Stephen Colbert Laughs At Kalamazoo, Comedy Central Star’s Hometown: Video

Late-night satirist and talk show host Stephen Colbert poked fun at Kalamazoo, Michigan, native Jordan Klepper’s hometown on his Wednesday night show, saying it’s “a funny sounding town, Kalamazoo” and suggesting the star of a new Comedy Central show got a start in humor “because your town itself was funny.”

Klepper, the comedian who plays a correspondent on “The Daily Show,” is starring in “Jordan Klepper Solves Guns,” which premieres on Comedy Central at 10 p.m. Eastern on Sunday, June 11. According to a promo for the show, “Jordan Klepper is an enlightened, progressive, sartorially aware comedian who's determined to fix America's gun violence epidemic.”

“As his quest takes him from the nation's capital to the deep woods home of the Georgia militia and beyond, one thing is clear: If Jordan can't solve guns, no one can,” Comedy Central said, adding parenthetically, “(Hopefully, this is not true.)”

Klepper, a Kalamazoo College graduate, said during the “Late Night With Stephen Colbert” show that enterprising T-shirt makers had already beat the host to the punch with shirts proclaiming, “Yes, there really is a Kalamazoo.”

“That is self-loathing at a level that I haven’t seen in a town,” Colbert quipped.

Also on the show, Klepper talked about the “fascinating” shift in tenor he saw while covering now-President Trump’s campaign rallies for “The Daily Show.”

“I would say something about, let’s say, ‘Is Barack Obama a Muslim?’ Right off the bat, I would say one out of 10 people would cop to something like that,” Klepper said. “Near the end, that was so normalized that it was probably seven out of 10.”

Conspiracy theories multiplied as Trump’s charges of “fake news” became more frequent.

“We were the fake news; they were right about us,” he said, but noted the conspiratorial nature nature of chatter among rally attendees.

At a rally late in the campaign, someone claimed that LVC printed by the rental company on video camera battery packs actually stood for “a sect of the FBI working for Hillary Clinton.”

At the end of the campaign, paranoia and conspiracy theories were the “general vibe” of the campaign, Klepper said.

For his new show, Klepper will talk to people on both sides of the gun debate, including those who have found common ground on the need for background checks. The debate is partisan and wide, he said, and his show will interview people who take middle-ground positions.

The exchange about Kalamazoo is found at about the 3:38 mark below.

Screenshot via YouTube