Watch The Daily Show preview our post-masculine future

(Image credit: Comedy Central)

last updated 8 January 2015

Jon Stewart started out Thursday night's Daily Show by celebrating the recent barriers that women have broken through in the workplace: Taking over at the U.S. Federal Reserve, Lloyds of London, and a major automaker, GM, to name a few firsts. His brief "thumbs up, women" introduction quickly made way for the highlight of the show, Kristen Schaal's job-interview role-playing game.

Stewart brought Schaal out to talk about all this glass-ceiling shattering, but Schaal, of course, took things in an entirely new direction. She started out having Stewart pretend to be a female job applicant interviewing with her depiction of "every manly-man boss that I've ever had." All the tropes are there: The cigar, the scotch, the sexual harassment. When the role-playing ended, with Stewart in tears, Schaal had a revelation: "Jon, that was incredible."

Schaal apologized to men, saying she didn't realize how terrible it must be for them to give up all that delicious "power to abuse." When Stewart intoned that men will just have to get used to a world of equality and mutual respect, Schaal was having none of it. This power is too much of a rush, she said, so women "are coming for it, and we're going to abuse it much better than men." She then demonstrated this new form of emotional abuse on Stewart.

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The next part is equally bizarre, at it's best. Stewart started out talking about the advances and setbacks for same-sex marriage in red-state America — Utah and Oklahoma — but then he made an ill-advised quip about how the murkiness surrounding the status of gay couples married in Utah last month makes for a bunch of "Schrodinger's couples." This brought an unexpected rebuke from Jason Jones, involving quantum indeterminacy, cognac, and a cantaloupe. Words can't do it justice. Watch:

Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.

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