Jordan Klepper has lost count of how many Trump rallies he’s attended. “We’re probably in the 30 range,” he says over Zoom. “Yeah, it’s a blur.” As the Daily Show’s resident rally-goer, Klepper has carved out a niche by picking the brains, or lack thereof, of Donald Trump’s most ardent and ridiculous supporters. “I got these front row seats to the end of the world,” he says.
In a new special titled The Daily Show Presents: Jordan Klepper Fingers The Pulse: Rally Together that airs Monday, October 28 at 11:30 PM, Klepper returns to the field weeks before the most consequential election of our lifetime. But this time, he’s bringing friends. Playwright and actor Jeremy O. Harris, Guys We Fucked podcast hosts Corinne Fisher and Krystyna Hutchinson, and Reno 911’s Thomas Lennon accompany Klepper at various Trump rallies to see firsthand what the right has wrought.
A correspondent on The Daily Show since 2014, Klepper admits that by some estimations, he fell on the sword by becoming the show’s go-to rally guy. “When people started asking other correspondents if they wanted to go into the field, their responses tended to be, ‘Fuck no.’” But Klepper had a different reaction. “I’m truly curious,” he says, about Trump supporters. “One of the main things I do when I go out there is like, ‘Tell me why you like this person. Tell me what you’re excited about.’ Really asking them to articulate why they are there dressed in a cape with a giant foam Donald Trump hat on. I want to know why.”
To connect with the people he interviews, Klepper relies on his decades of experience performing improv comedy at Second City in Chicago and then the UCB Theater in New York. “The tenets of improvisation are about saying yes,” he says. “When you’re doing compelling man-on-the-street interviews, you’re making people feel comfortable so that they share and you create something that is revealing. And I do think a lot of that starts in improvisation.” The Daily Show’s rally segments are so successful largely because Klepper approaches all of his subjects with an improviser’s open heart. “A journalist has to stay neutral,” he notes. “Oftentimes in a MAGA-verse, that comes across as confrontational. CNN gets a lot of people who think they’re getting into a fight with them. One of my tactics is to really make them feel comfortable to say yes, and have them find a place that is as compelling and more real.”
Klepper is aware that his aesthetic and his Kalamazoo roots might help his interviewees feel comfortable. “Trevor [Noah] used to always joke that, ‘Yeah, we sent you in the field because you’re a white guy,’” Klepper says. “I think there’s a lot of truth in that. I have a Midwestern sensibility, and a big, tall, lanky white guy at a Trump rally often invites people to come up and engage.
“I can’t help but look like I just came from a fishing trip,” he adds.
