Tear Jerker / The Daily Show with Trevor Noah

2015

• October 5th : Doubles as a Funny Moment, but after the Oregon shooting, Jessica Williams reveals that she's started to pre-tape reactions to various recurring national tragedies such as police shooting unarmed black men, shootings and politician sex scandals, because she's getting too worn out and depressed to handle these tragedies on a regular basis. She says she may as well not do her job if our national leaders won't do theirs. Her final line, following Trevor Noah's affirmation that maybe we can change things for the better, is that we are probably going to have another mass shooting before Thanksgiving, which earns a Stunned Silence from the audience.
  • Even worse is the fact that it turns out she was right. On October 9, two shootings occurred in 2 different states.
• October 5th: During his segment on Planned Parenthood, Trevor notes that despite the facts being against them, pro-lifers have been wildly successful in passing restrictive legislation against abortion. He further notes that, if they put that effort into preventing gun violence, they could save far more lives.
• October 21th: Jordan Klepper's expose of the lottery in Illinois, which due to budget standoff with the Republican governor and Congress has stopped paying out, including to a couple Danny and Susan that had won $250,000. Jordan even takes the time to take a big check to the governor's office for an endorsement, only for the governor to be out of office.
  • "The news today is depressing and sad." That's how the story starts, as Jordan tries to find a story with a Happy Ending.
  • Danny is still buying tickets, which Jordan calls him out for.
  • Jordan then invokes Tears of Joy by renting a limo and taking Danny and Susan out on a shopping spree and to a fancy restaurant, so that they can have their Happy Ending.
• December 3th: The supercut of all of President Obama's statements after numerous mass shootings, in which we see him gradually greying and becoming more exasperated by Congress' apathy about it, is pretty disheartening.
• December 7th: In a 2010 episode of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart interviewed four 9/11 first responders. 5 years later, only one came back (two of them battling serious illness, and one having died in the interim 5 years), tragically illustrated by recreating the set from the 2010 interview, with just one chair occupied and the remaining chairs empty.
• December 17th: The 2015 recap segment, with Trevor looking rather put out and full out states 2015 was a shitty year, especially because of all the mass shootings that have happened.
  Trevor: From the Charlie Hebdo shootings, to the Planned Parenthood shootings, to the shootings in Mali, to the Paris shootings, to the San Bernardino shootings, uh, shitty year, really. 2015 was a shitty year.

2016

• January 6th: Trevor on President Obama's speech about gun violence before he angrily denounces Fox News for calling the speech unbelievable.
  Trevor: See that thing you’re feeling right now? That pain in your chest. That comes from watching someone weep on national television, because he knows that society can do better than to file the shooting of children under ‘shit happens.’ That feeling is how you know that you are human. No matter how opposed to Obama’s policies some people may be or how cynical their politics, they have to at least acknowledge and respect the raw authenticity of that emotion.
• January 25th: A story about an elderly gay couple who had to have one man adopt the other just so they could get the family benefits of living together and other rights, who are now not being allowed to undo the adoption and get married after gay marriage was ruled legal.
• June 13th: Once again, Trevor is forced to address the sadly increasingly common topic of mass shootings, especially in light of the Orlando tragedy. He's especially disheartened by the fact that President Obama has to address the topic more often than any other President.
  Trevor: I'm sorry. Maybe it's because I'm new, but it's not normal. And it shouldn't be normal. We shouldn't allow this to be normal.
• July 7th: Trevor is visibly frustrated as he has to address two more shootings of unarmed black men by police. Even sadder is that the day the clip aired, another shooting took place in Dallas at a police protest, this time with several officers dying.
• September 21st: Once again, Trevor is forced to address the shooting of another unarmed black man, this time in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
  Trevor: People always ask me, they go, "how do you laugh when the news is sad?" I tell people it's not that I find things funny, it's that my mind uses that as a tool to protect me from pain.
• November 9th: Michelle Wolf and Hasan Minhaj discuss the outcome of the 2016 election, clearly still trying to fully wrap their minds that half the country voted for Donald Trump. It gets worse when, while Hasan managed to slip a joke at the very end of his speech, Michelle was visibly broken and on the verge of tears.

2017

• May 4th: Trevor having to deal with the sheer ignorance and/or indifference the GOP showed in the face of evidence that their health care plan will kick millions of people off their plans.
• June 19th: Trevor, immediately after a rather funny segment about Donald Trump's ongoing investigation, segues into the Philando Castile shooting, and immediately becomes somber and sincere. No one in the audience laughs for the rest of the segment. Crosses over with Moment of Awesome.
  Trevor: In a story of a man being shot because he was lawfully armed, you would think one group, one powerful group in America, would say something about it. This is one group you would expect to be losing their goddamn minds about this: the NRA. But for some strange reason, on this particular case, they've been completely silent. Completely silent. And yet, according to their rhetoric, this is everything they stand against, right? An officer of the state depriving a citizen of his life because he was legally carrying a firearm? I mean, listen to how vocal and fired-up the NRA gets when nothing has happened.
  Wayne LaPierre: There is no greater freedom than the right to survive and protect our families with all the rifles, shotguns, and handguns we want.
  Trevor: Unless you're black.

2018

• March 22nd: Trevor talks with the Parkland shooting surviving students. There are no jokes, no quips. The kids point out that they're not going to overcome the tragedy completely.
  • Carly Novell mentions that everyone in the school has been supporting each other through their grief and trauma. Even so, the conspiracy theories are hurtful, because, in her words, "We were there ... we can't forget the seventeen lives that were lost."
  • Kai Koerber feels bad for saying it, but he is against teachers having guns as a black person in the South. It doesn't make him comfortable. "I don't think that lethal weapons should have a place in school environment."
  • Carly also says that she wishes people understood the tragedy was relatively recent for the survivors — a month and a half ago — and they're still adjusting to the news vans taking photos. She points out that it's a school, not "Las Vegas".
• May 13rd: After showing White House Chief of Staff John Kelly's negative comments about immigration, including that the people the administration is against coming to the country, while not bad people, can't integrate into American society, Trevor recounts the story of how immigrants from many countries were ostracized in the past, before telling the story of an illiterate Italian day laborer who came into the country as an illegal immigrant whose great-granson became a important man... White House Chief of Staff John Kelly. You can hear by the audience's reaction that it came as a heart-breaking shock to them to discover that the descendant of an immigrant went on to become against immigration.

2019

2020

• March 13: Trevor announces sadly that to protect his audience from COVID-19, they will stop taping in front of large groups. He serenades them with a song.

2021

• September 15: Trevor talks about America's 20-year war in Afghanistan, specifically, how drone warfare made Americans indifferent to the plight of Afghan civilians who died during drone strikes, as the last drone strike that took place before American withdrew from Afghanistan saw at least 10 civilians, 7 of whom were children, getting killed.

2022

• June 29: Trevor talks about how complicated the topic abortion is, post the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the US Supreme Court. He points out that it's more nuanced beyond the phrases "pro-life" and "pro-choice", that even contraceptives aren't 100% effective, and how "then don't have sex" is completely meaningless. In a slight Awesome Moment, he proposes how the constituents could call on the bluff of every single Republican to write a retro-active law on punishing every person who has had an abortion, rightly pointing out that a high number of Republican law makers whose mistresses or someone they've been seeing have hypocritically gotten abortions at some point, in spite of their own anti-abortion stances and various strict anti-abortion restrictions prior to Roe being overturned.
  Trevor: Because we've seen time and time again. They'll have a mistress, they'll have a woman they're seeing, they'll have somebody, and all of a sudden- "Oh, pro-life. Oh, no. I didn't mean it like that. Oh, this was an exceptional cir- Oh, no, this is the devil." No, there's only one devil in this conversation, and it's you.
• September 29: Trevor announces that after 7 years, he's stepping down as host of The Daily Show.

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