Danielle Solzman
The Opposition‘s Jordan Klepper is back on television with a new documentary series, Klepper, premiering May 9 on Comedy Central.
I like this look for former Chicago improviser Jordan Klepper. Not the whole part where he’s sitting in a Fulton County Jail. Though to be fair, he’s only there because of doing the right thing–supporting education, not segregation. It’s more of the fact that he’s back in the field. Sure, he’s toning down the funny but he also knows that he has a platform. This is one of his best qualities and it leads to some great work. All in all, this is a different type of Klepper than who we saw during The Opposition. It’s a return to classic form–the one who broke out in a big way on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Jordan is no longer behind a desk for this series. Instead, he’s out in the field–a place where the comedian thrives. In the first, Jordan is bringing the issue of PTSD in Texas to the forefront. You know an issue is serious when our military veterans are killing themselves at a rate of 20 people per day. In Killeen, Texas, Jordan meets with a grouo of veterans who call themselves the Valhalla Club and turn to wrestling. One of them, Eddie, turns to stand-up comedy as a way to battle PTSD. Even at that, it’s hard to find the humor when battling PTSD.
May 16th’s episode sees Jordan off to Louisiana, where he’s in a boat sinking along with other protesters. It’s for a good cause when you consider how some oil companies are treating are air and water supply so horribly. When there’s a major incident taking place every 11 days, you know something is going wrong.
Perhaps its the May 23rd episode that may be the most important. During the filming of this episode, Jordan would be arrested and sent to the Fulton County Jail. All in the name of supporting education. This episode introduces us to Freedom University. It’s a place where undocumented immigrants can attend school in safety. Because of this, we don’t know where the school is actually located. This episode takes a look at a policy enacted by the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, 4.1.6. The policy states as follows:
A person who is not lawfully present in the United States shall not be eligible for admission to any University System institution which, for the two most recent academic years, did not admit all academically qualified applicants (except for cases in which applicants were rejected for non-academic reasons).
These field pieces may not be presented in the hysterical way that they were on The Daily Show but it doesn’t matter because Klepper has the platform to give these voices a larger audience.
