Daily Show Goes to Austin, Where Ebola is Getting Hipper By the Second

The Daily Show heads to Austin this week, for a string of Texas-themed jokes (Guns! The death penalty! Hats! Everything is so big!) and, last night, a chat with Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis. But first, they tackled how Texas dealt with its recent brush with Ebola.

“Dallas officials tried every Texas solution they could think of,” correspondent Samantha Bee told Stewart. “They shot at Ebola. They gave it the death penalty. They prayed for the virus, but in a way that the virus found patronizing and that made it feel bad about itself. Turns out all they really needed to do is get their shit together.”

While Dallas is actually not a particularly gun- or death-penalty friendly place, in comparison with the rest of Texas, The Daily Show gets one thing right: the heated Dallas/Austin rivalry, where Austinites think they’re much cooler than anyone in Dallas, and Dallas simultaneously feels bad about itself for being Dallas while also deriding the shallow, obnoxious hipsters in Austin. (Source: I spent two years living in Dallas, much of it spent stuck in traffic.) According to The Daily Show‘s other lady correspondent Jessica Williams, the city’s hip trend-setting residents don’t need to worry about dumb, dowdy, Dallas Ebola coming there, because they’ve already got their own.

“Austin is already brewing its own locally-sourced, small-batch, fair-trade organic cage-free farm to table Ebola,” she added, hoisting a mason jar (of course). “Keep Ebola weird!”

Sounds about right, honestly.

Screengrab via Comedy Central