Watch The Daily Show laugh at Fox News' pot paranoia

(Image credit: Comedy Central)

last updated 8 January 2015

Jon Stewart started out Tuesday night's Daily Show with an easy applause line: Marijuana is now legal in Colorado. He walked his audience through the restrictions — or lack thereof — in the Centennial State's new pot law, declaring that an ounce of hydroponic weed is more than enough for any one toker to have at any given time.

Formalities out of the way, Stewart tucked into the part of the show everyone was waiting for: Making fun of the people making scary pronouncements about legalizing pot. This provided such a rich vein to mine, Stewart, discarding tradition, talked about nothing else for the rest of the non-interview part of the show. His first target: Fox News host Bill O'Reilly and his "Old-Timey Restoration Hour."

In Stewart's turn of phrase, "crank up the grumpalodian":

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Stewart got his best line of the night off of O'Reilly's assertion that allowing legal pot is "literally Russian roulette," since some adults can't handle the drug. Oh right, Stewart quipped, "the only difference between a bong hit and pointing a loaded gun at your own skull is that the gun can kill you instantly — and must never be criminalized or restricted in any way, ever. Ever!" The rest of the O'Reilly segment dealt with the Fox News star's bizarre comparison of weed and teenage texting. Yeah, I don't get it either.

O'Reilly dispatched, Stewart briefly mocked New York Times columnist David Brooks for his column arguing that although he smoked pot as a youth, states should ban it now on moral and health grounds:

Stewart ended his tour of reefer madness with warnings from MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and a bevy of Fox News personalities about how pot makes you dumb, sucks away all motivation, is addictive, and is a menace to public safety. Stewart's big message here is that these same talking heads — and TV ads — all-out celebrate alcohol, which is at least as dangerous as pot. He topped off this lecture with a pretty funny stoner take on how pot ads would be so much better than beer commercials — especially if you are high on weed.

As your bonus video, here's Stephen Colbert's much more abbreviated take on the reaction against Colorado's pot law, from Monday night's Colbert Report. In this case, brevity is the soul of wit:

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.