'The Daily Show' Lights Up for Italy's Hash Boat

With Syria and the threat of war looming over the country, Jon Stewart thought it'd be nice to cover something a little less dire. "There is an awful lot of just chaos and uncertainty in the world right now," Stewart said. "It would be nice to just have, like, a fun story, a nice story."

With Syria and the threat of war looming over the country, Jon Stewart thought it'd be nice to cover something a little less dire. "There is an awful lot of just chaos and uncertainty in the world right now," Stewart said. "It would be nice to just have, like, a fun story, a nice story."

Somewhere off the coast of Italy, his wish was granted — on Friday drug smugglers set fire to a ship carrying 50 million pounds of hash when an Italian customs boat caught up with them. After a clip showing the ship, Stewart looked up to the sky and whispered "thank you Jesus." According to reports, the fire created a thick layer of hash smoke that hung over Italy. "That explains why Italy ordered five million pizzas, from itself," Stewart joked.

While the smugglers could have come up with a better Plan B ("A little surprised that the two dudes on the hash boat didn't have a better exit strategy than 'Uh, maybe we should burn it,'" Stewart said) that's not nearly as dumb as phase two, jumping into the ocean. "'So here's what we're gonna do,'" Stewart said in his best high-Italian-drug-smuggling-mobster impression. "'We're gonna give thousands of sharks a serious case of the munchies, then we're going to dive headfirst into their living room, like a complimentary delivery of crazy bread.'"

To really get a sense of what things were like on the ground, under that hash cloud, The Daily Show sent senior smoldering drug boat correspondent Al Madrigal in to investigate. Stewart noticed that Madrigal wasn't wearing a mask. "Ha ha ha, good one Jon. Why would I be wearing a mask, it's not Halloween yet," Madrigal said, into his biscotti microphone. "Classic Stewart." Stewart tried to get Madrigal to talk about the ship, or the rumored crew of Syrians and Egyptians, but Madrigal was more fascinated by what it would look like if a giant started smoking the hash boat.

As for whether the smugglers will go to jail, maybe they're already there. "Jon, aren't we all in jail?" Madrigal asked. "I mean, if you think about it, in a sense we're all just trapped on an orb, just spinning in space," he added, at which point Stewart decided to nip the high philosophizing in the bud. Good call.