Series / The Opposition with Jordan Klepper

"I'm not going to lie to you. I'm not some guy in a suit who's gonna butter you up, pat you on the head, and tell you you're smart. No, you're too smart for that."

— Jordan Klepper

The Opposition with Jordan Klepper is an American late-night talk and news satire program that aired on Comedy Central from September 25, 2017 to June 28, 2018. The show was hosted by comedian Jordan Klepper, a former correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.

Effectively a Spiritual Successor to The Colbert Report, the show is a parody of Alex Jones and the general trend of "Alt-Right" media commentators, havng a greater focus on wacky correspondents. Notably, the show managed to attract Jones' ire before it even premiered. This did not go unacknowledged.

On June 15, 2018, Comedy Central announced that the show had been cancelled, but that Klepper would be hosting a new primetime weekly show. Said show, Klepper, which aired in 2019, ended up being a mini-docuseries however, and Klepper returned to The Daily Show later that year.

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The Opposition with Jordan Klepper contains examples of:

• Action Girl: In the "final fight", Klepper gets the toughest fight from "Feminazi".
• Ambiguous Syntax: The farmer who finds Klepper beating up the scarecrows in his field (which Klepper hallucinates as him beating his "enemies") in the final episode tells him, "All this has consequences, asshole! Real consequences!" It's left ambiguous if he's just talking about the consequences Klepper tearing up his scarecrows will have for his field, or if he's aware that Klepper peddles conspiracy theories and he's warning him about that.
• Conspiracy Theorist: Jordan Klepper and his "citizen journalists" all espouse conspiracy theories.
• Couch Gag: The Title Sequence features two protesters carrying signs that change on a weekly basis.
• Cutting Back to Reality: In the last episode, our host contemplates staying in his doomsday bunker, then climbs out to face his "enemies" manifest as clearly-labeled headliners. Over time, we get intermittent cuts to him fighting and swinging a sword against thin air until a farmer finds him tearing up his scarecrow in his field, and being asked, Jordan Klepper awkwardly says that he's "fighting all the enemies", protecting "the forgotten man". The farmer tells him that he and his friends are making a mess of everything.
  Farmer: Now who the hell's gonna clean this up?
  [Jordan looks down at the mess nervously, then gets up and runs]
  Farmer: All this talk has consequences, asshole! Real consequences!
  Jordan: (running, barely comprehensible) The fight continues!
• Eskimos Aren't Real: The first trailer for the show claims that China isn't real.
  Jordan Klepper: They say our children should learn Chinese; I say China isn't real! No one I know has, like, ever been there. And I know, like, a ton of people.
• Everyone Has Standards: In a segment about believers of the Flat Earth theory, Klepper and citizen journalist Kobi Libii state that even they don't believe in it, though in true Conspiracy Theorist fashion, they claim they do admire their determination nonetheless.
• Gaslighting: Done as a Visual Pun as part of a Running Gag, such as in the November 2, 2017 episode.
• Hypocrite: As the quote implies, this is the point; Klepper says he gives people the straight, unaltered news when he's an egotistical Conspiracy Theorist redefining any and all news to suit his obvious agenda.
• Insane Troll Logic: In a segment in which Klepper looked at "good" and "bad" numbers, he engaged in some mental gymnastics to make the $400,000 Secretary of Health Tom Price spent on private flights a "good" number. Even Klepper himself seemed to find it quite straining.
  Jordan Klepper: $400,000. Four. Four is the number of legs of a horse. And horses were popular in the 1830s, 1830 is military time for 6:30. And 6:30 is when the sun goes down. And son is also a male child, which is who Tom Price was visiting. And "visiting" has eight letters. And a son is half a father. Eight divided in half is four. And what has four letters? "Good."
• Insistent Terminology: Klepper always refers to his correspondents as "citizen journalists".
• Interchangeable Asian Cultures: "Don't lecture me about China, I eat sushi all the time."
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: When Klepper isn't misinterpreting the news, he's getting his facts wrong, but so what? The important thing is that he messes up with great sincerity and conviction.
• Lack of Empathy: Klepper claims that empathy is "a weakness" and Donald Trump is engaged in a "national empathy rollback".
  Jordan Klepper: Empathy is a waste of time. That's why it's one of the Seven Deadly Sins.
• The Mole: Klepper explains his appearances on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah as him being a mole sent to infiltrate it. He didn't seem to be very good at it.
  Trevor Noah: What are you doing?
  Jordan Klepper: I'm a mole. I mean, nothing.
  [Zooms in on Trevor Noah, text appears saying "CLUELESS STOOGE"]
• Never My Fault: Klepper's persona has a variation, I Am Never Wrong. See Insane Troll Logic above.
• Ominous Visual Glitch: The show features glitches on its graphics, and even on the Comedy Central logo at the beginning of its videos uploaded on YouTube, in accordance with its "underground" look.
• Shout-Out:
  • Some "citizen journalists" seem to be stand-ins for conservative personalities:
    • Camp Gay Conservatives Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson seem to be a two-man reference to gay conservative commentator and Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos.
    • Niccole Thurman, an African-American woman, seems to reference the upward trend of conservative African-American women who appeared during or in the aftermath of the 2016 elections, such as actress Stacey Dash, singer Joy Villa, and bloggers Diamond and Silk. Her first appearance on the show also had her among a crowd of people, around the time that there were various media reports about an African-American man who appeared ubiquitously in almost all of Trump's rallies, and who was revealed to held fringe conspiracy theories.
  • One episode had Jordan and Niccole talk about Kanye West announcing his support for Trump. Just as Jordan was about to bring out his gaslight to, well, gaslight his audience, Niccole interrupted him by bringing her own device: Stirring a teaspoon against a porcelain teacup.^note Appropiately enough, this also served as a reference to the fact that Kanye's announcement led to jokes that he was in the Sunken Place.
    Jordan: Niccole, why are you stirring your tea so weird?
    Niccole: Don't worry Jordan, it's not for you.
• Spiritual Successor: To The Colbert Report, another Comedy Central show starring a former Daily Show correspondent assuming the persona of a champion of right-wing/conservative ideas; whereas The Colbert Report styled itself after conservative pundit programs like The O Reilly Factor, The Opposition is aimed to satirize right-wing alternative media, such as Breitbart.com and Alex Jones's InfoWars.
• String Theory: Jordan's "murder board" is a major feature of his show. In one episode he comapres himself to Sean Hannity - "We both like our conspiracy boards"◊.
• The Unfought: In the final battle with his "enemies", Jordan never quite engages a black guy in a shirt labeled... "FACTS".
• Visual Pun:
  • Jordan sometimes uses a device to hypnotize and gaslight his audience into agreeing with his viewpoints — an actual gaslight.
  • As mentioned in The Unfought, during Jordan's "final battle" with his enemies in the final episode of the show, the one enemy he doesn't fight is a guy with a shirt labeled "FACTS". One could say then that Jordan never engaged with facts.
  • Then there's the fact that Jordan's "final battle" is revealed to be a hallucination, and that Jordan's "enemies" are in reality... a strawman (the exit to Jordan's bunker being located on an open field). Yes, Jordan is literally beating a strawman.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Another link between this show and The Colbert Report: like Colbert, Klepper has thinly veiled daddy issues. For example, when a line in "O Canada" was made gender-neutral, with the phrase "all thy sons" changed to "all of us", his reaction was:
  Jordan Klepper: Refusing to praise sons? Since when did the Canadian national anthem become my dad?

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