When you read the reviews, they all say how tiresome it is to wait, and you think, this is a dumb complaint because it says you have to wait right on the ticket, these people must be whiners.
Most people are whiny about waiting. (See: every other post I've written.) I know I am insufferably impatient, but if there is a game to win, and you have to be patient to win it, I will be calm and focused and not whiny any at all.
This is how, after waiting three hours on a rainy, miserable, should-have-been-20-degrees-warmer day, we won the waitlist game and got inside to see a taping of The Daily Show.
The actual taping took 45 minutes. No cuts, no other takes, they went straight through like we were watching the actual show.
Jordan Klepper stayed in character before and after his segment. Roy Wood Jr grinned and waved at all of us. And Trevor Noah was his engaging self, asking us in a commercial break, "Really, I don't get it, do you? Do you understand why he would spend all this money on the military? That's like you're dying of liver disease but you go out and buy face cream.”
"He," of course, was Trump. The audience, of course, were all aligned in similar political views. Which has always seemed strange to me, even in a mass of like minds, in public, to loudly talk about things widely accepted as an even split. But that's not where we're at anymore. We're not split down the middle. We're splintered in factions and larger points of contention than tax breaks.
It seemed so fast, the taping, compared to how long we waited in the cold, and my toes did not recover until after dinner.
"I forget that this is the culmination of their whole day," my brother said, and he was right. They spend all day working on this show. The taping is the end. The cap. The final draft.
You forget other people had a whole day, a whole life, a whole set of reasons before the one emotion you see in front of you.
You forget that. I forget that.
That this forgetting is likely how we splintered in the first place.
Overall, the taping experience is far worth it if you're a fan, but if you do go, be prepared. Bring snacks, extra socks, and a coffee. On this, people of the Internet were right - it is tiresome to wait, it takes even longer than they say, and I'm not sure how anyone doesn't wimp out in the winter.