Stephen A. Smith has become the latest target of “The Daily Show,” with the late night program releasing a new biofilm mocking the sports television personality for his various on-air takes.
The nearly 7-minute video, titled “Stephen A. Smith: Greatest of All Take-Havers,” starts with a look at his childhood, with Smith saying he was born in the Bronx and raised in Queens with the “greatest mom in the world.”
“That’s right, every other mom in the world is a scrub. I don’t care if your mother, Theresa, or that hot mom from The Brady Bunch,” Craig Kilborn says in a voice narration. “Those moms should be riding the bench behind Janet Smith.”
It proceeds to jump forward Smith’s enrollment at the Fashion Institute of Technology, which Kilborn said “might not have greatest tradition of sports” but “definitely had a playa.”
“It was primarily a girls school, and the other dudes were homosexual,” Smith says in an interview clip. “It left it all to us.”
Watch the full clip below:
Smith would eventually put down the sewing needle and transfer to a basketball program at Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina, where he recalled hitting 17 straight three pointers and being given a scholarship on the spot.
“That’s right. Stephen A Smith was the king of threes until he started playing actual games and became the king of 1.5s per game,” Kilborn joked. “Unfortunately, Stephen A could not explain the mathematics, as he had attended the Fashion Institute of Technology.”
Smith would go on to join his college newspaper, where he would write a story telling his own basketball coach Clarence “Big House” Gaines to retire, and later ESPN in 2003.
In another interview clip, Smith says he “had no TV training whatsoever” and that he instead focused on being himself and saying what he feels, to which Kilborn replied: “Yes, he had the rare ability to open his mouth and let words form into sentences that people could hear on TV. No one had seen anything like it before.”
The biofilm then goes into a montage of Smith’s various takes, which Kilborn said ranged from “weirdly quiet” to “full on freaking screaming.” He proceeds to tease Smith for his catchphrase “stay off the weed,” telling him: “Or, hear me out, maybe try a little weed.”
It goes on to talk about Smith’s on-air arguments with Skip Bayless on ESPN’s “First Take”, comparing the pair to Larry Bird and Magic Johnson yelling at the top of their lungs. But following Bayless’ departure from the program, Kilborn says that Smith was “breaking take records left and right.”
“We’re talking 300 takes a day with a sentence completion percentage of 93.3% and off the charts decibel levels,” Kilborn said. “The man even had a correct prediction average of … well that one doesn’t matter.”
Kilborn then notes that Smith’s takes couldn’t be contained after locking in a 5-year $100 million contract, before playing another montage which shows him talking about Pokemon’s Charmander, who he called Shamander and said reminded him of himself due to its forehead; refusing to get into an argument about Pixar’s “Cars”; and calling a tweet asking him whether standing or sitting is the correct way to wipe yourself a “nasty ass” question.
“That’s the difference between just talking s**t and having a take on s**t,” Kilborn said.
Lastly, the video takes aim at Smith floating a 2028 presidential run, questioning whether a “loud mouth TV personality with endless opinions, no qualifications and a bad hairline would be a plausible candidate for President of the United States?”
It then cuts to Donald Trump, who says “I’ve been pretty good at picking people and picking candidates, and I will tell you I’d love to see him run” to which Kilborn replies:”Oh, right. God dammit.”
The biofilm ends with Smith firing right back at the Daily Show.
“All right, ‘Daily Show,’ you had your fun. But guess what? It still was a sorry ass take,” he says. “You got some work to do. And maybe, just maybe you’ll do it right if you stay off the weed.”
“The Daily Show” has produced several satirical biofilms over the years, which have focused on subjects including Vivek Ramaswamy, Ted Cruz, Vladimir Putin, Elon Musk and Lindsey Graham.
