BY AMY Z. QUINN Somewhere, Kevin Spacey is smiling. And I need to do someone a big favor — stat. See, while Team Phawker waited in the will-call line at the Tower Theater to pick up our tickets for the Jon Stewart show Friday night, a friendly couple approached — desperate to give away an extra pair of tix. A quick glance at the freebies showed they were probably pretty good, so we took them with the couple’s admonishment to “Pay it forward.”
As it turned out, the seats were front row — several rows closer, even, than where the beneficent couple were sitting. Lucky us, because we had the catbird seat for Stewart’s hour-plus act, in which he riffed on some familiar political topics: Bush (“People think he’s stupid, he’s not stupid. People think he talks stupid. He doesn’t talk stupid, he talks the way you talk to stupid people.”) Cheney (“The man to call when you wake up in a hotel room with a dead hooker.”), Imus (“I’m glad he got fired, because now racism is over!”) and gay marriage (which irks conservatives because they just can’t concentrate “with the sound of one man’s balls slapping into another man’s ass, miles away” — you and I can’t hear it but the sound is DEAFENING to right-wingers).
When he threw it open for questions at the end of the set, it wasn’t surprising to hear him asked which candidate he was going to support for President, nor was it a shocker to hear him say he hasn’t yet made a choice. He seems suspicious of Obama’s sudden rise and wary of Hillary Clinton’s studied pursuit of the White House.
Stewart, who grew up in Lawrence, NJ (for all you Pennsy people, that’s in the “up near Trenton” part of the Garden State) but proved himself enough of a Philly boy that we should start claiming him as a local. He easily and convincingly poked fun at Upper Darby and West Philly — even the Tower itself, which he joked hadn’t been cleaned since he attended an Alarm concert there back in 1984. [Good Lord! I was there, too! Sonofabitch, I was hoping to take THAT to my grave.–The Ed.]
GRADE: A+