On a Thursday afternoon in late November, Jordan Klepper sits at his desk in midtown Manhattan sifting through the day’s news. Less than two months into his tenure as the host of Comedy Central’s The Opposition with Jordan Klepper, the comic, formerly a correspondent on Jon Stewart and then Trevor Noah’s The Daily Show, is still getting used to anchoring a show of his own.
On The Opposition, with a perpetually cocked brow and a hairstyle that adds at least several inches to his 6ft4in frame, Klepper plays a creature very much of the moment: a logic-defying, conspiratorial dingbat ripped from the Breitbart comments section who goes by the name of “Jordan Klepper”.
To prepare for his almost-nightly hosting duties (the show airs Monday through Thursday), Klepper wakes up, checks the mainstream media, like CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, and then alternative news sources such as Breitbart, the Daily Caller, and InfoWars, whose host, Alex Jones, the irascible poster-child for rightwing paranoia, is the most obvious inspiration for Klepper’s apoplectic schtick.
On this day, like most days under the governance of Donald Trump, there are at least a dozen political stories circulating, each of which make for great, satirical fodder: Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate accused of sexual misconduct against teenage girls, has blamed the scandal on a conspiracy engineered by liberals, gay people and lesbians; rumors are swirling that the US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, is about to be fired; the president has retweeted anti-Muslim videos from a far-right nationalist group called Britain First and, moments later, insinuated that MSNBC host Joe Scarborough may have been involved in the death of an aide. But since it’s only 1pm, some of these stories might be old news by the time Klepper steps into the studio in the Grand Ballroom of the Hotel Pennsylvania to begin filming.
“Boy, every day right now is somewhat atypical, partially because of the news cycle and partially because we’re figuring how we want to best run this show,” he says, readying for the 20th episode. “I’m different than Alex Jones or Sean Hannity, so I take some of the attitudes that they attack stories with and then try to bring my body to that character.”
The character Klepper plays is a raging mural of rightwing personalities: there’s the smugness of Tucker Carlson, the strained sub-logic of Hannity, the bombast of Jones, and the waspy arrogance of Fox News’ Jesse Watters, all topped off with the host’s charismatic, newsman cadence, which almost never breaks. While it will inevitably remind viewers of Stephen Colbert’s own rightwing parody, which he mastered on The Colbert Report before moving to tamer pastures at CBS, Klepper’s character is more patently derivative of the anti-establishment anger Trump so deftly weaponized on the campaign trail.
Being a correspondent on The Daily Show, where Klepper was often sent to Trump rallies to survey the fans decked out in “Lock Her Up” memorabilia, taught him something about the tribalism of American politics and how it engenders a readiness to believe pretty much anything. In one field piece for The Opposition, Klepper goes to a post-election rally in Phoenix and asks attendees to sign a petition to “Impeach Hillary”, which many of them enthusiastically do.
“Talking to people legitimized these sources and points of view. We call these ideas fringe, but I don’t think they are fringe,” Klepper says. “They are being validated by Donald Trump. They hear it on the radio, they see it in their news feeds, and then they go to a stadium with 10,000 people and the guy who’s leading in the polls says Hillary Clinton is having seizures.
“This is how a new reality gets created,” he says. “So we can start playing with this paranoia, this weird, new Donald Trump post-party ideology.”
Asked how he’d describe the ideology, Klepper believes it’s simply about accruing symbolic victories: “It’s not about Republicans and Democrats. Seeing religious right people not giving a shit about morality, and just wanting to win on abortion – it’s: ‘I want to win, but I want you to lose.’”
At The Opposition headquarters, which might be how an Alex Jones type would describe the backrooms where George Soros supposedly funds anti-Trump protests, Klepper’s dedication to character and mockery is reflected everywhere, from a pillow with the words “It’s only news if you believe it” superimposed on his visage to a paper wristband that reads “DO NOT EAT: microchip embedded”. Lest the earnestness of his parody fall on deaf ears, he makes sure his true feelings can be discerned behind the character’s veneer of Deep State anxiety. Just six episodes into his new show, the mass shooting in Las Vegas took place. Klepper rose to the occasion, delivering an incisive yet funny segment about how fellow rightwingers could avoid talking about guns.
“Not even 24 hours later, these heartless liberals deployed their most sinister, nefarious, despicable weapon: talking,” he says, peering into the camera as if delivering a prophecy. “There’s only one thing for us brave, patriotic Americans to do: stand our ground, turn, and run away from this debate.”
Klepper, who is 38 and was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, has been bred for his Comedy Central gig since he first joined improv troupes, such as Chicago’s Second City and iO theater in 2003, where he did a show called Whirled News Tonight. The audience would cut out news stories of the day, tack them to a wall, and comics would pick one to read aloud and improvise a scene about it. Besides honing his John Kerry impression, iO made Klepper more curious about current affairs and illustrated, as Oscar Wilde would say, the importance of being earnest, especially when it comes to political satire.
“I am this character, and this character is an asshole,” he says. “I want to show some of the fears and blind spots that people have, so you can see why they’re so frustrated. Like: ‘He’s being bigoted right now, but maybe he’s not a terrible person, he’s just missing something.’”
“Earnestness has always been a virtue,” he adds. “In comedy, it’s something there’s a craven need for right now because we feel so lost.”
Klepper doesn’t just draw inspiration for his character from newscasters, but also from the members of the administration whose job it is to present Trumpism as a coherent doctrine. “I find Kellyanne Conway fascinating,” he says. “She is totally adept at her job and they let her do it. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is also somebody we’re watching, through gritted teeth. Those folks are doing elements of what we do. Trump will tweet this hateful, Islamophobic video with no context. Why did he do that? We don’t know. But someone has to answer for it.” Mining the discord of those defenses – “how you have to bend over backwards” to support them – informs Klepper’s own show, where he tries to untie the twisted knot at the center of far-right disaffection and, in some dark corners of the web, lunacy.
But Klepper, and the cadre of satirists who have flourished in the strange, new political climate – among them Colbert, John Oliver, Klepper’s former boss Noah and his friend Samantha Bee – know that comedy’s Trump-induced bull market won’t last forever. Exhaustion, or maybe even impeachment, could be imminent. But it won’t matter much, since Klepper’s show is less about Trump than it is the henchmen who must find a tiny kernel of reason in his behavior.
“If that could end tomorrow, I’d be the happiest guy in the world,” he says of Trump’s omnipresence in late-night comedy. “This show traffics in culture wars. It might literally be the NFL, because that’s the fight the commander-in-chief’s decided we ought to have. So if we can take that fight, and make a mountain out of a molehill, it’s a way for us to show the tactics, as opposed to the story.”
- The Opposition airs Monday through Thursday on Comedy Central at 11.30pm ET