Hey Jon Stewart, Jokes About Wearing Masks Aren't Funny

[SocialDemocrat61]

Hey Jon Stewart, Jokes About Wearing Masks Aren’t Funny
Critics of the host say he’s a hypocrite.
Julia Métraux

Over the weekend, Covid-cautious individuals shared clips on social media of Jon Stewart punching down on people who are masking, who are presumably doing so to protect themselves from Covid, the flu, and other infectious diseases that are spreading across the United States.

On the December 11 episode of the podcast The Weekly Show With Jon Stewart, guest Tim Miller of The Bulwark said there have to be at least two people at fellow guest Jon Favreau’s workplace wearing masks because it’s a progressive organization. Stewart responded, “There’s always two, and you always say, ‘Oh, are you sick?’ And they go, ‘Uh, I don’t want to talk about it.'”

Disappointed to see Jon Stewart & co joke about masking in public. I do it for my medically fragile daughter (Batten Disease). People not masking properly led to her getting pneumonia, which led to her being on life support, which led to me getting price quotes on her cremation just in case.

— Philip Palermo (@palermo.bsky.social) 2025-12-29T03:31:53.258Z

First of all, asking people why they are masking is invasive behavior. No one randomly owes you information about their health, their loved one’s health, or, understandably, just wanting to avoid Covid, which is the only way to prevent Long Covid. As I’ve also previously reported, disabled people in New York’s Nassau County have reported being harassed after the county passed a mask ban. Cancer patients have also told their stories of being questioned about why they’re masking. Even before the start of the Covid pandemic, populations including cancer patients and organ transplant recipients have been encouraged to mask by healthcare professionals.

“Sad that Jon Stewart and friends have become just more white liberals who enjoy punching down at marginalized people who are just doing our best to survive,” Karistina Lafae, a disabled author and essayist, told me. “Those of us who have Long COVID, who have watched family and friends die of COVID, we are being mocked for taking common-sense precautions against illness and further disability.”

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/12/hey-jon-stewart-jokes-about-wearing-masks-arent-funny/

[newdeal2]

1. The photo speaks volume

This is NOT the face of the Democratic party. They have no ideas or bold action - just platitudes about finding ways to get along with Republicans.

[Jose Garcia]

11. Stewart never claimed to represent a political party

He's a comedian. Comedians tell jokes.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

2. .

“Sad that Jon Stewart and friends have become just more white liberals who enjoy punching down at marginalized people who are just doing our best to survive,” Karistina Lafae, a disabled author and essayist, told me.

He hasn't become; he's always been. People just like to give him a pass because he says funny things sometimes. In the meantime he gave oxygen to the lab leak theory and is generally terrible on public health in general. He's an entertainer, not someone to follow.

[yardwork]

7. The breadth and depth of anti-science in US culture is disturbing.

I didn't see this coming but it had to begin years ago. People wouldn't have responded so stupidly to basic COVID measures if they weren't already inclined to distrust scientists and medical professionals.

RFK, Jr. did a lot of damage but it can't have been only him.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

10. This country/culture has always had an anti-intellectualism streak.

[yardwork]

13. That's true.

I think what surprises me is that that kind of intentional ignorance became mainstream.

Maybe it's the key to what's happened over the last 40 years.

[tanyev]

3. Maybe it's someone who has something contagious, absolutely had to leave the house for some reason,

and is wearing a mask to protect everybody else!

Maybe, just maybe, it's nobody else's damn business why I choose to wear a mask. Hmph.

[Iggo]

4. "Hey, Iggo. Why are you wearing a mask?"

“Because Fuck You. That’s why.”

Works every time. I’m done having to be a science teacher for random idiots. In fact , one of my favorite going-out-and-about shirts says “Science Says You’re An Idiot.” (Thank you to Glenn from SpectreSoundStudios.)

[MustLoveBeagles]

5. It's nobody's business why people wear medical masks

They should be able to wear them publicly with out harassment. They have their reasons for why they do it and don't owe anyone an explanation.

I'm disappointed in Jon Stewart and the others for punching down. We don't need that shit on our side


🎊 🥳 🎉

[Iggo]

8. For fifty years I never asked the old Asian ladies on the bus why they were wearing masks.

Two seconds of critical thinking told me: “There’s always somebody sick on the bus. They’re probably trying to not get sick.”

So there’s no reason to ask unless you’re trying to start a fight.

[MustLoveBeagles]

9. Correct

🥳🎉

[tanyev]

14. Exactly. I always wear a mask to my regular checkups because Hello! the doctor's office is full of sick people.

One time the PA came into the little room and saw me with a mask on, she got an alarmed look on her face and asked, "Are you feeling OK?"

[LisaM]

23. I have seen people masking on buses for years (Seattle).

I always assumed that they were trying not to get sick, but since COVID, I also found out that they were trying not to spread germs if they thought they were coming down with something. So good for them.

[Attilatheblond]

40. Have seen people masked in AZ for decades. Some are fragile and some have really horrible allergies

It's nobody's business and exceedingly rude to think masked people owe any explanation. Of course, except, for the overpaid violent offenders working for ICE. THEY have a lot to answer for and should be fired for hiding their faces from the public that is forced to pay them.

[Coolgoober]

37. Also Iggo

I was stationed in Japan years ago and we have a friend from the Philippines. It seems most Asians wear masks themselves when they are not feeling well. Also I do use the 'fuck you , that's why' and I use the 'because I can' when people ask stupid questions.

[Iggo]

39. Yep. It's been years. They know the answer. They just want to fight. So I cut out the foreplay.

[3catwoman3]

41. I, too, was stationed in Japan, at Yokota Air Base, in the late 1970s. Come fall and winter illness...

...season, almost all the Japanese wore masks when out and about in public, especially in large crowds. Seemed smart to me.

[Srkdqltr]

6. Jon stewart has always been a stuckup know it all. Unpleasant to listen to.

Liberal or not.

[LisaM]

25. Yeah, I am not a huge fan.

I also think he helped Hillary Clinton lose.

[Oneironaut]

12. Someone wearing a mask almost always has a good reason to do so.

It’s kind of silly to say that wearing a mask is a tribal thing. It really isn’t. I’m not sure why this misconception still exists. I don’t think almost anyone just wears a mask to virtue signal. Kind of silly.

Can we also ditch the term, “masker?” They’re wearing a medical mask.

[MustLoveBeagles]

16. Sorry

It wasn't my intention to cause offense. I'll amend my post


🎉

[Oneironaut]

38. Oh I didn't even notice you said that tbh. You're fine.

I was more just hoping it falls out of general use in this country - more so when it’s used in a derogatory way.

[displacedvermoter]

15. Tim Miller ain't really all that Liberal,

None our new "heroes" - the Bulwark crew, the Lincoln Project crew, Rick Wilson, Adam Kinzinger, the Cheneys, et al - are Liberals. A number of them have had conscience searing moments over the years, perhaps, though others are just out of jobs in this new much more Fascist GOP that now runs the show they used to be leaders of.

As for Stewart, his shelf life is pretty much expired. Both siderism is really not funny anymore.

[Johonny]

28. I've been interested in how they've evolved in one year

The end of 2024 when Liberals were pointing out that Joe Rogan and other podcasters weren't interested in liberals and that the MSM was clearly biased against the Democratic party during the election year, Tim was laughing that off.

Now Tim is 100 percent all in on the Tech Bros are a real political danger to America and the MSM is a RW mouth piece. The Bulwark crew is always 20 years behind actual liberals.

Pretty soon they will figure out Transgender people are just people...

[Renew Deal]

17. Whatever

[Rebl2]

18. The last

paragraph, first sentence, should insert rich white liberals. I have had the flu. Come on over guys and let me cough all over you, assholes!

[Hope22]

20. Take care!

I hope you are feeling 100% soon. 💗🙏🏼

[Hope22]

19. Just under the surface...Jon sucks...

911 responder support does not negate the damage he continues to do. Face it ignorant people walk around sick as dogs and do not give one f! I on the other hand have people who I love and care for and can not get sick! I still mask and am happy to do it!
Ps..Jon’s mocking of President Biden was a continual source of disgust for me. Jon, those insults are the reason we are in this mess!

[karin_sj]

21. We still have a mask mandate in Santa Clara County...

... until March 31, 2026: "Mandatory Requirement to Wear Face Masks in Patient Care Areas of Health Care Delivery Facilities During the Designated Winter Respiratory Virus Period."

Of course, you still have the idiots who refuse to wear a mask and there's not much that staff can do to make them wear one. But for the most part, people here wear masks at the doctor's office and at hospitals, and I think that's a good thing.

Went to visit my sister in Sonora last week, and she took a fall and went to the urgent care center. There was one family with an infant, and only they (and us) were wearing masks. Then infant was so young, she wouldn't wear the mask, and was coughing quite a bit. About six other people came in after, looked at the masks that were offered, and sat down (no mask requirements there). My sister said she could hear the doctor talking to the family when she was in the exam room and after a while, they said, "Your daughter has RSV." I was really glad we had been wearing our masks!

[surfered]

22. The surgeon and assistants wear masks to protect the patient. If it was proven it didn't work, they wouldn't do it.

[PatrickforB]

24. Wedges, wedges! So we are going to worry about the utterance of a comedian when

1. Plaques honoring black soldiers dying liberating Holland from the Nazis taken down.
2. MASSIVE medicare and medicaid cuts.
3. SS-ICE thugs rounding up people right and left.
4. National guard deployed illegally.
5. Desecration of White House.
6. Redactions and holiday release of Epstein files.
7. Illegal bombings in Venezuela and Nigeria.
8. Social Security in danger.
9. Major recession about to happen.
10. Massive inflation from tariffs.
11. Farmers going broke because of tariffs.

Seems like Jon is NOT THE RIGHT SCAPEGOAT.

Gosh, maybe it is Trump and the GOP. Because not to be smart alecky or anything, but this kind of stuff seems just a little more important, as does Trump's treason against this republic because Putin is demonstrably calling the shots.

And WHERE are the Democrats? Asking me for donations. That's where. Oh, pleeeeeeeeze give me money.

No. We gave Harris over $1 BILLION and Thiel/Musk put their thumbs on the scale to make it look like Trump won.

The only Dems that seem to even have a spine are the younger ones. But we still have a bunch of institutionalists in power, and they are happy because their donors are happy. AOC, Bernie, the rest of the squad - all the progressives. And we have Newsom and Pritzker both showing some spine.

WHERE THE HELL IS CONGRESS????????????????? Because Trump is pulling this thing down around our knees. We have three more years of these nazis in power before we can sift through the ruins and start picking up the pieces.

THERE HAD BETTER BE SOME TRIALS FOR CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY COME 2029. Miller, Bannon, Bondi, Noem, Vance, RFK, Hegseth, Thiel, Musk, Zuck. These people need to be on the dock facing life in prison or possibly execution. How many people have died already because of these criminal fucks dancing to the tune of Russian oligarchs????????????????

So we got one off color joke. Jon was wrong. Yes. Horribly wrong...but what about???????????????

I'd say we need to clean house, get rid of fucking Wall Street financiers and billionaire parasites corrupting the government like so many modern robber barons, and impose a NEW FAIRNESS DOCTRINE by changing the rules of corporate governance to include a fiduciary responsibility for corporate officers to hold the interests of workers, the environment AND consumers. This could include a special clause requiring TRUTH in news reporting for consumers of news from publicly traded media companies.

Otherwise the experiment our founders tried will fail.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

32. deep breaths there buddy. It's okay to make an observation about an entertainer. What's your plan in the meantime?

[PatrickforB]

63. Plan? Come on. What plan do any of us have but to resist as best we can?

So what IS our plan Whiskey? If the species of Sapiens does not learn to live in harmony with the Ain Soph, each other and our sacred earth, the earth itself will cast us off.

The Issues
This government is so corrupt it can no longer function, and the people in charge are giving away the treasury to the billionaire locusts. Wall Street is roaring but layoffs are about to begin. The same AI that is being crammed down our throats and up our rectums isn't that smart and it is creating a big market crashing bubble, just like the dot-com bust in 2001 and the housing derivative bubble in 2009.

Wall Street and the billionaires are out of control and squeezing all of us to death economically.

There are around 3,300 billionaires on this planet. The top 1% of the wealthy, including these billionaires, are emotionally diseased people who live in such fear they won't have enough that they now control over 40% of the world's wealth.

In the meantime, 3.5 BILLION people live in poverty, with around 900 million of those in extreme poverty. The worst? Over 17 people DIE OF HUNGER RELATED CAUSES EVERY MINUTE.

Spiritual Plan
My plan includes meditations and other spiritual practices that lift my own consciousness to the highest realms of consciousness. These states were identified using kinesiology in the 1991 book Power vs Force written by psychiatrist David Hawkins. These highest levels of human consciousness on Hawkins' log scale are love, joy, peace and enlightenment. As a friend of mine is fond of saying, we must hold our consciousness at 'love or above.'

In addition, I am striving to shed both fear and attachment.

Economic Plan
Materially, I'm still working at age 67, and in the process of downsizing so my post-work income will be enough. I am a caregiver to my spouse, as well, and her needs must be somehow met.

And, I am calling my two US senators - my rep is BoBo, so calling her office is futile - at least once a week. I speak to their staff members about these issues. I have in fact spoken to both of their policy teams about overturning the current legal doctrine of shareholder primacy and replacing it with a stakeholder approach that holds the needs of workers, consumers and the environment EQUAL to shareholder profits. This, as I said in my original post, would need to include the right of consumers to truth in news reporting from publicly traded media companies, not biased to generate higher profits through increased clicks and thus higher ad revenue. The reason this is important is we MUST get rid of Fox news and other right wing propaganda organs, and right now the fiduciary responsibility of the senior news producers on MSNow, CNN, Fox, ABC, NBC and CBS is ALWAYS to generate maximum profits for shareholders. Nothing really required in terms of truth in news reporting.

Lastly, as a reasonably well-respected economist, I have been working with economic developers throughout my state to advance agritech as a viable economic development strategy, because with vertical farming, we don't consume as much water, and can grow a greater variety of crops. The Netherlands has led the way in this - over the course of this century they have quietly increased their ag capacity to the point they are the SECOND largest exporter of produce in the world behind the US. My question is why we cannot achieve these results here, and several states have so far been adopting Dutch practices that has yielded measurable increases in like-to-like produce output per 1,000 people employed.

I am also involved in looking for ways to mitigate energy requirements, because data centers take up huge amounts of power. There is solar and wind, of course, as well as conservation. Hydrogen power remains blocked by greed-based economic interests, while at the same time promising advances have been made in fusion and it may be feasible by 2030 to create business parks around tiny fusion reactors tied to the power grid. This all has potential.

Microeconomics
I am also buying only what I need. Nothing frivolous. The current figures on retail sales show a 4.1% increase from 2024 in Black Friday gross sales, but inflation has outpaced that, suggesting the American consumer is being squeezed by Wall Street greed-flation - spending more for the same amount of goods or less.

What are you doing?

[twodogsbarking]

26. Be kind. It's all we have.

TV used to be entertaining.

[Johonny]

27. He's the worst anchor on the Daily Show

I'm not sure why he came back. I rarely listen to him. He is the Joe Manchin of comedians. Past his time. I've moved on to listen to people that feel the moment, and are not immune to it by ego and wealth.

[Ocelot II]

31. Would you prefer that people who are coughing *not* wear masks?

The covid pandemic established pretty conclusively that wearing a mask, at least the N-95 type, was a very effective means of limiting the spread of the virus. And people who are wearing masks might not be sick themselves, but are just trying to avoid getting sick, maybe because they have weakened immune systems or maybe because they just prefer to be cautious - since most people aren't wearing masks any more even when they are sick. If you are concerned about people coughing behind masks maybe you should wear one yourself.

[Ocelot II]

36. Or *you* could stay home. Sometimes people have no choice and have to go out.

They have to work; they have to shop; they have to be out for any number of reasons. Having a cough might mean nothing but a cold, and the mask-wearer just doesn't want to spread their cold to others. Yes, masks are uncomfortable. My glasses fogged up, too, and my face itched, but I wore one anyhow, for my own safety. If you see a person wearing a mask just keep your distance and stay upwind.

[Ocelot II]

44. Covid isn't spread by surface contact.

Weren't you just here?

Covid wasn't widespread anywhere in February of 2020. The lockdowns and mask mandates didn't start until the middle of March.

[Ocelot II]

47. Science.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00251-4
https://archive.is/zWaX7

[QueerDuck]

56. Welcome to DU. Enjoy your visit.

[Coolgoober]

49. Oh,

Imagine that, they removed their post. It's hard to argue with people that have good critical thinking skills. Good on you, Ocelot.

[Emile]

52. LOL

I think LG is still here, but with a new name now.

[Emile]

58. She comes here everyday, and plays ignorant idiot.

[RedWhiteBlueIsRacist]

30. Kinda funny how right-wingers never joke about wearing ear protection at the shooting range.

Bunch of damn snowflakes, can't handle getting their dainty little eardrums busted from bang-bang...


Protect ears ok
Protect lungs bad

[Coolgoober]

51. I Love Smart People

[flvegan]

33. What's the entire quote, discussion and context?

Haven't seen it posted anywhere, not sure if valid or if The Outrage Factory is trying to put in some year end overtime.

[Wild blueberry]

35. When I was an exchange student in Tokyo in 1972, everyone wore masks in public in winter

To prevent the spread of flu and colds.
You know, almost like everyone cares about other people.

[3catwoman3]

43. I saw the same thing when stationed at Yokota Air Base outside of Tokyo in the late 1970s.

As soon as fall-winter illness season hit, masks on everyone, everywhere. And they actually had them over their noses and mouths, not dangling under their chins.

I thought then, and still do, Americans could stand to learn a few things from the Japanese - always being polite, saving face by not behaving like an asshole in public, just to name two.

[Chemical Bill]

45. I would answer with...

I'm not sick, but I don't trust you to not be infectious. When was your last COVID test? This morning?

[awesomerwb1]

48. Why watch those a-holes?

Stewart's expiration date was 15 years ago.

[duckworth969]

50. I don't care for Stewart

In my opinion, he gets more press than he should.

Dude ain’t funny either.

[Ferrets are Cool]

53. FUCK YOU Jon.

Why don't you bitch about ICE masking up instead of those who actually need to do so. Again, FUCK YOU Jon.

[markodochartaigh]

54. I have long covid.

I've been vaxxed and boosted all along. I have Asperger's so social distancing is my superpower. When I got covid I had just stopped wearing a mask. I tracked my exposures because I'm retired and it was easy to do. I kept my exposure to less than an hour a week by severely limiting my time out of the house. I got covid from one trip of less than thirty minutes to Publix. No one was even coughing, that I was aware of. Covid almost killed me and I believe that long covid will take at least a decade off my life.

And almost certainly I got covid because people here in SW Florida have not taken the pandemic seriously.

If you get long covid I bet it will change your opinion of taking simple precautions.

[Pluvious]

59. A response from Paco...

Link to tweet

[Orrex]

60. It's worth recalling that he "masks don't work" mantra was popular on DU, too

Really, anything that requires action by the individual was declared ineffective against Covid.

Hardly surprising that Stewart is of that mind too.

[betsuni]

61. In that podcast Stewart says RFK has the Trump magic, authentic, does pull-ups, isn't weird and has a mythology.

Defends him on the brain worm and dead bear things. Guests do not agree RFK would be a good candidate.

[nitpicked]

62. Just had to dig out one of MY masks

I've no clue if it's food poisoning or one of those nasty viruses, but I'm due a visitor and I don't want THEM to come down with this if it's spreadable.