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Jon Stewart: Authoritarian governments a threat, not comedy | Entertainment News
WASHINGTON (AP) — Jon Stewart, accepting the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, warned Sunday evening that speculation about the potential of comedy amid enhanced audience cultural sensitivity was ignoring a genuine and enduring risk: authoritarian governments all over the entire world. “Comedy does not improve the world, but it’s a bellwether,” Stewart claimed. “When a society feels beneath threat, comedians are who gets despatched absent very first.” Stewart pointed to Egyptian comic Bassem Youssef, whose Stewart-impressed political comedy present gained him both fame and self-imposed exile. Youssef’s story is “an instance of the legitimate danger to comedy,” Stewart mentioned. The intersection of comedy and politics was the…