Jon Stewart didn't have much to laugh about Thursday.
In his solemn opening monologue on Comedy Central's The Daily Show, the host explained why he had no jokes in light of the Charleston, S.C., church shooting that killed nine people late Wednesday evening.
"I have one job, and it's a pretty simple job. I come in in the morning and we look at the news and I write jokes about it, and then I make a couple faces and like a noise and then it's just cha-ching and I'm out the door. But I didn't do my job today, so I apologize. I've got nothing for you in terms of jokes and sounds because of what happened at South Carolina," the comedian confessed. "And maybe if I wasn't nearing the end of the run or this wasn't such a common occurrence, maybe I could have pulled out of the spiral, but I didn't. And so I honestly have nothing other than just sadness, once again, that we have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other and the nexus of a just gaping, racial wound that will not heal, yet we pretend doesn't exist. I'm confident, though, that by acknowledging it, by staring into that and seeing it for what it is, we still won't do jack s--t. Yeah! That's us, and that's the part that blows my mind."
"I don't want to get into the political argument, the guns and things, but what blows my mind is the disparity of response between when we think people that are foreign are going to kill us and us killing ourselves. If this had been what we thought was Islamic terrorism, we would be...we invaded two countries and spent trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives and now fly unmanned death machines over like five or six different countries all to keep Americans safe. 'We gotta do whatever we can! We'll torture people! We gotta do whatever we can to keep Americans safe!' Nine people shot in a church. What about that? 'Hey, what are you gonna do? Crazy is as crazy is, right? That's the part that I cannot for the life of me wrap my head around, and you know it," he said. "You know that it's gonna go down the same path. 'This is a terrible tragedy.' They're already using the nuanced language of lack of effort for this. This is a terrorist attack. This is a violent attack on the Emanuel Church in South Carolina, which is a symbol for the black community. It has stood in that part of Charleston for a 100 and some years and has been attacked viscously many times, as many black churches have. To pretend that...I heard someone on the news say, 'Tragedy has visited this church.' This wasn't a tornado. This was racist. This was a guy with a Rhodesia badge on his sweater."
Stewart continued, "I hate to even use this pun, but this one is black and white. There's no nuance here. This is...and we're going to keep pretending like, 'I don't get it. What happened? This one guy lost his mind.' Because we are steeped in that culture in this country and we refuse to recognize it. And I cannot believe how hard people are working to discount it. In South Carolina, the roads that black people drive on are named for Confederate generals who fought to keep black people from being able to drive freely on that road. That's insanity. That's racial wallpaper. You can't allow that. Nine people were shot in a black church by a white guy who hated them who wanted to start some kind of civil war. The Confederate flag flies over South Carolina, and the roads are named for Confederate generals. And the white guy's the one who feel like his country's being taken away."
"We're bringing it on ourselves," Stewart told viewers. "And that's the thing: Al Qaeda, all those guys, Isis, they're not s--t compared to the damage that we can apparently do to ourselves on a regular basis."
Watch the video below to see what his guest, Malala Yousafzai, had to say.