Jon Stewart (and text, space and voice)

Recently listening to Fresh Air's most entertaining interviews of 2010, I heard a bit of the one she did with Jon Stewart. I confess I have been a fan of his since he was on MTV. This bit struck me as an interesting analogy for thinking about learning in 2011.

"We don't do anything but make the connections," he says. "We're just going off our own instinct of, 'What are the connections to this that make sense?' And this really is true: We don't fact-check [and] look at context because of any journalistic criteria that has to be met; we do that because jokes don't work when they're lies. We fact-check so when we tell a joke, it hits you at sort of a gut level — not because we have a journalistic integrity, [but because] hopefully we have a comedic integrity that we don't want to violate."

Here is a "fake" textbook author and comedian making meaningful, purposeful connections. I continue to be fascinated by the idea of intertextuality -- how texts inform and influence one another. I believe Stewart has that idea mastered across media or text types.

Through his work he has developed a voice that NPR calls "The Most Trusted Name in Fake News."

You can watch the interview here.