Famed Comedy Show Comes Down To Film Clay's Book-Banning Superstar
Jon Stewart's Daily Show Considers Episode on Bruce Friedman
This is a work of opinion, but it's got some facts, too.
By SHELBIE GRAHAM
Agree or disagree. Love him or hate him. But at the very least, give him some credit. Bruce Friedman is hilarious.
Not that he has a sense of humor or self-awareness per se, but what he does every monthly meeting is hysterical. Friedman is never tardy for the monthly Clay County School Board meetings, but last Thursday, a film crew from The Daily Show was there too, and the cameras were rolling. Let me be the first to send him flowers.
There’s a chance we won’t have to watch last Thursday’s meeting on Clay County District School’s YouTube channel. No, there’s a chance we’ll be watching it on Comedy Central in the near future, specifically on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
It’s easy to get worked up about Clay County’s “Book Banning.” One of the first shots in Florida’s culture war were fired when Friedman’s microphone was silenced when he tried reading a book during a school board meeting in our county.
Humbly, I ask those on either side of the aisle to lay down their arms. Republicans and Democrats, a cease fire is needed. Let’s put a pause on the tug-of-war in our libraries. Let’s come together and have a laugh during Clay’s Comedy Central premiere. Let’s have the humility to laugh at ourselves.
Friedman’s efforts have led to 428 book titles being pulled off the shelf, and he’s present at nearly every school board meeting with a laundry list of even more. But last Tuesday, Friedman informed the dais he planned to take the rest of the month off.
You can’t see the reactions of the school board members in the recording, but I am sure they were glassy-eyed and sentimental. Friedman has single-handedly made our most mind-numbing government meeting something to look forward to every month. I mean, if it weren’t for Friedman, would anyone care? In a school district where 43 percent of students read below grade level, Friedman has rekindled a newfound passion in our community for literature.
Does That Make Him Jon Stuart Stewart?
Stewart isn’t the only comedian on The Daily Show, but there is some reason to think that he’s the man for the Friedman project. For one thing, Stewart was born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz, a very Jewish name. And he often references his Jewishness in his comedy routines. You might say it’s part of his shtick.
Stewart may find Friedman, also Jewish, irrestible as subject matter. After all, it was Friedman who made headlines in the The Jewish Telegraphic Agency magazine for being the jew who banned a version of the Diary of Anne Frank.
Which, as noted in an earlier Clay News & Views story, Anne Frank is the closest to a sacred text for Jews without being the Bible.
“The Diary of Anne Frank” is one of the greatest works of literature of the 20th century, more remarkable for the fact that it was written by young teen. Frank was 15 when she died of typhus while imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen after having been forced there by—irony alert—people who liked to ban books and burn them too.
Stewart is not just a performer. He can be serious when he has to be.
His advocacy is credited with passage of a bill providing lifetime health benefits to 9/11 first responders. He is also regarded as “an essential actor” in passage of the PACT Act, which extended funding to provide health care for American veterans exposed to toxic substances in our recent Middle East wars.
Stewart’s shows have been a breeding ground for a generation of new comedians, including John Oliver, Steven Colbert and Steve Carell. Now he may well launch Bruce Friedman and Clay County into a new role as a national punchline.
I’m crossing my fingers and toes for the network executives at Comedy Central to give the green light to a Friedman episode. If we can get Jon Stewart to say the words “Clay County,” I propose the new library developing in Oakleaf to be named after Bruce Friedman. Perhaps a bronze statue in his honor too, standing beside a mountain of his challenge forms just as tall, not smiling.
Stewart is a has been, he used to be funny. His comedy has no edge anymore.