‘The Daily Show’ skewers media coverage of royal pregnancy
When the news broke Monday that Catherine, the duchess of Cambridge – or, as everyone continues to insist on calling her, “Kate Middleton” – was pregnant, it was inevitable that the American news media would catch a serious case of royal baby fever. And it was nearly as certain that “The Daily Show” would skewer the overblown coverage, which they did brilliantly on Thursday night.
Jon Stewart began by riffing on the headline on the British tabloid The Sun, which read “Kate Expectations.” He suggested there were better pregnancy puns inspired by great literature. Why not “Macbirth,” or “A Portrait of the Fetus as a Young Man,” or even “Madame’s Ovaries”?
“To me the most striking thing about Kate’s pregnancy is how much the media wanted to let us know they totally knew she was pregnant,” Stewart observed, rolling a clip from “Today” which exhaustingly recounted all the telltale clues that the duchess was expecting – things like drinking water rather than wine, wearing loose-fitting dresses and, of course, tickling the feet of a baby during a recent public appearance.
“That doesn’t mean she’s pregnant, that means she’s human. How do you not tickle a baby’s feet?” said Stewart. “I’m not pregnant, I tickle babies’ feet.”
The other sure sign that Kate was with child? The “intractable vomiting” caused by hyperemesis gravidarum, a term Stewart likened to the spell Harry Potter used to defeat Voldemort.
“Luckily now Kate is recovering from the vomiting. And with all the speculation about whether she’s pregnant behind us, perhaps we can get down to more serious speculation,” Stewart observed, cueing up a montage of media personalities pondering the gender of the heir, whether he or she will have ginger hair, and what school the royal tyke will attend.
“It does raise the philosophical question, does loss of privacy begin at conception? Let’s hope for our entertainment’s sake she has a litter,” Stewart said.
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