USA TODAY International Edition
Jordan Klepper, provocateur, is ‘The Opposition’
His character is a more ‘paranoid’ version of his Daily Show persona
NEW YORK Jordan Klepper is an angry white man.
Or, rather, he plays one as host of Comedy Central’s The Opposition (Sept. 25, Monday through Thursday, 11:30 ET/PT), a new Daily Show companion that stars one of its former correspondents as an arrogant blowhard.
While the Colbert Report channeled Bill O’Reilly, Klepper is aiming his sights more generally at the alt-right media, magnified in the Trump area as a place where contrariness is its own reward.
“This guy is a provocateur first,” he says in an interview at the show’s spacious offices — overlooking a Hooters — in a shabby midtown hotel, where a former ballroom serves as his studio. “He’s going to be the first guy to stand up against something; he just hasn’t figured out what that thing is yet.”
So the show also will “poke some holes in how the left gets so sacrosanct with some of their issues as well,” Klepper says. “We’ll feed it through the opportunistic host, who will flip on his own ideas if it makes him get more clicks. That’s his ideology.”
If that also sounds a bit like our current president, it’s purely intentional.
At a practice taping on Sept. 15, Klepper aimed his satirical sights on climate change, PBS, “soulless progressives,” the “deep state” and (of course) mainstream media. “I don’t like it when people agree,” he told his guest, a Politico editor. “Compromise is the ultimate C-word.”
Klepper, 38, isn’t really angry; he’s a smart, genial, 6-foot-4 native of Kalamazoo, Mich., with a pompadour and a background in improv. He joined Daily in 2014, replacing John Oliver, and bridged the transition from Jon Stewart to Trevor Noah.
He honed the character, a more “paranoid” version of his Daily Show persona, as he interviewed supporters at Trump rallies during the 2016 election. “What became eye-opening to me was where they were getting their information,” he says. “It wasn’t necessarily CNN, and it wasn’t MSNBC. It was a little bit of Fox (News), but it was InfoWars, the Blaze” and Breitbart, so-called “alt-media” that approached stories from a conservative, anti-mainstream point of view.
“There’s a validity given to any website that treats itself as news, and it gets passed around in a way that allows it to be its own echo chamber,” he says. “What makes it insidious is that it gets picked up and finds its own way downstream.”
Noah, an executive producer of the new series, says Klepper can stand out in an increasingly crowded field of late-night hosts with his unique focus. “It’s an exciting opportunity, and it is challenging, because you’re going to be in a space where people are going to be comparing you to Colbert,” he says.
Comedy Central president Kent Alterman says Klepper’s show is a solid fit, perhaps in contrast to The Nightly Show, hosted by former Daily correspondent Larry Wilmore, canceled last summer after 19 months. “Jordan is aiming squarely at the new world that we’re living in, but at the same time it has a natural connection to the Daily Show. We’re excited we can restore that hour in a really potent way.”
Fans of the genre will see familiar touches in The Opposition: A topical opening segment, plenty of news clips, a real-world interview subject who serves as a mock foil, and a band of six contributors, called “citizen journalists,” who make the news instead of reporting it. “It’s the act of being transgressive and showing up at a place and causing a ruckus that is the story,” he says.
In one remote segment, Laura Grey (Klepper’s wife of four years), does a James O’Keefestyle undercover exposé on how the removal of American icons is tantamount to “washing our history.” No, not Confederate statues; the animatronic robot band at Chuck E. Cheese pizza restaurants.