On Wednesday, Jon Stewart couldn't find much to be funny about in Eric Garner's death. "If comedy is tragedy plus time," he said, "I need more fucking time."
By Thursday, however, he'd found some dark humor in the case — namely, in the rationalizations being made for why police had to choke Garner to death for selling cigarettes. The narrative, if parsed closely, quickly collapses in on itself. As Stewart puts it, it ends up painting Garner as a "a dangerously large, but incredibly fragile, out-of-shape, monster weakling."
In other words, the legend of "the giant negro" is alive here, too, but merged with a secondary rationalization that if Garner simply wasn't so fat — if he had taken more responsibility for his own life — he would still be alive today.
Of course, he would also still be alive today if police hadn't put him in a chokehold.
Speaking of that chokehold, you're not going to want to miss Fox News' Sean Hannity beginning his analysis of the move with "as a martial arts student"...
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