
The Daily Show‘s Trevor Noah took a look at Jussie Smollett's arrest on Thursday night, noting that “the whole world now knows Jussie's name, but for all the wrong reasons.”
First, Noah examined Smollett's alleged motive for the staged hate crime —to get a raise from Empire producers: “Call me old fashioned, but whatever happened to just going into your boss's office, and blackmailing him with nudes?”
Noah also expressed astonishment that Smollett paid his accomplices with a check: “What? Did he also write ‘Fake Hate Crime' in the memo?”
And Noah mocked Smollett for bungling a plot to have the attack take place in front of the security camera because the camera was facing the wrong direction: “You've gotta be sh*tting me. He wanted to be caught but he didn't get caught on camera because he didn't know which way the camera was pointing? You're an actor! That's your only job! Your only job.”
“So Jussie is potentially going to prison for a while. And in his wake, he has screwed over everyone,” Noah continued. “Members of the gay community are emotionally terrorized over something that turned out to be a hoax. Trump supporters are upset about being falsely accused, and Democratic candidates are tying themselves in knots trying to walk back their initial statements calling this a modern-day lynching.”
“The point is, nobody won,” Noah concluded. “But there is a silver lining. When this started out, it was a story about people who hated Jussie Smollett because he was black and gay. But now, people hate him because he's an a**hole. In other words, they're judging him on the content of his character, and not the color of his skin…and that, my friends, is progress.”