Jordan Klepper Bikes Naked Through Portland and Norway—Is This the Most Outrageous ‘Daily Show’ Special Yet?
Added on December 9, 2025 inTV News Cards
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Is Donald Trump really a contender for the Nobel Peace Prize, or is this just another episode in America’s ongoing drama where reality checks seem to miss the cue? As Jordan Klepper hits the road—from the magnolia-lined streets of Mississippi to the cobblestone corners of Oslo, and the eccentric naked bike rides in Portland—he’s chasing down what “peace” even means in 2025. With the Nobel committee passing the baton to Venezuelan democracy activist Maria Corina Machado, Klepper peels back the layers of a curiosity: why the White House’s full-court press for a prize that wasn’t theirs to claim? Amidst protests, ICE raids, and international tensions swirling like a cosmic tempest—maybe even Mercury’s mischievous retrograde has something to do with our mixed signals—this special is a rollercoaster of earnest questions and absurd realities about diplomacy, democracy, and that ever-elusive quest for harmony. Ready to ride shotgun on a journey where the absurd meets the solemn, and peace takes center stage in its many forms? LEARN MORE
Jordan Klepper’s latest Daily Show Presents: Jordan Klepper Fingers the Pulse special took him to Mississippi, Oregon and Norway in search of an answer to the question: Does Donald Trump deserve a Nobel Peace Prize?
The short answer is that the Nobel committee didn’t think so. The 2025 prize, to be awarded Dec. 10, will go to Venezuelan democracy activist Maria Corina Machado. But Klepper wanted to get at why the president was campaigning so hard for the Nobel, and what the notion of “peace” looks like now both in the United States and elsewhere in the world.
“As we were putting this special together, two conversations were taking place in the country,” Klepper told The Hollywood Reporter. “There were troops being sent to Portland and to Chicago. There were these ICE raids and these protests. And at the same time, Donald Trump was campaigning openly for the Nobel Peace Prize. We saw a special in that conversation.”
The Daily Show Presents: Jordan Klepper Fingers the Pulse: Give That Man a Prize airs at 11:30 p.m. Monday on Comedy Central, following The Daily Show. The half-hour special follows Klepper to Mississippi to speak to Trump supporters; to Oslo — home of the Nobel Prizes — to speak to Norwegians about their views on the matter; and to Portland, Oregon, for a naked bicycle ride protest that took a turn when federal agents used chemical munitions on the crowd.
He spoke with THR about putting together the special, what he and his crew try to do with the longer shows and whether being known for his Daily Show work makes his job easier or harder in the field.
Can you tell me about the various places you went and people you spoke to for the special?
We went to Mississippi and talked to Trump supporters about why Donald Trump was the most peaceful president. They talked about the wars that he has solved. They talked about him bringing strength to cities. We went to Congressman [Anna Paulina] Luna, who has nominated Donald Trump for the peace prize as well as putting him on Mount Rushmore, and talked to her about the qualifications Donald Trump has for being a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Then we went all the way to Oslo to talk to people who give out the Nobel Peace Prize about what the qualities of a Peace Prize winner look like, how those connect to a Trump administration. I talked to the lovely people on the streets of Oslo about what they thought about Donald Trump being nominated and potentially winning a Nobel Peace Prize, and they were all lovely, lovely folks who didn’t mince words, but did it in such a lovely Norwegian way. We even found a small group of Nordic MAGA.
That takes us to Portland, where there was a naked bike ride to protest the ICE raids and the ICE detention center there. I talked to the protesters there about this idea of peace, about Trump’s thoughts and actions against democratic norms. I disrobed, got myself onto a bike and rode along with these folks. These are the things I do for comedy, for America. In doing that, I saw what felt very representative to America in 2025, which was a group of naked people, people dressed as cartoon characters, frogs, chickens, protesting outside an ICE facility where agents are shooting pepper ball bullets into the crowd.
What started as an act of protest turned into a violent [scene], where protesters are bowled over by ICE agents. A clarinetist is shoved into the ground, is taken away across state lines for a couple days. People don’t know where she is. As we capture all this conversation around what does peace look like on an international scale, what does it feel like here in America? That’s the shape of our special, and I think Portland was, in many ways, an encapsulation of that feeling of what I think a lot of people are feeling in America right now. There are these international conversations around what peace looks like and what democratic norms are, and yet, you go to some of these places, and it feels both absurd and violent at the same time.
And as this is all coming together for you, there are threats of military action in Venezuela and the targeting of the supposed drug boats.
Yeah. We’re having this conversation as the Venezuelan drug boat attacks are happening, and also there’s a large conversation about American war crimes. This all comes on the heels of negotiations about between Putin and the Trump administration and Ukraine. So it was very much at this moment of, What does peace on and international scale look like, and how does it feel back home?
When you have a half hour versus four or five minutes on in a Daily Show segment, what’s the difference in approach in terms of trying to sustain the comedy and the throughline of the story you’re telling?
You get to go deeper. What I feel really lucky about is I get to [work in] three separate modes at The Daily Show. I get to host behind the desk. When you do that, you’re dealing with a day of stories, you’re responding to the news of the moment in a monologue form. Then I get to do field pieces, which are also reflective of what’s happening, in short four-minute spaces. A lot of those, to me, feel like I’m stress testing propaganda. The conversations we hear about [a given topic], how do those actually play out in real people’s lives?
With these specials, you get a chance to have a larger argument and really dive deeper into these conversations. We use the man on the street, the conversation out in America, as a jumping-off point. Donald Trump is talking about a Nobel Peace Prize. How do his supporters talk about Donald Trump as a peaceful president? What do they think of these Venezuelan boat bombings? What are their responses to it? Do they see hypocrisy in in the violence back at home and the quest for a peace prize? We take those arguments that we see out on the streets, and then we stress test them. We go to Norway, we see what peace looks like from an international angle. We go to Portland, we see what it looks like up close there. We get to live in the arguments that are made on the street.
Given that The Daily Show has been around for a long time, and that you’ve done a number of these specials, are you surprised that people are still willing to open up to you? Or is there just something about a guy with a camera that folks are like, “Yeah, let’s go”?
Oh, come on — I’m a charming guy! People want to chat. I’m Midwest nice. When I go out on the streets, it’s a mix. There are some people who recognize me from the work I’ve done over the last decade, and that either turns them off right away or draws them toward me — I think more often. Americans love attention, and you put a microphone and a camera there, and people want to be heard, so that’s still part of the conversation. When you go to Norway, you realize those cultural norms don’t necessarily translate. Suddenly people are like, ‘Oh no, talk politics on television? That’s of no interest to me. No thank you.’ And then they move right along. This desire to be on television, to be heard, to be your most confident, assured self — that is, perhaps, American exceptionalism boiled down to its core. There is something about people in this country when we go [into the field]. They dress to impress, and they want to articulate their beliefs.
You’ve been to a lot of Trump rallies and other similar events. Do people recognize you as the MAGA specialist from The Daily Show, and is that an attractor or a repellent?
It’s a blessing and the curse. There are those that are drawn to the attention and those who step away from it. More often than not, you go to a MAGA event, and if somebody is wearing a cape and a set of horns, that person generally wants attention. They’re not as discerning about somebody with a camera. They want to be in front of that camera. That being said, people are also brought up in very different media bubbles. So in a world where people were consuming some of the clips and the things I was doing on The Daily Show, many of the people in that that MAGA-sphere aren’t watching some of the shows that I might be on or watching The Daily Show, and therefore are just kind of approaching me as somebody with a camera and a microphone.
With the firehose of information coming from the administration, do you worry at all that people might have memory-holed this a little bit, or is the hope that the actual awarding of the prize will bring it back to into people’s minds?
The overall theme of this is essentially peace. A main element of the Nobel Peace Prize is upholding democratic norms, and I think that is front of mind with a lot of people in America right now. Also, the sycophancy that surrounds Donald Trump is remarkable. FIFA created a peace prize that they handed out [at the World Cup draw]. The only other worry is in a world where so many people are trying to appease Donald Trump, before this thing airs, there’s a decent chance there’s three or four other Peace Prizes created to curry favor with this administration. It takes our thunder.
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