Hey Jon Stewart, do you ever watch The Daily Show, on closed captions?
‘People who get Jean Simmons tour dates get “KISS-information”.’
I watch everything on my television with closed captions turned on. Television shows, movies, DVDs — everything has closed captions or subtitles displaying.
My mother was mostly deaf. Without her hearing aids she could barely make out anything, and even with her hearing aids it wasn’t until the advent of Closed Captioning that we were finally relieved the task of repeating nearly every line of dialog on TV. Growing up in later childhood and as a young adult everything in my life had closed captions.
And my wife is French, living in America for several years, and speaks Italian and Spanish as well. So it’s of great assistance for her to watch everything with closed captions. Of course, she calls them subtitles. In France as in much of Europe, people are much more accustomed than Americans to the use of subtitles in foreign movies and television.
So between growing-up with captions and always having them on as a lifestyle as an adult, and having a wife who depends on them, I am intimately familiar with Closed Captions.
And it has been my observation for quite a while that of all of the television shows and different channels that I watch, The Daily Show on Comedy Central has typically, some of the least accurate, and more often, what I can only describe as “uninformed” and occasionally “uncooperative” Closed Captions on television.
Sometimes when Jon Stewart is rolling along hard on one of his zingers — talking fast on one of his rants — and he’s really bringing to light the hypocrisy and the self-contradiction of the right-wing establishment, the Closed Captions just sort of trail off with an ellipsis as if whoever is typing the Closed Captions just can’t keep up, even though the captions keep up just fine with all the multi-talking-head shows like “The View” or “Fox and Friends”. Sometimes when I see The Daily Show’s captions trail off during some right-wing smashing rant, I wonder if Papa Bear O’Reily is doing Closed Captions for The Daily Show.
And sometimes I see this, and I don’t know what to think:
What Jon Stewart actually said was, “Let’s face facts, the guy had some issues.”
What got Closed Captioned was, “Guy had somish seuss. Let’s face facts.”
And you can’t tell me that it’s just Comedy Central’s Closed Caption system, because I’ve never seen this kind of trouble on the show following, the friendly rival, The Colbert Report.
Oh my god!~ Stephen Colbert is doing the Closed Captioning for The Daily Show!
The Daily Show runs Monday through Thursday on Comedy Central.
