Jon Stewart collected one of the rarest honors in comedy Sunday night, the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. It was mostly a night of laughs, notes the Washington Post, though Stewart himself delivered a more serious message about comedy and the modern world:
- “Comedy survives every moment," said Stewart. It "doesn’t change the world, but it’s a bellwether. We’re the banana peel in the coal mine. When society is under threat, comedians are the ones who get sent away first.”
- "Having Bassem here is an example of the true threat to comedy," said Stewart, referring to Egyptian comedian Hassem Youssef, per NPR. (Youssef's Stewart-inspired show got him in trouble with authorities in Egypt.) The real threat, Stewart said, is "not the fragility of audiences" or "the pronoun police," but "the fragility of leaders."