This Is How Jordan Klepper Stays Joyful While Talking to Nut Jobs

Jordan Klepper has made a name for himself by traveling around the country, interviewing some of the strangest and most off-kilter people. The Daily Show host has spent the last several years interviewing supporters of President Donald Trump about the various conspiracy theories they subscribe to—whether that be about Jeffrey Epstein or Joe Biden’s alleged penchant for sniffing children. 

Meeting people, day in and day out, who are both divorced from reality and invested in the success of MAGA can be truly disheartening. During an audience Q&A before a recent taping, a member of the crowd asked Klepper: “Do you think we’re going to be ok?”

Klepper immediately responded: “No!”

“I hope we’re going to be okay,” Klepper continued. “In a grander, grander scheme of things, in a long…if you look long term we’re all gonna die. So that’s maybe some good news. I don’t know if I’m an optimist.”

Klepper doesn’t mince words or provide some milquetoast answer to the question. Inside, he went insightful and reflected on what his very unique job has shown him in the years of covering so much chaotic, and often downright horrifying news. 

“I get to talk to a lot of different people,” Klepper said. “We cover the news. You're probably feeling many of the things that I feel when you're inundated with these chaotic stories of war crimes, sex islands, people who don't take accountability. It's a scary, strange time we are in.”

He explained that where he’s able to find hope, and a bit of sanity, is when he gets to cover the way people still find resistance and joy through their actions. “Where I garner a little bit of hope, or where I've seen some of it recently, is… I'm doing this special that's coming out on Monday, and for this special, there was a lot of talk about Donald Trump wanting the Nobel Peace Prize,” he said. “But what we started noticing is that he talks a big game about peace, but it doesn't feel like peace here, back at home in places like Chicago and Portland.”

Klepper and the TDS team went out to Portland to film a segment on the nude bike riders who were protesting the ICE facilities. 

“There's protests happening outside an ice facility because of the cruelty that was happening inside,” Klepper said. “And as a comedy show, it's hard to make comedy out of something like that. It's a dark time. But what they did was they threw a naked bike ride as a protest to what was happening inside.”

Obviously, nude bike riders are a much more fertile ground for comedy than ICE detention centers—Klepper said it was impossible to miss “dongs and boobs.” But when they arrived at where the protest was scheduled to take place, it was 40 degrees outside and raining. Not exactly the perfect weather for a naked protest. Soon, though, there were thousands of mostly naked protestors, assembling in the rain to stand up against the cruelty of the Trump administration.

“What you see outside of that ice facility is people organically using humour and joy as a way to show an image of peace and life outside of the cruelty that Donald Trump wants to show you,” Klepper continued. “And is that winning right now? It’s fighting right now...That gave me that nice little chunk of hope.”

It’s not the first time Klepper has addressed how he has found a bit of humanity while mired in the drama of the Trump administration. In another audience Q&A from September, Klepper was asked if he encountered any empathy from any of the Trump supporters he interviewed. 

He shared an encounter from a MAGA-verse celebrity, this guy known for wearing a suit that looked like a brick wall in homage to Trump’s promise of a border wall. Klepper said that this man spent the better part of a day trolling Klepper and the rest of the TDS team. But the next day at the airport, Klepper bumped into the man again, and they had a three-and-a-half hour long conversation. In that, there was no agreement, but there was some understanding. 

As Klepper put it: “There wasn't a middle ground that we found, but there was a softening in those relations.”

Both reflections are incredibly valuable in a time when political division and hopelessness rule our collective existence. And if anyone can figure out how to find a bit of laughter in a time like this, it probably is the guy whose job it is to make us laugh about it.