Jordan Klepper
Comedian and co-host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, where he works behind the desk and in the field.
“I was doing some new material about things that I saw online that I thought everybody was having an experience with. And as soon as I started talking about it, I realized nobody was having that experience. The algorithm had lied to me and I crafted a bunch of commentary about the things that I was seeing and nobody was seeing it.”
StarTalk Radio · Ideas & Essays · November 2026
Context
Asked whether he ever gets scared doing his job, Klepper said a live comedy audience is scarier than a rally because it tells you in real time when you are not funny. He gave this example of a recent set that bombed because his feed had shown him a view of the world nobody else shared.
Transcript
don't, yeah. Yeah, there's nothing scarier than a blow to your ego. I think that my physical, my physical harm is something I'm fairly okay with.
But the emotional harm, you're still sensitive. And what does that do to the remainder of the show if you don't get them up until some point? And you got to still deliver the show.
That's the work. That's when you dig into like, all right, I have a show to do. What you get better at, I was doing new material a few weeks ago. You get better at loving the bomb and loving what is bad about it. I was doing some new material about things that I saw online that I thought everybody was having an experience with. And as soon as I started talking about it, I realized nobody was having that experience. The algorithm had lied to me and I crafted a bunch of commentary about the things that I was seeing and nobody was seeing it. And it felt terrible, but also amazing in that I've got to the point where like, well, this is very interesting. This is not, I wish this were funny, but now I'm going to explore that. I'm having an experience that's completely alien to yours. I'm going to talk to the people in the audience. I'm going to try to find out more about it. And you love it. Lemonade Adelmons. Yes.
So three weeks ago, I deleted my entire search history on YouTube.
Really?
Yes. And then all of a sudden, recommendations came up. I said, oh, is that what other people are looking at? Yeah. It's buried in there, but you can do it. And it's a fresh start. I recommend it.
More from StarTalk Radio
