When Jon Stewart broke America’s collective heart by announcing that he was stepping down from his position of Late Night Liberal Sweetheart, the drums began beating across media land. Stewart’s abdication of the Iron Throne is a challenge but it is also, of course, an opportunity. Who will replace him? What will Comedy Central do now?
Two of Stewart’s scions, Stephen Colbert and John Oliver, have already signed lucrative late-night-hosting contracts of their own — in Colbert’s case, twice over. So they’re out as possible successors. Will Comedy Central choose another TV personality from Stewart’s incredible stable of talent and promote from within? Will it go in a different direction altogether? And, most importantly, will the network finally put a lady and/or Person of Color behind the desk?
As the Times points out, the white maleness of Late Night is a perennial problem:
When Jimmy Fallon slid into “The Tonight Show” a year ago, opening up the 12:30 a.m. “Late Night” slot, a similar outcry arose. “It’s time,” bloggers blared. Names were floated. Then Seth Meyers got the job. Soon after, David Letterman announced he was wrapping up his “Late Show” run. Bloggers blared. Names were floated. And Stephen Colbert got the job. Then Craig Ferguson decided to step down. More blaring, more floating — and then the job went to the British actor James Corden.
Now, all these hosts are talented and deserving. Their worthiness is not the issue. The issue is that they are not representative of the available talent. Nor do they reflect the audience. For example, Mr. Letterman’s audience is around 55 percent female. So why are women considered only for “next time”?
Tina Fey, of course, has the answer.
A Huff Po live panel convened to discuss the issue as well.
Tired of speculation, Twitter users began suggesting their own alternatives to Jon Stewart and, in my Twitter feed at least, it took about five minutes to choose a consensus candidate: the composed, acerbic, hilarious correspondent Jessica Williams. The clamor reached her ears as well and she demurred, in a classic 21st century way.
How modest! How self-effacing! You can almost hear all the old white people who benefit from the status quo nodding their approval. We did it, they whisper. We have succeeded in instilling in yet another competent, confident young woman a total lack of understanding of her own self-worth! We didn’t even need to undermine her; we gave her the tools and she undermined herself. Well done all. Good show. Let’s play eighteen holes and then hit up Hooters for lunch.
Jessica Williams, respectfully, I reject your humility. What on earth does “under-qualified” mean when it comes to being a comedian? You’re smart, you’re funny, you’re self-possessed. Is there something I’m missing?
And how insulting that so many press outlets took her tweets at face value despite the fact that they were displaying clear symptoms of Impostor Syndrome, a well-documented phenomenon in which men look at their abilities vs the requirements of a job posting and round up, whereas women do the same and round down, calling themselves “unqualified.” The AV club opined,
She also probably doesn’t want to make any big commitments at this point, even to a prestigious position like hosting The Daily Show. Ignorant hair-based assumptions aside, this outpouring of support is a great sign for Williams’ career, as it provides tangible evidence of her marketability. And producers are taking notice; Williams tells Uproxx that director Jim Strouse recruited her directly for her part in his new film People, Places, Things, and that she has many offers to choose from right now. So whileHot Tub Time Machine 2 could still be right and Williams may take the position some time before 2025, if her film career keeps growing we might see her on the other side of the interview desk instead.
Bullshit. All Williams needs is a pep talk. Get Luvvie in a room with her, and Jazmine, and Amy Poehler and Lena Dunham. Get Paul Feig in there too, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, and George R. R. Martin. Get her the best Lean In group of all time. She will emerge as from a funeral pyre, naked and coiled in dragons, ready to lead.
ETA: I apologize for being insensitive here. I should have underlined that of course the choice belongs only to Williams. If she had said, “I don’t want the job,” I would have left it there. Her saying “I’m not qualified” is what intrigued me, especially since I’ve read so much about Impostor Syndrome lately and that’s so often the language women use.
Again, I want to emphasize that I have enormous respect for Williams. I think she’s talented and funny and great. That said, Williams is not accountable to either old white tastemakers or, as the also talented and funny Wyatt Cenac pointed out, to young opinionated ones like me. The decision is entirely hers.
ETA II (2/18): I wrote that first apology early on, before I had the chance to read Jessica Williams’ full Tweeted response, and then my feed became overwhelming & impossible to sort through, especially with all the curse words, so I missed a lot of what came next. But now that I’m more caught up, I wanted to state officially and for the record, as I have on Twitter, that I was wrong. I was offensive and presumptuous; I messed up, and I’m sorry. Williams should not have had to deal with this shit: my calling her a “victim” of anything, my acting like I know better and could diagnose her with anything, all of it. Ugh. I’m leaving the post up, because at this point my stupid blog entry is News, and may it live in infamy. But I apologize, again. I am listening to folks and trying to learn, and I will try my hardest to be more damn careful & thoughtful in the future.
Jessica Williams (on stop-and-frisk): People need to accept this program as a fact of urban life, and right now, I’m standing in one of New York’s most crime-ridden neighborhoods.
John Oliver: Where exactly are you, Jess?
Jessica Williams: I’m on Wall Street!
Mommies, especially low-income ones, take a hit in the labor market, whereas daddies, especially already privileged ones, reap rewards. You must be as tired of reading this nonsense as I am of writing about it.
Ms. Correll asked participants how much they would pay job applicants if they were employers. Mothers were offered on average $11,000 less than childless women and $13,000 less than fathers. In her research, Ms. Correll found that employers rate fathers as the most desirable employees, followed by childless women, childless men and finally mothers.
Low-income women lost 6 percent in wages per child, two percentage points more than the average. For men, the largest bonuses went to white and Latino men who were highly educated and in professional jobs. The smallest pay bumps went to unmarried African-American men who had less education and had manual labor jobs. “The daddy bonus increases the earnings of men already privileged in the labor market,” Ms. Budig wrote.
GAH SEXISM UNEQUAL OPPORTUNITY OUR CLASSLESS SOCIETY okay I’m out. Only good news now:
+ Jesse Mecham of YNAB did an AMA.
+ New Orleans’s economy has seriously bounced back post-Katrina; it reversed a pre-hurricane decline and is now outperforming the country in general.
+ Here’s what Rupert Giles maybe studied at Watcher / Librarian school.
Here’s a cheerful story about a female academic whose potential employers were queasy about her marital status. This is known in the ivory tower as “the two-body problem.”
my marital status kept popping up in preliminary interviews, campus visits, and even in discussions with my letter writers. “What would your poor husband do?” emerged as a refrain in my job search. One of my recommenders repeatedly asked whether I would take jobs if they were offered. Later, I wondered if married male colleagues had to endure similar conversations. Did their spouses figure so heavily in the calculations of recommenders and interviewers? Were their wedding rings analyzed? Were their poor wives influencing possible job offers? Apparently not. Writing in The New York Times, English professor Caroline Bicks describes how her husband emerged as a “problem” in her job search, whereas no one ever asked him about his wife. “It felt as if my wedding ring was a hurdle I had to clear to prove my commitment to academia,” she writes, “while Brendon’s was a badge of stability and good-guy gravitas.”
And oh God it gets worse:
My husband, Chris, is also an academic, a computational scientist, requiring us to navigate two careers and apply to academic jobs everywhere. Marriage affected our job searches differently: It was a liability for mine and a boon for his. Hiring committees imagined Chris as the male head of household, someone who needed a job to support his wife and child. Interviewers viewed my academic strivings as hobbies. We both went on the job market determined to do what was best for our family. And before long, I became a trailing spouse — first an adjunct, then a lecturer, now outside of academia. It turns out it was easier to resist traditional gender norms before I was beset by the grim statistics of our situation and the outdated notions fueling them.
To some degree, women are also at fault for letting it happen. They don’t lean in to their job searches the way their husbands do, apparently. They are more willing to back-burner their careers, to make sacrifices, to be treated badly. And then, of course, they are.
Academics! Some tips. Practice saying the following before you go on interviews:
+ “Husband? What husband?”
+ “It’s his lifetime ambition to be a stay-at-home dad.”
+ “He can work remotely from anywhere!”
+ “I’m the Barack in this family, okay? He’s the Michelle.”
+ “Enough about my marriage; let’s talk about yours!”
+ “That? No, that just stands for ‘Pretty Handsome Dude.’”
Or just marry a woman instead and take turns being the wife.
For ¥3,000, or about thirty dollars, I had gotten a membership card at Tokyo’s first co-sleeping café, and then I paid another ¥3,000 for forty minutes of sleeping; it’s ordinarily ¥5,000, but as a first-timer I was eligible for a promotional rate. (A ten-hour package costs ¥50,000, a 20 percent discount off the hourly rate.) The café had a video explaining that all sexual overtures, regardless of financial incentivization, would be refused. But there were add-ons available: I chose staring into each other’s eyes (1 min, ¥1,000) and being patted on the head (1 min, ¥1,000). Other options included having the woman change her pajamas once, spooning, or sleeping with your head in her lap. As appealing as they were, those had all struck me as crossing some sort of line.
Gideon Lewis-Kraus has an essay in Harper’s about co-sleeping cafés — places where, as far as I can tell, men go to pay women to sleep next to them for as short as 20 minutes, or for additional money, get patted on the head or get a five-second hug (cost: $10). The description of some of the services demonstrates some of the institutionalized sexism in Japan (women servicing men to make them feel better about themselves), but it also shows the country’s overworked culture that has people literally being worked to death. The young woman working at the co-sleeping café explains why such a place can even exist:
“I have sympathy for their work. For any work. I am at work now. In Japan you have no . . . Please hold moment.” She blushed, whited out her face with her screen, tapped lightly. She held the phone out. It said paid vacation. “In France I hear you get one months. But Japan is no. Men come here want time, relax time. It’s like being in their room at their house. Bed is best relax item.”
Photo: Warren Naronha