The Daily Show's Aasif Mandvi

September 26, 2008

The Daily Show has been profiling members of their "best f***ing news team ever!" this season. Check out the video above to see their hilarious spot on Aasif Mandvi, an Indian American actor and comedian and one of few Daily Show correspondents of color.

The profile is a send-up of news channels matching up their anchors and their news stories according to skin color, i.e. an African American correspondent covers a story on African Americans. The Daily Show's clip shows Mandvi filling that very important role of covering stories for brown folks: everyone from Indians to Israelis and Palestinians to Samoans. 

I love TDS but it'd be nice to see some more non-white correspondents on the show. As of now the only people of color are Mandvi, Wyatt Cenac, and Larry Wilmore. Perhaps they're trying to mimic the casting of network news teams (translation: lots of white men) in order to thoroughly mock them? That could be why they only have two female correspondents as well.
 

Contributor: 

Sylvie Kim

contributing editor & blogger

Sylvie Kim is a contributing editor at Hyphen. She previously served as Hyphen's blog coeditor with erin Khue Ninh, film editor, and blog columnist.

She writes about gender, race, class and privilege in pop culture and media (fun fun fun!) at www.sylvie-kim.com and at SF Weekly's The Exhibitionist blog. Her work has also appeared on Racialicious and Salon.