Jordan Klepper Riled His Alt-Right Inspiration Alex Jones with The Opposition

-So you are doing your show in Manhattan.
-Yes. -But I heard word
that you are operating out of a hotel.
-We are, yes. The Pennsylvania Hotel.
-The Pennsylvania Hotel. The historic Pennsylvania Hotel.
-Oh, yes. Right by Penn Station. -Yeah.
-The sexiest part of New York City.
If you know anything about New York City,
you know you go to Penn Station, you get a slice of pizza,
you see some TV, and you sleep in the bedbox.
-Yeah. -It´s, uh, we...
-Most people walk out of Penn Station, they say,
"I want a hotel right here!"
[ Laughter ]
-"I never want to leave!
Is there a place for political satire around here?"
Yeah, we actually -- We toured the hotel.
They reconfigured the ballroom to make it a studio.
And we walked around, and it had this funny smell.
It´s like, "What is that smell?" They´re like,
"Oh, there was a food show in here before here."
I was like, "Yeah, what food show?"
"The Worst Cooks" was in here beforehand.
So you -- you could imagine the smell.
Like, a food show beforehand is going to smell.
"The Worst Cooks" still lives in our studio.
-Yeah. So you have to overcome that.
-Yes. -But you have a great team.
You have some "Daily Show" experience.
-Yeah. -On this show,
you are playing a character who is alt-right,
sort of inspired by Alex Jones, a bit of a conspiracy theorist.
Tell us a little bit more about the character.
-Yeah. We´re kind of diving into this alt media landscape,
the world of "InfoWars" and "Breitbart," "The Blaze."
Like, we found, like, this world of, like, paranoid conspiracy
that suddenly filters its way down into the mainstream
and into the Oval Office.
That was kind of the world we wanted to live in.
-Yeah, it was a good time for this.
-Yeah. -You -- I want to talk about it,
because it´s sort of inspired by Alex Jones.
And first I want to show, here´s a promo for your show,
"The Opposition."
-Who are they? The enemy.
Who´s the enemy? They are.
I already said that. Pay attention.
It´s time for us to fight back against them,
because them are fighting against we.
-All right, very good. [ Laughter ]
Made it super clear. -Very clear.
-But then -- this seems to me like a gift.
Tell me if I´m wrong.
Alex Jones saw that promo and did a long piece on it
on his show, on his radio show.
-He has a lot of content to fill up on the radio show.
When you -- when you do alt media radio,
you´re on air about 20 hours.
So if there´s something to talk about, you talk about it.
-And here´s what he had to say about that promo you just saw.
-He´s up there saying, "You gotta go through me."
And then he´ll explain how he politically operates.
He´s really telling them how to operate,
not the way we operate.
Then he also says it very disingenuously.
So they´re there getting their programming
on how to attack us,
while they´re learning to hate us,
but really they´re discovering their identity.
This is mind control.
[ Laughter ] -Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-So here you are,
not even an episode into your show,
and you have full engagement with your inspiration.
It´s a great start. -Locked and loaded.
And he is right. It is mind control.
-Yeah, okay, good. -Oh, yeah.
Viacom told me, "We need to get inside the minds
of 18 to 23-year-olds, get them engaged in the show
so we can sell them fizzy drinks during the advertisement."
And he knows it. He sees it. -Fantastic.
-Yes, yes, boom.
Huh, huh, huh!
Yeah, he -- he knows what he´s doing.
He´s signaling me, he knows.
He wants me to bring it on, and you know what? I´m happy.
-There you go. -Yeah, uh-huh.
-And now you´ve -- But genuinely,
you have been engaging a lot, or I should say not engaging,
but doing a lot of research about this world
that you want to talk about.
And what is it -- You must have uncovered some things,
some actual, genuine ways that people interact or are drawn to
the kind of media that you´re talking about.
-Well, I do think when you get on the fringe
with a lot of these media sources,
or just news in general, I think what we´re starting
to respond to is how it´s not necessarily the facts
that these people are pulling from.
The veracity and validity that they get
is how they experience the facts.
So, like, even Alex Jones does this on his show.
Other people as well.
It´s not about like, "I heard this fact."
It´s like, "I experienced this. I got this e-mail.
I saw this thing."
So an anecdote suddenly becomes a fact
and it becomes a conspiracy and it becomes,
through a little bit of paranoia,
then becomes something that other people begin to follow.
And so you just start to see this path towards chaos.
And then you make a show about it.
-Yeah. In making the show about it, does it become --
Is it any less chaotic to you?
Do you sort of feel like you´re getting your head around it?
Or in your research, do you have a sense of,
"Oh, this is worse than I thought?"
-I think you start to wrap your head around it.
I mean, I would guess -- Like, it´s cathartic to come to work
and have a bunch of writers and be like,
"Did you see this thing? Are you experiencing --"
And, like, to be able to hash that out
and try to make sense of it through a show later in the day,
I think is something that we all gain something from.
-Yes, you will learn, once you start doing the show,
that the off weeks are the hard weeks
´cause that´s when you will go crazy.
-Yes, yeah. -Exactly.
´Cause then the news happens,
and you have nowhere to talk about it, so you just
sort of wander around Manhattan, talking out loud.
-And just start screaming.
That´s when I celebrate my anniversary with my wife.
-Yeah, there you go. -Yes. Yes.
-You came from Chicago.
Much like me, you were an improviser.
-Yes. Mm-hmm. -Do you have any memories of
your favorite times in Chicago, your favorite shows?
-Favorite shows?
Probably my favorite improv show in Chicago,
I was in a group called "American Dream",
which was a lovely group of people.
And we did a bunch of weird, crazy shows.
And the one that stands out is,
one of our members showed up late --
´cause every improviser works two different jobs --
was exhausted and needed to sleep.
So we did an entire show at I.O.,
where he went to sleep on stage.
And we decided just to whisper the entire show.
We asked the audience not to laugh,
but to raise their hands. [ Laughter ]
And they did.
And so we did this entire show where people were,
instead of laughing, were raising their hands.
And you started to see -- There was an improviser
that came in halfway through,
and just saw a bunch of people raising their hands
and us whispering.
It was like, "This feels like a cult."
And it was an improv show, so he was right.
-Yeah, he was right.
Well, you´ve come a long way from that.
And congratulations. I really can´t wait for Monday.
Thanks so much for being here, Jordan.
-Thank you sir. I appreciate it. -Jordan Klepper, everybody.
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Jordan Klepper Riled His Alt-Right Inspiration Alex Jones with The Opposition

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