Jon Stewart gets serious weighing in on Eric Garner case
Stewart’s segment on the Eric Garner grand jury decision may have aired on Comedy Central, but it wasn’t funny.
Jon Stewart's segment on the Eric Garner grand jury decision may have aired on Comedy Central, but it wasn't funny. Even Stewart, the political commentator-comedian was at a rare loss for words and jokes while weighing in on the grand jury's decision not to indict Eric Garner's killer, an NYPD police officer named Daniel Pantaleo.
"I honestly don't know what to say," Stewart said on the Dec. 3 airing of "The Daily Show." "If comedy is tragedy plus time, I need more [expletive] time, but I would really settle for less [expletive] tragedy."
While there may have been conflicting witness accounts and lack of video evidence in the Michael Brown case — in which a Ferguson, Mo. police officer named Darren Wilson killed an 18-year-old, unarmed black man, Michael Brown — Stewart pointed out that Garner's death was recorded on video and ruled a homicide by the coroner. Despite that, Pantaleo still was not indicted in Garner's death by a grand jury.
"We are definitely not living in a post-racial society, and I can imagine there are a lot of people out there wondering how much of a society we're living in at all," Stewart said.