take on the Taliban

and bring home a vial of sweet-smelling anthrax.

I start doing the show, traveling around,

and I landed a six-week run in New York.

♪♪

[ Indistinct conversations ]

[ Horn honks ]

[ Indistinct conversations ]

[ Cheers and applause ]

-Fans and celebrities alike gave their regards to Broadway...

Mel Brooks' new musical version of "The Producers."

-Matthew and I once had a lunch where we said,

"This will either be the biggest hit

or the biggest flop in history."

-You're looking at the man

who single-handedly changed the face of Broadway.

Now it's permanently disfigured.

[ Laughter ]

-And it turned out to be the biggest hit.

-Since it opened in April,

the show has smashed box-office records

on the way to becoming the hottest show on Broadway

in more than two decades.

-Won 12 Tony Awards, the most Tony Awards in history.

It was the "Hamilton" of its day.

-There will never be a bigger hit,

and I will never be more powerful.

I'm the king of the world!

[ Cheers and applause ]

-My show was to open in New York on September the 19th, 2001.

This is going to be it from me.

I'm gonna play all these characters.

It was gonna launch me to the next level.

And I thought, "I got to create a poster that really...

People are gonna talk about."

And it was me with a shaved head, right?

Like, as if I'd just been smacked,

and a giant glob of cum going down my face.

September the 10th,

I had 10,000 posters made,

and they went all over New York.

[ Chuckling ] And I thought, "Oh, boy.

I can't wait to see how New York reacts to this.

♪♪

-I just gone through the World Trade Center

the day before, on 9/10,

without knowing that I'd be looking at it

for the last time.

-I did Luna Lounge,

and I think it was for the first time,

so I was really... I was all pumped and excited.

And David Cross was the emcee.

-It was just loose and fun,

and then we all went to Max Fish across the street.

We were all just drunk, partying.

-I was a New York City police officer.

I was probably doing comedy two years.

But on this particular night, on September 10th,

I had done my regular tour at work, went home,

schlepped all the way back into the city

for this industry night, and I did really well.

I actually got like two people that approached me

and gave me a card.

And I drove home, man... I was, like, on a cloud.

♪♪

-I believe it was the last innocent day

[Voice breaking] America ever had.

That's, of course, a total crock of shit.

-I woke up to Howard Stern.

-You can tell when a woman wants you,

and you can tell when a woman's just being friendly.

-Yeah. I heard she was into Beetlejuice, too.

I heard she came on to Beetlejuice.

- Yeah, right. - I don't mean

to interrupt the fun, but this is a breaking news story,

a serious news story. - What?

-A plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.

-You're kidding!

-I was working at Goldman Sachs,

so we were evacuated immediately.

Pretty much figured an amateur pilot flying too low.

-Someone learning how to fly, and they screwed up.

-I was a volunteer EMT, went down to the Trade Center.

I had a friend, a safety volunteer at the Twin Towers.

He told me where the triage center was.

And I stood there, and he kept bringing me people.

-It didn't occur to anyone that it was intentional

until the second plane hit.

-It was like, "Holy shit!"

-And that's when people started to figure out

that this was a premeditated terror attack,

and that's when the paradigm started to shift.

♪♪

- What do you got there, John? - The Pentagon.

- The Pentagon. What? - Alright, here, we're going...

-Stop it. What? Is there another explosion?

-Wait. What's going... Is there another explosion?

-At the Pentagon.

-They just attacked the Pentagon.

- Turn it up. - I'm walking down the stairs,

and this guy says... And I quote...

"Yo, yo, 'Scary Movie 2,' they just bombed the Pentagon."

It's World War III and shit."

-That's when it was just a big wave of... of uncertainty,

and then the fear came in, and then the panic came in.

-There's this sense of,

"This was calculated and we're under attack,"

but we had no real concrete information.

Boy, the next couple hours were just terrifying.

♪♪

-And then I'm like, "What are those things?"

You could see what... At first, I was like,

"Furniture's falling," you know.

Anyway, you know what I'm about to say.

-I remember it. I'll always remember it.

I don't want to look... see the people jumping out of windows.

♪♪

- And then they were just gone. - Oh, no.

- Wait a second. What happened? - Oh, my God.

- Tom, what happened? - Oh, my God.

- What just happened? - Oh, my God.

- Oh, the whole... - What just happened?

Look at that. - God.

-Oh, the whole World Trade Center just collapsed.

-The earth just shook.

Everything was white... Like, it looked like someone

had just put a sheet of paper in front of my face.

At that point, you can't even move.

And then some guy was chanting the "Our Father."

That was probably the worst experience in terms of,

"Oh, this is it. I'm... I'm going to die."

[ Chuckles ]

♪♪

-I watched the footage on television, the...

♪♪

apocalyptic footage,

things you might see at the end of the world.

-I'll never forget... The girders looked like

Satan's trident coming out of Hell.

-Then you started to think, uh,

"Some... Something is different forever."

♪♪

-The night of September 11th, I got a call

from my commanding officer

to go down and start working on Ground Zero.

You couldn't bring in heavy machinery

'cause it might cause cave-ins.

And we didn't know if there were survivors.

So we had to move as much as we could by hand,

pass empty buckets up,

they'd fill them, and we'd pass them down.

And we worked 12 hours on, 12 hours off,

12 hours on, 12 hours off until the 18th.

At that point, they declared it no longer search and rescue,

but search and recovery.

-I worked every single day from that point on...

More than three weeks of 14-hour days.

We formed a chain of evidence. They had a meat wagon...

That's what they call the Medical Examiner's Office.

And anything that... Any body part

that they thought might be human down at Ground Zero

got its own body bag.

They would extract DNA from it, and then it would get a number

so they can build up that database to do comparisons

between the people that were, uh, missing

and the people that they found.

This firefighter comes in,

and he's got a pillowcase over his shoulder,

and he dumps it on, um, on my desk,

and he goes, "There's 17 of my buddies in there."

Inside the bags were, you know,

whatever they collected from the...

The firefighters' locker... A toothbrush, a hairbrush.

That was it. I mean, that... That hit home, like...

That's when I finally had my breakout moment

and when... When I started crying.

♪♪

-People were completely drowning in it emotionally.

-It was like a mental war zone.

Even if you wanted to be happy, you couldn't.

-I remember even trying to, like,

get a little break from the news.

And I turned on Comedy Central,

and even "South Park" had a hotline to call.

It was just like, "Wow.

Even the Comedy Network is depressing right now."

[ Laughs ]

-Everything changed in that moment

for kind of a generation,

but it was hard to know what the repercussions would be.

-It was a really weird and difficult time.

And I thought, "How difficult is it going to be

for comedy to revive after this?"

-I didn't know how anybody could be funny again.

It was kind of like that song "The day the music died"...

It felt like the day that comedy died.

-I remember calling Bernie Brophy,

my manager at the time, and even he was like,

"I don't know, kid. Might be out of business."

-The comedy clubs closed.

It was the first time I'd ever seen them close.

-Are we even allowed to be funny?

-How do you make a joke ever again now?

-And I remember people saying, "Can we laugh again?

When is it safe to laugh again?"

-And who was going to show up?

-And then there was, of course,

the whole slew of think pieces...

"Will we ever laugh again?"

-Newsweek ... they used to have in the front section,

like, little quotes from the week.

And that week, there was a quote from me.

It really didn't feel to anyone that irony made sense.

You know, your... Your irony is always

kind of anti-establishment,

and it's difficult to feel anti-establishment

when the establishment is lying in smoking ruins at your feet.

-Is comedy dead? No, it's necessary.

How the... do you think you live every day

in this goddamn world? [ Laughter ]

-I don't know how else to process something that horrific.

-Laughter is, like, one of the first few things people go to

in a terrible time.

-A comedian's natural response

is to try to find the... The humor,

even in the darkest of situations.

-Where comedy exists, I suppose,

is... is between what people are thinking

and what is socially acceptable to say.

And we kind of push the boundary a little bit.

-You need something to burst the tension in the room,

and that's what comedy is supposed to do.

-You ask any group of comedians anywhere in the world,

they'll tell you, like, within 30 minutes or an hour,

someone made a joke.

-Stuff like, "Does this mean,

uh, the Yankee game is canceled?"

-In that moment, that's what... That's how you cry.

That's how you process grief and trauma

and share your feelings with each other.

-Before we even went off

and all the comics came and gathered here.

It's home.

-I remember thinking, like, "We'll open again

when people start calling the club and want to see comedy.

And when people want to come out and laugh,

that... we'll be here, ready for them.

But I'm not going to... I'm not going to push it."

-You saw, like, one of the biggest cities in the world,

just shut down.

-In New York, the set of "Live with Regis and Kelly"

remained dark.

Fashion Week has been canceled and will not be rescheduled.

All Broadway shows have been suspended until further notice.

♪♪

-It was still a little bit scary

to be in Times Square. - Yes.

-There were police absolutely everywhere.

Is something else going to explode?

[ Siren wailing ]

♪♪

-I thought my show would still go on.

I thought, "Oh, yeah.

New York's gonna want a comedy show about terrorism."

I was so deluded.

I really thought, "I'm gonna help them through it."

-The powers that be have decided we're going to be depressed

over this thing for a minute.

And anybody who tries to break the depression

is considered an insensitive asshole.

And you could... up your career forever.

-I'd worked so hard for this.

Like, I'd put my heart and soul into it.

It was the best thing I'd ever done.

A few months later, I remounted it in Toronto,

but it was a disaster.

People were, like, disgusted

that I would talk about these things so soon after 9/11.

And that was the end of it.

My career, I don't think, ever really recovered.

-Terrorist comedy show. That's a...

Talk about bad timing. - Yeah, that's bad.

I wouldn't know how to... - Yeah.

- work my way out of that.

-I thought that we wouldn't be going back to the show

for a while, that this would be a long break.

And then that was when Rudy Giuliani...

Remember when we... this is when we used to like him...

When... When he hadn't gone insane

and he was America's Mayor... He was saying

we should go back to work... It was important.

-We're going to, uh, go to public events

and we're going to do the things that we normally would do.

-New Yorkers were going on with their lives,

and it was open for business, and... but it seemed very...

It was literally, wasn't it, a Thursday?

-Yeah, the attack was on a Tuesday,

and the show was on Thursday.

-It did seem too soon to go back.

Like, who... and who's going to show up and why?

-Yeah, who can get in from the...

- And who wants to see this... - In America.

- nonsense now?

[ Applause ]

-Giuliani has asked that we put ourselves back up.

-It just seemed wrong. It felt truly wrong.

And yet, you know, we were try...

Doing what we were being asked to do.

-We all want to do something to, you know,

help the city, you know, in this terrible time.

And, uh, so it's always great to have an opportunity.

So we're all just happy to have a little way

that we can help get the city going again.

-The show started. It was a... A smaller house, of course.

It was very quiet.

And the opening number, which is raucous and fun

and... and always brought the house down...

It was... it was... it...

Everyone was a little tentative about all of it.

-♪ Opening night, it's opening night ♪

-Then, slowly but surely, the audience started to engage

and feel, obviously, that it was okay to laugh.

-It's gonna be our job to fill that safe with $2 million.

-$2 million?! Gee!

How much do we put in?

[ Laughter ]

-I remember feeling cheered by the fact that

people were still able to come and sit in an audience,

look at people in costumes and play along...

That that still was possible was a great relief.

- ♪ He's the celebration of love ♪

-It was an... also an escape,

gave them two hours not to think about

what was happening outside.

It was a bit of a miracle that it...

When it all comes together that way.

It was just the right show at the right time.

[ Cheers and applause ]

♪♪

-The comedy clubs opened up, I think, the Friday after.

-And I remember finding my way to the Comedy Cellar.

It was a small crowd.

I go, "What's wrong with you people?

Don't you have anywhere else you could be?"

And in some cases, people just did it.

-People needed to do something. I don't think they knew,

but they needed to get out

and, you know, be around other people.

-I had to find a way to also make myself feel better.

So I would just try and tell jokes,

but it felt weird to tell jokes.

-It's not scripted. It's not a TV show.

It's not on Broadway. It's not theater.

You don't know how the comic feels

when he walks in through that door.

You don't know what the audience member feels.

-You know, nobody knew what to do.

And are you gonna bring it up? How do you not bring it up?

And it was those discussions going on.

-Talk about sensitive topics...

how the audience would react to anything light or funny.

-We didn't even know if we were supposed to touch on the topic,

not touch on the topic.

You talked about something, and somehow it was like,

"Oh, I lost a family member in there."

-You would see kind of those pauses.

You know, where they would have, like, a rapid-fire flow,

that wasn't happening.

-I felt like the audience...

they didn't even want to hear about it.

-I don't think anyone came out guns blazing.

-The audience wanted something,

and I wanted to give them something,

but I didn't know what that was.

So we were stumbling around together to find it.

-The audience and everybody else

felt more gentle, more inclusive, warm feeling.

-And a week after 9/11, we started doing shows,

laughed inappropriately loud

at jokes that did not merit that kind of laughter,

normal jokes that got like a 2 in laughs pre-9/11

were getting like 8 after.

-Like, me... I'm gonna forget this... crowd

as soon as I walk out of here. [ Laughter and applause ]

-They were desperate to laugh,

and you were sort of desperate to tell jokes,

and everyone was sort of desperate

for this whole thing to work.

-We just kept talking to connect,

to get some kind of normalcy,

to find... to find a foothold to climb out of this.

-As comedians in New York,

we were grieving like everyone else.

We just dealt with it onstage night in and night out,

going, "This is what I'm going through."

And people laughing, and when they laugh,

you're like, "I'll get through it."

-It was almost like, "Okay, we got knocked down.

We went through some terrible things.

We're gonna dust ourselves off."

-A show of resistance and strength

to not let this disrupt, you know, our way of life,

that, you know, we're not going to be

completely culturally annihilated by this.

-It was a big "...you" to terrorists.

You know what? Yeah, okay, you took that shot.

Well, we're... back. [ Laughter and applause ]

-If you're going to a comedy club on September 17, 2001,

you're hardcore,

versus, you know, maybe a late-night show.

They're talking to a larger audience.

They're freaked out. So they felt like

they had to tread a little more lightly when they came in.

-And I can remember flying back to the city, looking downtown,

and all you saw were the... - Terrible.

- the rising pillars of smoke.

So I was trepidations about it

because I didn't know what to say, didn't know what to do.

-The process that we put the show together

is always going to be affected by the climate that we live in.

And there was a pall cast over the country.

But also, you know, you're fighting your own sadness.

Some of us thought maybe the show would have to return

to being more of a parody and a spoof,

you know, kind of like a Mad magazine.

I know Jon was thinking hard

about how the show could come back and what it would be.

-It was also a sense of like, "Alright, well,

we're gonna do what we can to, like, make comedy."

And everybody felt that obligation like,

"Great, let's... Let's try to do this."

-It just sort of was collectively understood

David Letterman would be the first back on air.

-And we all wanted to know what Letterman was going to say.

-It just really felt like he was the elder in the room,

and it was the respectful thing to do

to allow him to go on first.

-He was the person who would know what to say,

how to handle it in comedy.

-On the Monday that we came back,

they said to me, "When you do the warm-up, um,

obviously there's going to be some tension in the room."

-As late as 4:00, I was talking to various people on the staff

about, "Are we honestly gonna do a show?"

-I still did what I had to do. It got some laughs.

Again, it felt really nice.

And then Dave came out and told them,

"Hey, you know, just be patient with me."

-And I was just trying to justify returning to the air

with a comedy variety talk show

less than a week after the attack.

-He was very, very sincere and lovely.

And... And then, when the show started,

he made his opening announcement.

-You're watching and you're confused

and... and... and depressed and... and irritated

and... and angry and full of grief.

And you don't know how to behave,

and you're not sure what to do.

And you don't really...

Because we've never been through this before.

-To see him human... Didn't know how to take it.

This was "Stupid Pet Tricks" guy.

-We're gonna... We're gonna try and feel our way through this,

and, uh, uh, we'll just see how it goes.

-They have to have a really earnest opening statement

and then kind of slowly go into jokes.

-They had the serious chat with Dan Rather,

and then they brought in comedy at the end, Regis Philbin.

-And I don't mean to be silly about this,

but you experienced Pearl Harbor, I think, right?

-Well, I wasn't there. [ Laughter ]

I wasn't there, if that's what you're asking.

-You... You were on... You were on the air then, too...

Weren't you? - No, I wasn't on the air.

-I'm sorry. I thought maybe you were.

-I remember that being very much of a catharsis.

I don't want some saccharine, stevia guy

helping me process tragedy.

But the fact that you knew that this affected Letterman

the way it affected him...

That's the best part of art to me... and culture.

And this is who we kind of help process stuff through,

whether it's the daily events or a tragedy.

-There's something about that tradition of late-night TV.

They know their audience, and they knew

what people were ready for.

-For about a week, they were super serious,

just suddenly turned into

these group therapy sessions for everybody.

-We all wanted to commiserate with that person,

share the same feelings as well.

-Jon really helped people through a lot of stuff

because there's sort of like this feeling of like,

"What's going on here? Like how do I... What do I...

How do I process this?"

-I just... I wanted to tell you why I [Voice breaking] grieve...

[ Sniffles ]

[ Sighs ]

but why I don't despair.

[ Sniffles ]

-It was very real and emotional.

-The show probably, from that moment on,

felt less bound by the idea that this is a half-hour comedy.

Jon himself became a lot more willing to be serious

in his remarks on the show.

-A lot of folks have asked me,

"What are you gonna do when you get back?

What are... What are you gonna say?

I mean, that, geez... What a... What a terrible thing,

uh, to have to do."

And... And I don't see it as a burden at all.

I... I...

I see it as a privilege and...

[ Chuckles ]

I just... I see it as a privilege,

and everyone here does.

-And that's when I realized, "Yeah, my job

is to at least articulate what I'm feeling

and hope that that connects to some... somebody else,

'cause that's healing. When you're not alone...

That's the healing part of... Of my job.

-It was pretty amazing to watch the smartest guys on television

walk that tightrope of dealing with something so serious

and then getting back to being the circus acts that we are.

-We're supposed to make you happy and make you laugh.

And yet, they had to be cautious about it.

-Not skirt the issue, but it's also important

not to offend anyone, to hurt anyone.

-The irreverent Bill Maher, the host of "Politically Incorrect,"

learned the limits of dissent when he made this comment

less than a week after the September 11 attacks.

-We have been the cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles

from 2,000 miles away... - Absolutely.

- That's cowardly. - Yes.

-Staying in the airplane when it hits the building...

Say what you want about it... Not cowardly.

-Bill Maher lost his job because of a statement about 9/11,

a statement that was factual.

So there definitely was this fear of stating facts

[laughs] because it might get you in trouble.

-And the White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer

issued a cautionary note.

-A reminder for all American that they need to...

to watch what they say, watch what they do.

And this is not a time for remarks like that.

There never is.

-I cleaned out my office on September 18th,

uh, which was the day after I made those remarks

about the terrorists not being cowards.

Um... - You mean you expected it then?

-[ Chuckling ] Yeah, I pretty much knew it.

-Is all bravery noble? Maybe not. Maybe not.

But I'm glad he said it because I think it's a... a statement

that's provocative and got people talking

and, also, showed the true colors of where we are at

when it comes to speech and policing of it.

-I think it's okay for people to go, "Look, I'm offended."

It's valid. Okay. Don't listen to any more, then.

But the idea that you go from being offended by something

and saying, "I don't want to hear that,"

to saying, "I don't want anyone to hear that...

Shouldn't be allowed to say that"...

That, for me, is too far.

-There are people that will galvanize and say,

"We didn't like that he said this,

and now we're going to write letters,

and now we're going to shut down your career."

-When there's tragedy,

people need to create drama that might not exist

to circumvent the drama that really exists

that's really hard.

-If I had said it three months later,

no one would have even noticed.

-We made this decision that it was

not the time to be funny... Well, it's the time to be funny.

-You should be able to do comedy that's good and wise and funny

the day before a tragedy or the day after a tragedy.

And The Onion proved that.

-It was still kind of an underground

little independent publication.

-Well, for instance, I mean, we were the first ones to break

the story of the secret of fire falling into Russian hands.

-"NFL Star Thanks Jesus After Successful Double Homicide."

-"New Remote Control Can Be Operated By Remote."

- "Texans Elect Gun."

-Where do they come up with this stuff?

-There's the adage comedy equals tragedy plus time,

which is pretty much The Onion's operating principle,

only we basically skip the time part.

-So, we... we had just arrived in New York in January of 2001,

which seemed like a good idea at the time.

-This was back when The Onion was...

had newspapers on the street, physical newspapers.

-We'd been here nine months

and still hadn't put out issues on the street in New York.

-Finally got it together enough to have, you know, an issue.

And we're having a party to celebrate that.

And that was, um, September 10th.

-We ended up not running anything.

-By the end of the week, we decided that we would,

you know, come back into work on Monday like normal.

And I think everyone was just fine with that

because all you did was just, like,

watch TV and read the papers and be sad.

And I think it wasn't a terrible idea

to sort of get back to what you were doing,

even though what we were doing was writing jokes.

But it just was better than doing nothing.

-That's a great human coping mechanism,

is laughing at things.

Finding the right thing to laugh at, you know, is hard.

-We realized we had to address it with at least one article

and the rest would be different.

-One was about ketchup packets, you know,

so we were just, like, looking, you know, like,

"Okay, here's... here's a story about, like, global terrorism

and the death of... Of 3,000 people.

Uh, and then here's one about, like, ketchup packets."

-And then we realized, like, anything that was different

would just stand out and just be absurd.

-It just seemed crazy that we would talk about anything

but this horrible tragedy that was happening all around us

that was on everyone's mind... Like, how would you avoid it?

-It was almost unbelievable to us that we were doing it,

but we... we had decided that we were gonna do the entire issue

about what had happened.

We were very, very worried

that people would misunderstand what we'd written,

that people would think that we were mocking it

or acting above it.

And that was the last thought on any of our minds.

We chose the jokes very carefully.

And we... we... We discussed everything.

And it was, like, one of the most intense

Onion writers' room meetings that there ever was.

-Occasionally, there was a joke where we all just kind of,

you know, went and said, "Ohh, we can't do that."

-Tim Harrod pitched something that said,

"America Undefeatable, Say Quadragon Officials."

[ Chuckles ] It's quite clever and very funny,

but we're just like, "Well, the butt of that joke

is sort of the dead people at the Pentagon."

And that didn't seem like an appropriate target.

-We all had a good internal laugh about it,

and said, "Next."

-It was very, very hard to pick the issue...

A lot of soul-searching.

-All the headlines were kind of in the same mode of

just observing the tragedy and giving voice

to the... The collective experience

of the tragedy that we were feeling.

"U.S. Vows To Defeat Whoever It Is We're At War With."

-The jump graphic for that article...

there was a map of the world,

and the map had a key... "Known locations of terrorists."

And then, with lines, it was

"Possible locations of terrorists,"

and the entire map was all lines.

-One of them that I wrote was,

"Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake."

The genesis for that one was we were just in someone's backyard,

and this woman, like, brought out this cake,

this American flag cake.

It was, you know, very resonant about her funneling her sadness

or her inability to do anything else

into this dumb little cake with stripes,

with strawberries, and little blueberries.

-That story, I think, was very beautiful

and very sincere, which is, you know,

these are things that you normally don't think of

when you think of The Onion.

A story I wrote was called

"God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule."

-You read that and you laugh, but it's just so deeply sad.

-These murders had been committed for religious reason,

because someone thought God wanted it done.

And I was 100% sure that anyone who knew anything about religion

would not agree.

The purpose of God is to get us to not kill each other.

And it just struck me as so sad

that it was going to create Islamophobia,

and it was going to create

all this long-term cultural antagonism

that was already bad,

but was going to become much, much worse.

And it just seemed so tragic.

And so that story that I ended up writing,

I mean, it was a weepy story,

embarrassingly maudlin in some ways, I guess.

But, I mean, I was crying when I wrote it.

-I think that we all just were helping ourselves.

I don't think we ever were like, "Oh, we're doing something

good for... for America or good for other people."

The Onion writers have always been very sincere

in what they're trying to say.

Even if they use sarcasm as the way

of conveying their message,

the message is not sarcastic.

-We just did not want to offend anyone,

and we were nervous.

-When we came to work on the day

that the issue actually went up online,

the first thing we saw was a fax...

Now, this is back with faxes...

And it just said, "Not funny, not funny."

"Not funny, not funny, not funny."

- In really big letters. - Like it was yelling at you.

-I thought that we would be run out of New York,

if not the nation, by a torch-wielding mob.

-It just felt like, "Oh, God, this is...

This is... you know, this is it.

Like... we failed."

♪♪

But then, over the course of the day,

more e-mails started coming in.

-Tons of e-mails, and they were just 99% positive,

like, higher than any other issue that we ever put out.

-The first smile or a chuckle I had came from The Onion.

It was the headline, and it said, "Holy... Shit."

It's the expression of what everybody was thinking,

and somebody finally said it.

-I think everybody had this big thing inside of them

that just needed a pressure release,

and it just came out as laughter.

-Something to kind of shake me out of the darkness a little bit

and go, "Oh... yeah.

Like, you know, yeah."

-The response from everyone has been that you guys

have been really funny about it in an appropriate way.

-I remember it being brilliant, as it always is,

and no other type of comedy,

whether it was sketch comedy or stand-ups

or anything that broached the subject,

came close to The Onion ...

Just hitting every level, hitting every tone.

-And most amazing, readership doubled.

So here's a humor magazine, of all things,

getting a circulation boost from a mass murder.

-Obviously, you don't want to, um, like,

be like, "Yeah, we... We... nailed it!

We... The... 9/11 issue... We nailed it!"...

Like, derive pride from a tragedy,

but it definitely is one of the things

I'm most proud of in my entire comedy writing career.

-You would think that this little independent

kind of underground humor publication

with a bunch of freaks and longhairs working there

would not have been a significant contribution

to those people's lives in that moment,

but, evidently, meant something to people.

And that's a very humbling thing to realize.

-It's "Saturday Night Live"!

-May of 2001,

Rob Carlock, who had been producing "Weekend Update,"

left and moved to L.A. to take a job,

and I remember thinking, like,

"Who are they gonna get to do that job?"

And the answer was me.

-My first day of work at "Saturday Night Live"

was supposed to be on September 11, 2001.

-Suddenly, the news went from being this funny, like,

"What did Newt Gingrich say today that's funny?"

It turned from that to, like, the scariest topic for comedy

that any of us could have ever possibly imagined. [ Chuckles ]

-Letterman came back. All the late-night shows came back.

What about this institution? - I mean, that's what

"Saturday Night Live" is most famous for,

is addressing what's most topical.

How is that gonna be possible?

♪♪

-The networks were ready to roll out their new TV shows

next week, but now that may change.

-I don't think we even knew

if we were gonna still do a show that week.

-The whole week was very tense.

-What are people ready for? Is this okay? Is this too risky?

-It was just a really weird, gut-wrenching feeling

of sadness and... And devastation.

We didn't feel funny.

We didn't feel like really laughing.

[ Chuckles ] You know, we weren't joking around

as we usually do or doing bits with each other.

Every time we would pass by each other,

we kind of gave each other a look like,

"Are we still gonna just keep writing?

Are we still doing... Are we still supposed to be here?"

-The thing that you hold on to in those moments is, like,

"No, it matters... Normalcy, right?

People need to laugh again."

-That week, we did what we always did,

and that was create a show and write a show

and then perform it.

-We have to go do dumb sketches. We have to put on dumb wigs

because, damn it, that's the point of this show.

That's the point of "SNL." That's the point of New York.

We don't get derailed... Like, they don't...

They don't get to cancel our dumb sketch show.

So we're... God damn it, we're gonna do it.

♪♪

-We didn't know what the cold opening

was going to be that week,

how they would address what was obviously in the news,

which was, you know, 9/11 and the Twin Towers,

and then, all of a sudden, they decided

that it would be the first responders.

-You know, half of them had been down there and survived it.

They all had friends that... That... that... that died,

and they were all standing there.

And the look on their faces told a thousand stories.

-Since September 11th,

many people have called New York a city of heroes.

Well, these are the heroes.

[ Cheers and applause ]

-It was really a beautiful way and moving way

to start the show.

- "Saturday Night Live"

is one of our great New York City institutions,

and that's why it's important for you to do your show tonight.

-Can we be funny?

[ Light laughter ]

-Why start now?

[ Laughter ]

[ Cheers and applause ]

♪♪

-It was perfectly conceived. It was perfectly executed.

It was so great that the first joke back

was a self-mocking,

self-referential joke about "SNL"

and about the larger question that everyone was asking,

"Can we be funny? Is it okay to laugh?"

-Was genius that speeded things up a little bit.

-It gave us permission to laugh again,

not just the audience in the studio,

but America, really.

-Reese Witherspoon was the first host for the season premiere.

-We've never done a show under these circumstances,

so we're still finding our way.

But I promise you that we're going to give it

everything we've got.

-We definitely went with safer,

more fun, whimsical types of sketches.

-With negative $130,000,

Sean Connery is here yet again.

-I wouldn't miss it for the world, Trebek.

I turned down Harry Friggin' Potter

for this. - [ Laughs ]

-Please, God, take me now. [ Laughter ]

-It was now safe to do Maya doing her Versace sketch.

-She makes me laugh so hard. "Get out."

-Get out! [ Laughter ]

-Then, how are you gonna handle "Weekend Update"?

The goal of "Weekend Update" is to tell 10 to 15 jokes

about stuff that happened that week.

[ Chuckling ] One thing happened that week.

-We're glad to be back, and here are tonight's top stories.

U.S. officials continue the search for Osama bin Laden.

Reports suggest that Bin Laden is most likely hiding out

somewhere remote and barren

where he will not encounter others.

The FBI has begun searching theaters

showing the movie "Glitter." [ Laughter ]

-That's not an amazing joke, but... but it's the kind of joke

that we would tell in a less horrifying setup

applied to this horrifying setup.

But that Gambino crime family joke...

That's a good joke.

-According to the New York Post,

the Mafia has stolen

more than 250 tons of scrap metal

from lower Manhattan.

A spokesman for the Gambino family said,

"Hey, the mayor told us to go back to work."

[ Laughter ]

-That joke is about, like, the city healing itself...

You know, like that's... I think that's probably why

that joke worked at some level is 'cause it's like,

yeah, we're going to get back to normalcy.

Like, we're doing our dumb sketch show.

The mobsters are gonna go strip metal

out of a bunch of buildings.

Like we're going... It's New York.

That's what we always do.

-Our final story tonight... New York City is awesome.

[ Cheers and applause ] Thank you.

-The show actually felt meaningful.

This is our tiny, little part to play in this much larger drama.

-We wanted to do New York justice,

and we wanted to make sure we did a good show.

-♪ Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding ♪

♪ Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding ♪

-We tried hard to just make people kind of laugh

and forget a little bit.

-Just sort of as an exhale. Alright.

- ♪ Ohhhhh ♪ - ♪ Ohhhhh ♪

[ Cheers and applause ]

-Being able to laugh again, it does help the healing process,

and it definitely made you feel like

we're not gonna lay down.

-It was a singular moment in all of our lives.

-You guys made me laugh, so thank you.

[ Cheers and applause ]

♪♪

-Comedy Central presents

"The New York Friars Club Roast of Hugh Hefner."

-Me and the Friars

and Comedy Central and... And Hef...

we all had to decide what was the right thing to do.

-He told me that their, you know, their people

were a little concerned about it being too soon.

Am I one of those people?

I'm like, "Hell no. I am in."

It's cliché now... The terrorists win.

But then, it wasn't a cliché... It was, like, this real thing.

Don't be defeated.

Jimmy Kimmel emceed, and Jimmy broke the ice.

-Everybody here will agree that right about now

we could all use a good laugh.

Unfortunately, though, our first roaster is Rob Schneider.

[ Laughter ]

-He set the tone right from the get-go.

The roastmaster's job is to lay waste

to everybody in the room in such a manner and style

that everybody can just backfill and follow suit.

-Let me just start off by saying Osama bin Laden is a [bleep]

[ Laughter ]

I don't mean [bleep] in a bad way,

'cause I know you have girlfriends in here...

I'm not trying to... [ Laughter and applause ]

And you're like, "Alright, I just want to be in roast mode."

My real reason for being here is, uh, you know,

I just wanted to get invited to the mansion.

That's the whole thing. I've never been to the mansion.

That's why I came tonight.

You know, I'm ready. That's the whole thing.

You know, we're going to set it off.

All I'm saying is, you know...

- Whoo! - Oh.

- let's do this.

[ Laughter ]

[ Cheers and applause ]

I think people were being very careful with their material.

-People were dancing around the 9/11 thing,

but Gilbert is ruthless and tasteless.

You pretty much got to put him on last.

-The one and only Gilbert Gottfried.

-Don't know what he's going to do.

There's a good chance he's a little inappropriate.

There's a good chance he's really dirty.

-Tonight, I'm gonna be using my Muslim name,

Hasn't bin Laid.

[ Laughter ]

-And that got a... a laugh.

And then I wanted to be the first one

to address the elephant in the room.

-It's a defense mechanism, you know,

to make a joke about something or an...

or a feeling in the room, you know?

We have to label the elephant in the room, you know?

Some guys ride the... elephant in.

-There's something in Gilbert, for better or worse,

that makes him want to do these things.

He can't help himself. He's compelled.

-I have to catch a flight to California.

I can't get a direct flight.

They said they had to stop at the Empire State Building first.

[ Laughter ]

[ Audience groans ] Mnh!

-God bless him.

-It was really the first moment in the night

where everybody's well-founded and well-intentioned fears

about the night had actually been realized.

-And you thought, "How will he get out of this situation?"

-I had lost an audience

as big as anybody could lose an audience.

And one guy yelled out, "Too soon!"

which I thought meant I didn't take a long enough pause

between the setup and the punch line.

-But that pushed Gilbert to go even further

and get even dirtier and more inappropriate.

-I figured, "Let me just go to the bottom level of Hell now."

-He launched into "The Aristocrats."

-Okay. A talent agent is sitting in his office...

Which is a joke that is about incest and bestiality

and all kinds of sick, perverse things.

-The most, uh, visceral, gross-out joke

you could possibly think of.

-The father starts... his wife.

The wife starts jerking off the son.

The son starts going down on the sister.

The sister starts fingering the dog's asshole.

-And it went so far [laughs] and... and it kind of...

- Yeah. - Brought everyone together

in a way that, yes, you could laugh.

-People were howling and pounding the tables,

and it proved to me... Terrorism... bad taste,

incest and bestiality... Good taste.

-Bad taste is not a crime.

In fact, it can sometimes be therapeutic, cathartic...

Healing, even.

-17 days might have seemed too soon at the time,

but it was perfect.

-That's the thing about "too soon."

It's like... It really begs the question,

because if somebody doesn't try it,

then you really don't know.

-Do you want me to start at the beginning?

[ Laughter ]

-The dean of the Friars Club said that they raised

somewhere between $500,000 and $600,000

for the Twin Towers Fund.

I'm glad we did this. [ Cheers and applause ]

-I truly had a front-row seat

to one of the greatest nights in the history of comedy.

-It was a big swing. He was in the moment, and he did it.

And it was a great litmus test for where everybody was.

♪♪

-It was interesting to watch comedians at that time

tread lightly around a lot of different subject matters.

Having been down there, it's the first time I remember

really feeling for myself, "Too soon."

-At Stand Up New York, the owner of the club, Cary Hoffman,

telling Marc Maron, "No jokes about 9/11, nothing here."

And Marc Maron yelling, "I'm an artist!

Don't tell me what to joke about!

It's my way of coping with it.

It's the way the audience copes with it."

-He's like, "Look, if you do it,

you'll never work here again."

♪♪

-Am I being inappropriate, or am I just doing my job?

Is our job to entertain these people away from this?

You know, they keep saying, you know, get back to normal.

I didn't know where that was before this went down.

You know what I mean? - Right.

What does that mean? - Well, they want us to get out

and... and do things. - Right.

Resume consumption, you know, start eating,

you know, go out, go to the movies,

take in a show, you know, put some gas in your car,

invest, get something between you and your feelings

before they lead to questions. You know?

If you think about,

"Ask not what your country can do for you...

ask what you can do for your country.

40 years later, it's like,

"Hey, you know how you can help America?

Go to Disneyland." [ Chuckles ]

-You got to go out to eat and get drinks and go to bars.

- Telling people to go shopping. - Right, yeah.

-That's our latest mindless cliché...

Go out and buy some jewelry and a new car...

Otherwise, the terrorists win.

[ Laughter and applause ]

-It's never the actual thing you make fun of.

It's how everyone responds to it.

-They raised the color-coding thing

any time Bush's approval rating would dip.

-Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a terrorism warning

asking all Americans to be on high alert this week.

Then on Friday, he announced that the period of high alert

would be extended indefinitely.

I think I speak for all Americans when I say,

bitch, I can't be any more alert

than I already am. [ Laughter ]

-Eddie Griffin started talking about,

"If I was on the plane, mother..."

-Shit wouldn't have went down like that.

You know what I'm saying?

'Cause them flights were from Boston to L.A.

You know how long a nigga have to save up

for a ticket from Boston to L.A.?

Nigga... A nigga would have been on the plane...

"We ain't making no mother... U-turn!"

[ Laughter ]

"The... you talking about, nigga?

I saved up for these tickets for two years."

-And then you realized, "Oh, we could show anger

towards the terrorists... That would be okay.

There's nothing offensive about that."

-The first joke that came out of it was,

terrorists convince thousands of people to kill themselves

in the name of God.

-I can't convince two of my friends to help me move.

[ Laughter ] - Of course,

the thing that everyone jumps on is 72 virgins.

-They believe that, if they kill themselves,

they will be met in Heaven by 70-some odd virgins.

Imagine that kind of faith... To think that that would happen,

when I haven't met one on Earth! [ Laughter ]

-I tried to turn it around.

I'll make a little feminist.

If you're a woman, you wouldn't want 72 virgins...

That would be like 72 premature ejaculations.

You just feel like, "Oh, my God."

Like, no wonder they wore burkas.

Maybe they're just protecting their faces.

-I think you saw a lot of comics

really be able to develop their own voices.

-Marc Maron doing some smart jokes about surveillance.

-It'd be a very disappointing surveillance operation

if they had me on camera all the time.

[ Laughter ] You know, they'd be like,

"Oh, he's throwing up. He's still in bed.

What? I can't believe he's jerking off again."

[ Laughter ]

-Patrice O'Neal had a really funny joke about...

He's like, "Now, you know, remember, people are, like,

'Oh, what are we gonna do in... In Wisconsin?'"

-People in Iowa worried about

all the cereal factories being undertaken.

Ain't gonna happen.

"Six tractors were hijacked today

and driven into a cereal factory in Iowa.

It's a terrible sight here, Jim.

We're live at the Raisin Bran factory.

Raisin... Raisin Silo Number 1

is completely engulfed in flames."

[ Laughter and applause ]

"I think, next year, there's only gonna be

one scoop of raisins."

[ Laughter ]

-Not a joke about the tragedy of 9/11,

but the joke of moving on from 9/11.

-After 9/11, we did shows almost right away.

We started doing shows really quickly

in the clubs around the city.

In some parts of the city, there wasn't even electricity

in some parts of the city yet, the subway didn't even go there,

but we started doing shows in these clubs,

'cause people seemed to want to come out.

They seemed to want to laugh, and...

And I couldn't believe it, you know,

it was... It was right after 9/11,

and there were already people in the audience

as bachelorettes... Bachelorette parties.

And I thought, "Holy shit."

You know, I-I-I never thought that I would be proud

to see a pack of drunken Jersey girls

with condoms on their heads.

[ Laughter ] I thought, "Shit.

They are never gonna change the American way of life."

They... They they just knocked down the World Trade Center,

but they couldn't stop this gaggle of squawking twats

from... from, uh... [ Laughter and applause ]

-That is such a brilliant turn of phrase...

a gaggle of squawking twats.

"Oh, we're going, Gina. It's your day.

It's your special day. We are going in the city.

We are going in the... city.

It's your special day.

I don't care what those... Mexicans did.

We are going into the city."

-And it was on the right side of it, too, which I loved...

That it was like... There was hope in that joke,

that it was like, you know, they're never gonna defeat us.

-But if you had, like, something specific about 9/11,

it had to be super funny.

It had to be so bad and so funny that people would be like,

"Alright, I can't not laugh at that.

That is sick, but I can't not laugh at that."

-Like, I was thinking the other day that

you can figure out how bad a person you are

by how soon after September 11th you masturbated...

Like, how long you waited.

[ Laughter ]

And for me, it was between the two buildings going down,

so I have a feeling of... [ Laughter ]

-[ Laughs ]

There's too many levels to do this joke.

-You can talk about 9/11 and difficult, painful things

as long as you have a perspective that's interesting.

-It's not about what this... The... this simple joke is.

It's about how it's presented

and what... you know, what the intent is behind it.

-Lindsay and I have hit a bit of a rough patch.

-Really? When did that start?

-Well, I don't want to blame it all on 9/11,

but it certainly didn't help.

-You saw Paul Mooney perform at the DC Improv,

talking about his experience

as a black man, an older black man,

and who... who's dealt with so much pain

and was releasing it on the audience.

-9/11... it's a different world, ain't it?

- Yes! - And shocked. Just stunned.

And it took that to make white folks realize

that we're human beings. - Hello.

-Yeah, you understand, you know?

'Cause they were so worried about us... they...

America's so worried about black folks.

They were so worried about the land niggas,

they forgot about the sand niggas.

[ Laughter and applause ] - It was really,

in my recollection, the first time

that real political lines were drawn

among us, among comics.

-Comics that were political before

took it one notch higher.

-If anybody who ever resembles

that goofy asshole with the shoe bombs

ever sits down next to me on a plane,

I'm going to call the stewardess over

and say, "Hey, unless this jagoff

is the harmonica player for The J. Geils Band,

get him off the... flight, okay?"

-There's two types of patriotism

that's happening in America When disaster strikes.

The people that are all inclusive about,

"This is America... Multicolored,

multifaceted, multicultural."

But then you've got the other people whose patriotism

lies in racism.

-I fell to the left of it.

I was like, "We need to look at ourselves,"

whereas there was plenty more comedians

or maybe more people at that time in general who was like,

"No, there's no reason to look at ourselves.

You know, these people, you know, killed us."

-You could argue they're more angry

at the cultural imperialism than they are at the oil.

-No, I think they're angry at us killing them.

I mean, really.

-You know, okay, 9/11,

I'm talking about... - Okay, alright.

We can't pretend that it's all this Iraqi...

We're not killing them.

We're killing anybody, that, you know...

-Moves, exactly.

-Your skin color all of a sudden becomes threatening.

-Mike DeStefano...

He you did a joke about, like, "Be more American,

punch a cab driver in the head," and I'm like,

"Mike, there are people really getting beaten up right now."

And a Sikh man was killed.

He's not Arab, but he looked Arab because he wore a turban.

And he's like, "It's just a joke.

I'm like, "Well, you're actually inciting people to violence."

-Innocent people were getting shot just for looking like

they may be from any of those countries

that had committed the 9/11 attacks.

-I almost... an Indian up on the way in here.

He said "No, no, I Indian, I Indian."

I said, "Well, pull your turban up, nigga.

Let me see a dot or something, mother..."

I'll... your ass up.

Don't start no shit.

-I wasn't prepared to defend Islam

to a bunch of Americans who are now terrified.

I'm just as scared as you are.

I don't... I don't know how to make you feel better.

You make me feel better. Tell me you won't frickin'

send your military industrial complex to bomb

every living brown person in the world.

Why don't you make me feel better?

-And I even got a flag and put it on the back of my car.

The other comedians were making fun of me.

They're going, "Oh, look Maz is trying not to get beaten up."

Ah, part of it. - My mom had a flag on her house.

Part of that is because she felt it was the patriotic thing to do

and this was her adopted country and she supports it,

and at the same time, she was worried

somebody would throw a rock through the window.

-You want to fix the Pledge of Allegiance,

put a disclaimer at the end.

"With liberty and justice for all...

Must be 18, void where prohibited,

some restrictions may apply, not available in all states."

[ Cheers and applause ]

♪♪

-I was a little bit outspoken at that point about 9/11.

After 9/11, there was just such an amazing glut of hero pussy.

Cops couldn't walk out of their house.

You didn't have to be anywhere near New York City.

Cops all across... Girls just see the uniform,

and they would stop, drop, and suck his dick.

He's a hero.

"That a girl! Hero! Get that hero dick good!"

The New York Daily News had an article about

"some... comic, Doug Stanhope.

He's making fun of the first responders who died at 9/11."

I was getting all these death threats and boycott e-mails.

"He's un-American.

He's doing this sh..."

It was... crazy.

♪♪

-Fairly soon after 9/11, I had a corporate event

in Washington for... For really big money.

I was to come and make fun of politicians.

The idea that you were somehow going to make fun

of George W. Bush on any level, it was just impossible,

and that event in D.C.,

that afternoon job was a disaster.

-A reporter said to me,

"So you can never make fun of the president again, I guess,"

and I'm like, "What? Never?"

What made it kind of easier to talk about 9/11

was our botched response to it.

-Fool me once...

shame on...

shame on you.

♪♪

If you fool me, we can't get fooled again.

They decided that 9/11

was the big moment they've all been waiting for,

where they would finally get to execute

this kind of massive plan that they had put in

to spread democracy in the Middle East.

-[ Stammers ] How?

[ Laughter ]

What, are you gonna give them all civics books

and they're gonna have to take a... test?

[ Laughter ]

-From the very beginning, it was like...

"The guy who did this isn't there."

It's like we got punched in the face,

and now we're turning to this person

and punching him in the face?

Why are we doing this?

Like, so pretty quickly, the sketches, I think,

became more pointed and more anti-authority.

We are engaged in a deadly standoff with an axis of evil.

You know who I'm talking about...

Iran, Iraq, and one of the Koreas.

It sounds like he's talking about heavy-metal bands,

"the axis of evil,

the weapons of mass destruction."

He's like, "You got a problem.

Bring it on... over there in Iraq,

where the troops are.

Bring it on over to that area.

Want a piece of me? Want a piece of me?

You want to start something?

Get on a plane, go over there,

where the people doing the actual fighting are."

-That's when I think comedy sort of blossomed

because we finally had

a self-deprecating way of being like,

"Oh, our country is doing the worst thing right now,

going into an unwarranted war.

Here are some jokes about it."

-I don't think, uh, Osama bin Laden

sent those planes in, uh, to attack us

because he hated our freedom.

I think he did it because of our support for Israel

and our ties with the Saudi family

and all our military bases in Saudi Arabia.

You know why I think that?

That's what he... said!

[ Laughter ]

-Some girl was sitting in the front,

and she claimed to be in the military.

And she said, "You can't make fun of our commander in chief

during a time of war."

And I said, "That's the whole point of this country.

Supposedly, we're going to Iraq to bring them democracy,

so you're telling me I shouldn't express myself,

uh, but we're gonna take democracy to them?"

-♪ America... yeah ♪

♪ Comin' again to save the mother... day, yeah ♪

- "Team America," just blowing up the Eiffel Tower and everything.

-The fact that they're really calling it out,

that America wants to be the world police.

-But that one joke in particular,

"There'll be 9/11..."

- times 100.

Jesus, that's...

-Yes... 91,100.

-It's a masterpiece.

-There was wasn't a lot of room

for going outside of that patriotic nationalistic fervor.

[ Rock music playing ]

-Comedy definitely took a front runner

in making commentary about what was going on.

-The US of A is the greatest country

on the face of the Earth,

and for that, I will make no apologies!

-Will did this thing

where people could wear patriotic clothing to work.

-USA! USA!

-During the run-up to the Iraq war,

we had a Fox News crawl, and we did get some pushback.

People were going, "Oh, my God,

this was so brave of them to take on Fox News."

Fox News can't be challenged.

George W. Bush can't be challenged.

And there were so many people who were... who were afraid

to be... be critical of the government at all

because you... you could be called anti-American.

-It's like a thing that politicians do

just because they know it's like an applause line.

-Those men are heroes who deserve respect. 9/11.

-Nobody is saying that 9/11 didn't happen.

What they're saying is we're not a fragile country.

Trust us to have this conversation

so that we can do this in the right way.

-Another episode, we had a joke saying, "War is never good."

-War is not the answer.

-Except to all of America's problems.

-Amen.

-The childish "support the troops" threat,

like if you don't support invasions...

you don't support the troops.

[ Indistinct shouting ]

This is a war for imperialism

that's gonna have disastrous effects globally.

It's gonna further destabilize the Middle East.

-Saddam Hussein held up the protests last week

and said, "Isn't that great news?"

-No, I don't think he said, "Isn't that great news?"

I think... And I think it is ridiculous

for you to try and manipulate the protestors.

-Manipulate what? All you've done is talk the whole time.

I haven't had a chance to say a word.

-What are you talking... Democracy in action.

Eight million people on February 15th

who disagree with you.

Just because they disagree with you, it doesn't mean

that Saddam's sitting there going, "This is great."

-Passions were running high in America during that time,

whether you were opposed to the war

or supporting our actions over there.

There were times when people would challenge her.

-Janeane was definitely singled out unfairly.

-When I watch her tirade,

and how can you describe it as anything but?

-No way Janeane Garofalo's gonna get a "patriot" banner,

at least not from us.

Over the weekend, she did a comedy gig in Boston.

-Sean Hannity said,

"Go to her performance in Boston and make some trouble."

-A couple of guys coming up and going,

"Excuse me, Miss Garofalo? Excuse me, Miss Garofalo?"

You want to explain why you think it's..."

you know, and that kind of stuff.

-Ambushed me and edited the tape and showed it on Fox.

-For Fox News and for those people to crucify her

was something fundamentally misogynistic.

-I want to defend her

and say that she's a skilled method actress.

She's actually preparing for a role

as that obnoxious, bitter, lonely, narrow-minded idiot.

- Don't forget paranoid. - Yes.

-Why should any comic deserve that?

To go out and talk and make jokes or to make a point,

you know, it's your right as an American.

-There was many people who were fine with it,

and there's some people, "I want my money back,"

or would wait after the show

because also, uh, people are very brave

when there's a five-foot-one female on their own.

And there would be people that would call ahead to hotels

and cancel my reservation, show up deliberately

to certain shows I did on the road to "protest"

because they'd been encouraged to do so by right-wing radio,

and they would call bomb threats

in to venues that I was working in.

I had so many death threats and so many things

that were sent not just to my apartment,

but to my manager, agent, my dad's house.

-To be character assassinated and terrorized

by intentional right-wing personalities and propaganda

to... to create fear and destabilize your life,

no one deserves that,

but a lot of it had to do with her being a woman, too.

-The media had played, yet again,

such a profound role in having a war happen.

-We expect every American to support our military,

and if they can't do that, to shut up.

-CNN was running a graphic all day long

that said, "Countdown to the war,"

and the theme song and the graphics and the whooshes.

-Obviously, parody and satire reigns supreme

when that happens.

-From the network that brought you "ER," "Friends,"

and "Good Morning, Miami" comes a landmark television event...

The war on Iraq, coming to NBC this fall.

[ Applause ]

-The deadline is now.

-My fellow citizens, American and coalition forces

are in the early stages of military operations

to disarm Iraq.

-Cable news really got toxic in the post-9/11 world.

-What John did, which was ethically the right thing,

but also just for him stylistically with comedy,

was say, like, "Let's make this show

about something more important."

-I think of myself as a comedian

who has the pleasure of writing jokes

about things that I actually care about.

-The show gained a lot of its credibility,

certainly with younger viewers,

by being really skeptical of the case for the war in Iraq

and being right in the end.

-The show became much more politically bent.

I hate to use the term "watchdog,"

but I always think of it that way of, like,

we were... we were, like, almost monitoring

what was happening in the cable-news world.

-Of course, our show, obviously, is at a disadvantage

compared to the many other news sources

that we are competing with.

Uh, at a disadvantage in several respects...

For one thing, we, uh, are fake.

[ Laughter ]

They are not, so in terms of credibility, uh...

we are, uh... well, oddly enough,

actually about even. We're about even.

-He was the first one to tell you, "I am not the news.

I am a comedy show.

I follow sock puppets who do prank phone calls."

If you're getting your news from me,

you're not doing your job as a citizen."

- "The Daily Show" wouldn't have become as powerful

if the media hadn't become so derelict.

-What Jon or the show did well was pointing out the hypocrisy

that was sort of running rampant in the media.

-Any progress in the standoff?

-Chief European Union negotiator Javier Solana

has announced that a resolution should be reached

in the next couple of days.

That's why we're naming Javier Solana

our Vanilla Coke peacemaker of the week.

-The tone and goals in "The Daily Show"

was always to call out the bullshit in the media

and in the government

and, like, sort of be the... the court jester

who was basically going, "The emperor has no clothes."

-John really invented,

and now you see this across all of cable news,

which is this montage of hypocrisy.

-Why is the United States of America using its power

to change governments in foreign countries?

-We must stand up for our security

and for the permanent rights and the hopes of mankind.

The United States of America will make that stand.

-Certainly, that represents a bold new doctrine

in foreign policy, Mr. President.

Governor Bush, do you agree with that?

-Yeah, I'm not so sure the role the United States

is to go around the world,

say, "This is the way it's got to be."

[ Cheers and applause ]

-I was going, "There's an idiot, there's an idiot,

there's an idiot, there's an idiot."

President George W. Bush was an idiot.

Now President Bush is a leader,

and I'm sure no one is more surprised than him.

-Under the two administrations under Bush,

comedy ended up becoming more and more vital every year

and more and more of a part

of the cultural landscape politically.

-What about people who say you're only interested

in the Middle East for oil?

-What? Huh? Oil?

You say something about oil, bitch? You cooking?

Oil?

[ Laughter ]

I don't know... Move! We have to get out of here!

[ Cheers and applause ]

-Good evening. I'm Stephen Colbert,

and welcome to the very first "Colbert Report."

Got a lot to do tonight. A whole big world to fix.

-It was a satire of the type of pundit shows

delivering news through opinion.

-I will speak to you in plain, simple English.

And that brings us to tonight's Word...

"truthiness."

-Post-9/11, there was a lot of people not speaking truths

but speaking like what felt like the truth.

-If you think about it,

maybe there are a few missing pieces to the rationale for war.

But doesn't taking Saddam out feel like the right thing?

-We had come out of the gate with this idea of truthiness,

which seemed to resonate with people,

so the show was definitely in the zeitgeist.

But then it became unclear to me whether

the Correspondents' Association really knew what we were up to.

-Let's take everyone

to the White House Correspondents' Dinner, 2006.

-It was 2 1/2 years after we had invaded Iraq.

-And there was no criticism. We tried to fix that.

-Our writers and Stephen wrote this piece.

-We did basically the kind of jokes

that we would do on our show.

-The very first joke we wrote for it

was, um, "People say that this administration

is... is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic."

Th-This administration is not sinking.

This administration is soaring.

If anything, they are rearranging

the deck chairs on the Hindenburg.

[ Laughter ]

-Alice and I were sitting at the same table,

and we both looked at each other like,

"Uh-oh, we are in trouble."

-It was very much the sort of stuff

that we've been saying to our audience,

to our studio audience,

and not to the president of the United States.

There lies the difference, it turns out.

-It was the first time that George Bush had to sit

and listen to a litany of his crimes,

and it was the first time that the media had to listen

to the litany of their ineptitudes.

-Over the last five years, you people were so good.

Over, uh... Over... Over tax cuts, WMD intelligence,

the effect of global warming,

we Americans didn't want to know,

and you had the courtesy not to try to find out.

-I don't think the people in the news media

were ready to hear what Stephen had to say.

-You're telling a whole bunch of people

that they suck at their jobs when they suck at their jobs.

They're not gonna laugh, but Stephen stuck with it.

And he was amazingly funny, and he was a truth-teller.

-Over the course of the next few days,

it was uploaded to YouTube.

We began to see this groundswell of support for it.

-Thousands and thousands of people grateful

for Stephen having spoken, you know, some truth.

-It was pretty amazing. It felt great.

-Ended up being an important political speech

in American history, made Colbert into a folk hero.

[ Cheers and applause ]

-We're lucky enough to be joined by an expert

in Middle Eastern affairs

who can bring us a unique perspective

for less than half the price of an American reporter.

He is Aasif Mandvi.

He joins us from Beirut.

-What White people do, you know, around that stuff

is not as interesting as Muslim Americans.

-I was the first

brown correspondent on "The Daily Show,"

and I was the first person that was hired to talk about

what was going on in the Middle East

and what was going on in Iraq

and all that stuff from the vantage point

of a brown person talking about that.

My very first piece basically highlighted this idea

that, like, somehow as we bomb their sacred cows,

as it were, over there, they're just supposed to take it

as, like, part of democracy being spread around the world.

As one gentleman told me while standing in

the smoldering remains of what was once his village,

"You can't get hummus without mashing some chickpeas."

[ Laughter ]

-That's an incredible way to look at a terrible situation.

-Well, I'm sure it's no different

from the way your nation views the events of September 11th.

Tough day. Great opportunity.

[ Light laughter ]

-I, uh, I don't think we...

I don't think we really look at it like that.

-Oh, well.

I guess not everyone knows how to respond

when opportunity knocks their house down.

I remember people just being like, "Oh, nobody is...

There's no... There's nobody speaking about that

from the vantage point of, like, the other."

So there was an audience for it. There was a thirst for it.

There was a hunger for this kind of experience.

-There really wasn't an Arab voice.

There were about five or seven comics.

That was it.

-I talked about what it was like growing up in America

as an Iranian.

I would touch on my ethnicity a lot

before September 11th.

-9/11 crystallized that for a lot of people.

"Oh, you've never been a fan of Iranians.

They've been the devil for a long time,

and now we can just rope in the rest of the Middle East."

-I went to a store and I went to buy something,

and the cashier looked at my credit card,

says, "What kind of name is... Is this?"

I'm like, "Well, it's an Arabic name."

She goes, "What... What does this mean?"

I'm like, "Well, translated to English,

it means peaceful, friendly Arab."

[ Laughter ]

We had a show at the La Jolla Comedy Store, and the club said,

"Hey, we actually got some calls from people.

They're really upset that you guys are performing.

We got a couple death threats."

So I called up Maz Jobrani.

I said, "Hey, man, we're getting death threats.

What do you want to do?"

And he said, "it, let's do it.

If we're gonna die, let's go out with a laugh."

♪♪

-So I called up Maz Jobrani.

I said, "Hey, man, we're getting death threats."

And he said, "it, let's do it.

If we're gonna die, let's go out with a laugh."

I'll meet a white girl.

She'll be like, "He's tall, he's dark, he's hairy,

and I think he's a terrorist."

Sure enough, people came up to us after the show.

"You guys were hilarious.

My husband was laughing so hard, he was crying."

Of course, we're like, "Tell your friends.

Let them know we're okay."

-There was a lot of airport jokes

in terms of getting racially profiled,

and at the same time, it was hacky

because it kept happening.

-To this day, I still randomly get selected at the airport,

and I'm like, "Yeah, I'm the guy. Go ahead, search me.

I'm an atheist, you... idiot."

I remember was on a flight like two weeks after 9/11.

I sat down beside this white guy.

He almost shit his pants.

I sat down. The guy was like this.

Any movement, I think he was like...

I'm like, "Oh, relax, dude."

That's when I wrote the joke.

Like, relax, you jackass.

Just getting my Discman.

Got to listen to my instructions.

[ Laughter ]

-The media started pumping out all of these images

of just, like, nonstop violent Muslims,

as if to say those are the only kinds of Muslims,

the violent ones.

-Every time they show us on TV, they always show the crazy guy

burning the flag, going like, "Death to America!"

Always that guy.

Just once... Just once, I wish they would show us,

like, I don't know, like, baking a cookie... just once.

Because I've been to Iran. We have cookies.

I swear, just once, I want them to be like,

"Okay, now we're gonna go to Mohammed in Iran,"

and they show some guy's like, "Hello, I'm Mohammed.

And I'm just baking a cookie."

[ Laughter ]

Even if they ever did that, they would follow that up

with another news piece, going like,

"This just in, a cookie bomb just exploded."

-To be a comic in a time when your race of people

suddenly become the country's enemy

and then you don't back down,

it's like coming out of the Middle Eastern closet.

-It became more and more important to say,

"I got to put aside some of my dick and fart jokes

and start, like, recognizing the need to talk about identity

as, like, a social-justice act."

So I asked myself, WWARCOAD...

What would Arafat and Rabin do circa the 1993 Oslo Accords?

-It wasn't like the rest of the media

was gonna give brown people chances

to share their perspectives.

-Took that term that George Bush had come up with

when he put Iran, Iraq, and North Korea

into this axis of evil, and on the tour,

me, Ahmed Ahmed, who's Egyptian, Aron Kader was Palestinian.

Dean Obeidallah is Palestinian. Four of us.

-We were trying to show America

Middle Eastern people laughing at ourselves.

Nobody had ever seen that before.

It hadn't really been done.

-Doing shows around America, shows in the Middle East.

There was never standup comedy shows in the Middle East.

-Sold out 5 countries, 30 shows, 20,000 tickets.

-And a production company said, "Hey, we're gonna film this,"

and they got Comedy Central to air it.

That was the first time in American history

that there were Middle Eastern American comedians

on a major network being funny.

It's great to see so many Middle Eastern people

coming together in one place voluntarily.

-We got a lot of e-mails from people saying

that it had changed their minds

about people from that part of the world.

-We're gonna start an Arab-American comedy festival

to show our fellow Americans we can be funny.

Arabs are not just terrorists,

and to be a platform to encourage other

Arab-Americans to get in the arts.

-There was an audience of brown people out there

who were kind of like,

"Why don't we talk about, like, what our experience is?"

I didn't have a lot of things that my Western friends had,

you know, like bacon bits and, uh, Santa Claus.

You know, I never got to see my mother's face, things like that.

-Max Brooks and Dean Obeidallah had hatched up this idea,

"The Watch List" for Comedy Central,

which was basically like the Chappelle show

but for brown people.

It was, frankly, ahead of its time.

-Meet Ali Mazyar, a Middle Eastern American actor

whose fortunes have recently taken a dramatic turn.

-Indeed, today, there are more parts than ever

for people of my ilk.

And so I founded the Ali Mazyar School of Acting

for Middle Eastern people.

It's gun up... fist up...

and yell.

[ Shouts ]

I want them to land the part

because if they don't get the role,

it will go to a Hispanic.

-We went through a wave where Arab comedy got really popular.

-And you start breaking through, and you're like,

"We're actually having the conversation we need to have,"

because I'm a believer that if

you don't have the conversation, nothing goes away.

Racism and bigotry doesn't end through silence.

It never does.

The day before President Bush was reelected,

they arrested, detained, and profiled...

True story... In the United States

over 10,000 Middle Eastern people, Arabs,

and especially Muslims.

And, um, I was one of them.

[ Laughter ]

Two cops, White cop and a Black cop.

The White cop walked over to me and bumped into me purposely,

and I said, "Is everything okay, officer?"

He said, "Turn around."

Handcuffed me, started walking me through the airport.

Slowly showcasing me as if to say,

"Hey, I got one."

The Black cop leaned into my ear and he whispered verbatim,

"Now you know what it's like to be a Black man in the '60s."

-Turning something that horrible,

that tragic, into something tangible

that's sort of trying to be a bridge of understanding

and representing our people in a positive way,

like, how could I be an Arab-American comedian

and not engage about that?

-Here we are coming out talking all this shit

about being from the Middle East,

and these young comics are like,

"Well, if they could do it, then we can do it."

-I think that's probably why a lot of people gravitated

to stand up after 9/11.

"Oh, I can say what I want.

I get to control the story, and you can actually hear me

and see me and know what I'm thinking."

-Sikh people get attacked all the time for being Muslim.

Spoiler alert... they're not,

but they're brown and they wear turbans,

so people attack them for being Muslim,

which must put them in such an awkward position

because they're like, "I'm not Muslim,

not that you should attack Muslims,

but if you're looking to attack Muslims,

which you shouldn't, I'm not one.

There is a Muslim right over there.

Don't attack him,

unless somebody is definitely getting attacked,

in which case, get it right, which is wrong."

-Comedy plays a role in the spectrum of change.

You're, like, maybe a swing hater,

and you, like... you're like, "Oh, huh, that's funny."

And then you see many,

many, many, many more things like that.

And you add up those laughs, those little chuckles,

hundreds of millions of chuckles.

That's where you see social change.

[ Cheers and applause ]

-After 9/11, the nightmares would just be...

♪♪

I would relive it every night.

I had gone through therapy, tried all the drugs.

Nothing else was working.

So instead of...

falling asleep to the sound of myself screaming,

I found an old Richard Pryor tape,

and I just started playing it.

-I go to the therapist, you know, and I go see him

and I talk to him, you know, "How do you feel?"

I said, "I feel like breaking your... face."

[ Laughter ]

"Like to pull your... guts out

and stomp on them, okay?"

"That's fine."

[ Laughter ]

-And I started to laugh.

It was like the first time...

I could, uh, just be on my own and not...

feel the fear of what happened to me and what happened to us.

-Yeah, my dad, if you don't know,

he was a fireman, and he died on 9/11.

He was a very good dude,

and I have a lot of jokes about it.

And if you don't like the first one,

you probably won't like the rest.

[ Laughter ]

What's weird is my grandma on my mom's side,

my mom's mom, she, uh...

Her birthday's on 9/11, and she never liked my dad.

[ Laughter ]

Kind of fishy, isn't it?

I'm not making fun of it to be an asshole.

I'm making fun of it because it's a challenge

to try and find humor

in stuff like that, to try and make a joke work.

-I helped prep him for the Bieber roast

because there was actually talk about it.

You know, what we do in that situation?

-Pete's wise for his years and said,

"I'm gonna get ahead of it and do one first."

-I lost my dad on 9/11, and I always regretted

growing up without a dad... Until I met your dad, Justin.

Now I'm glad mine's dead.

[ Laughter ]

-It's, like, fun to make people laugh at stuff.

They're like, "Oh..."

you know, "I shouldn't laugh at that."

-Your sense of humor is like your taste in food.

How spicy you like it depends on you.

-Who the... am I to say

that that's offensive if Pete doesn't think it is?

-I'm appalled that people would come here

and make jokes about the sacrifice

Pete's heroic father made on 9/11.

This is not the roast of Pete Davidson's father.

That was in 2001.

[ Audience groans, laughs ]

Some people are going, "Well, no, I lost a family member.

That can never be funny," and I always think,

"Well, but, you know, different people have different tastes."

I like the stuff immediately.

I like a warm cadaver to joke about.

-Which leads us all

to the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks...

Kyle.

-If you went through all the episodes of "South Park,"

if you went through all the episodes

of all of the comedy,

I'm sure there would be countless 9/11 jokes.

I never would have thought that that would happen.

-I was there in New York for 9/11,

which is just...

We had... We had over 2,400 widows.

2,400 widows, each who finally this year,

finally ended up with a check for $5 million each.

And, uh... [ Laughter ]

At least... There got to be

three women out there that were going, "Harry's dead, boo-hoo."

-Tragedy plus time equals comedy.

I-I mean, you got to let some time pass.

-Which I get, you know, certainly couldn't make

Holocaust jokes 'til at least '47.

-It's very hard to define what... what's too soon.

You know, it often is, like, very...

-They say you can't make a joke about the Holocaust,

but... - "The Producers"...

-Don't be stupid, be a smartie. Come and join the Nazi party.

-I don't think that it's really anything that's too soon

if you deliver it correctly.

-We did it, Brian, we made 9/11 happen!

High-five! - Alright! High-five!

-Wow, that... that probably wouldn't look very good

out of context.

-Too soon is when it gets you fired,

and just in time is when it gets a laugh.

-You didn't think I was so hideous

that night we made out in the back booth at the seafood hut.

-We all did crazy things on 9/11.

-You're really just trying to express a point of view

that highlights your sense of humor

and you as an individual.

Now you trying to find that audience member out there

to share it with.

-Just so I could go to my senior prom,

sold my passport on the street for 300 bucks.

Of course, this was before 9/11, so my bad, everybody.

-Gallows humor or dark comedy

is a way to sort of push back terror.

-When you're in trauma or you're in circular thought

or you're constantly adrenalized and full of anxiety,

escape is hard to come by.

-Part of what comedy does, it snips that connection.

-If someone can actually make you laugh in that moment,

to me, it's the most reassuring thing that can happen.

-To find the humor in a very, very dark moment

is the beauty of it.

-Taking something tragic

and spin it up into something good.

If American Airlines were smart, their slogan would be,

"American Airlines... First through the towers."

-You can either cry about it or you can laugh about it,

so let's laugh about it to stop from crying about it.

-Talking about tragedies is a very healthy thing.

-It needs to happen, whether it's satire or parody.

-Do you know Wanda Pierce?

She just woke up from a 30-year coma.

-Okay, what if we got relevant superstar David Copperfield

to make the World Trade Center disappear?

-Oh, I hate to be the one to tell you this,

but David Copperfield really isn't a big draw anymore.

-Handled the right way, nothing's off-limits.

-You're like the Twin Towers

if they burnt and never fell down.

-Laughter is part of any healing process.

-Testament to our own survival.

We haven't been destroyed by it.

-I think of September 11th half of the terrorist attack

and half, and more important to me,

as the day Jay-Z released "The Blueprint."

[ Laughter ]

My father was in New York at the time,

and I remember he called me. He was like, "Oh, my God.

Oh, my God, have you heard? Have you heard?"

And I was like, "Are you talking about track 12?

Yes, I've heard.

It's... amazing."

He was like, "No, son, we're under attack,"

and I was like, "Yeah, by dope beats by Timbaland.

This album is changing my life."

-Comedy and tragedy are roommates,

and wherever tragedy is,

comedy is standing behind its back,

looking over its shoulder,

sticking its tongue out and making faces.

-When something tragic happens,

how do we learn from that to move forward

instead of sitting around and just saying,

"Woe is me, woe is me"?

-This is what drove the bill.

This bill would provide $7 million

in medical and financial benefits for Ground Zero workers

who get sick, and they're gonna pay for it

by closing a corporate-tax loophole.

It's a win-win-win-win. Just [bleep] do it!

[ Laughter ]

-Comedy it its highest form is educating and entertaining.

You're laughing at a joke while at the same time,

you're learning something about an issue.

-Honestly, Mitch McConnell, you really want to go with the

"we'll get to it when we get to it" argument

for the heroes of 9/11?

-It's the comics job to A, service their audience,

but also tell the truth.

-They did their jobs.

18 years later, do yours!

-Social criticism. That's part of what comics do.

-The 9/11 First Responders bill

that's been languishing in Congress for years...

It just passed this afternoon.

[ Cheers and applause ]

There's Mitch McConnell right before the vote

walking in, knowing... Knowing he's gonna vote for it,

and, uh, here's our friend Jon Stewart.

[ Laughs ] [ Cheers and applause ]

-And that's how we saved America.

-Yeah. Yeah.

-It'd be really interesting

if you found someone from the Taliban,

someone that was willing to go,

"9/11, best day ever, love the jokes."

I did a show for the troops after 9/11,

and it went horribly.

I mean, it really... terrible.

Um, it's very difficult to get those Taliban guys to laugh.

-I'm glad comedy survived.

It was touch-and-go there for a little while.