On Nov. 11, the Bob Woodruff Foundation and The New York Comedy Festival held its 18th annual Stand Up For Heroes (SUFH) benefit at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall in Manhattan, and, as usual, some of music’s and comedy’s biggest stars — Bruce Springsteen, Norah Jones, Questlove, Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, Jim Gaffigan and Mark Normand — helped raise more than $29 million for military veterans and their families.
That figure includes the staggering $25 million donation the Craigslist founder Craig Newmark’s philanthropic organization donated to the Woodruff Foundation, where he is on the board of directors.
The benefit — which took place on Veterans Day for the first time in its history — kicked off with Questlove DJ’ng for the receptive crowd. Here are some of the highlights of the show. (Some jokes are paraphrased for simplicity’s sake; others are not verbatim because recording was not permitted.)
1. Bruce Springsteen
Last things first. The Boss, who has long supported veterans and has performed at 17 of the 18 SUFH benefits, closed the show with an electrifying acoustic performance of four songs: “The Power of Prayer,” from his 2020 Letter to You album, “Land of Hope and Dreams,” “Dancing in the Dark,” and “Long Walk Home,” which he introduced as “a small prayer for our country.” Given the benefit’s comedic theme, Springsteen always brings jokes with his guitar — some ribald, some corny — and he told them between songs.
His first involved a husband learning that his wife is pregnant. Taking the doctor aside, he says his spouse couldn’t be pregnant because he is religious about practicing safe sex and always wears a condom. “Let me tell you a story,” the doctor says. To paraphrase Springsteen, A hunter goes out to bag a lion but brings his umbrella instead of his rifle. When he encounters the big cat, he raises his umbrella, yells “bang!” and the lion falls dead. “Doc, that’s impossible. Some other guy must have shot him.” Rimshot, please! Another: “Bakery burns down,” Springsteen said. “Business is toast.” The crowd didn’t judge Springsteen on his comedy and gave him a standing ovation. As they left the theater, some could be heard using words like, “exhilarating” and “powerful” to describe his performance.
2. Norah Jones
Jones performed early in the show and proved to be the quiet storm of the evening. She left the talking to others, choosing instead to speak through the soulful set she played on a Steinway grand piano that was wheeled onstage. Her first three songs, “Don’t Know Why,” the hit single from her 2002 debut Billboard 200 chart-topping album; “Little Broken Hearts,” the title track of her 2012 release; and “Come Away With Me,” also from her first album, could have been interpreted as subtle commentary on the results of the presidential election. “Don’t Know Why” contains the verse: When I saw the break of day, I wished that I could fly away. Instead of kneeling in the sand, catching tear-drops in my hand.” “Little Broken Hearts,” includes the lyrics, “Only the fallen need to rise. What if lightning strikes them twice? Will they give up on their lives. And finally divide?” And though “Come Away With Me,” is largely a love song, it does contain the line, “Come away where they can’t tempt us with their lies.”
The last song of Jones set was a tribute to the patriotism of the vets gathered at the benefit — “American Anthem,” from the soundtrack of Ken Burns’ World War II documentary, The War. “Let me know in my heart, when my days are through,” Jones sang. “America, America, I gave my best to you.”
3. Jon Stewart
Stewart’s support of military veterans goes much deeper than the laughs he reliably provokes at Stand Up for Heroes, where he has appeared 15 times, and the applause and cheering he received while he was onstage reflected that. “Thank you for the Pact Act!” Iraq war veteran Amanda Hooper shouted from the audience during Stewart’s set, a nod to the 20 years The Daily Show anchor spent fighting for the 2022 passage of the law that provides assistance to veterans who were exposed to harmful chemicals such as Agent Orange during the Vietnam War and toxins from burn pits that were used to destroy military waste in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The chemicals can cause myriad illnesses, including cancer and respiratory diseases, and prior to the passing of the Pact Act, The Department of Veteran Affairs denied about 75% of veterans’ burn pit claims. Now a senior outreach coordinator at MACV, an organization dedicated to ending veteran homelessness, Hooper told Billboard that she is finally able to receive care for a severe respiratory illness she contracted because of burn pits in Iraq.
As anyone who watches The Daily Show knows, Stewart’s activism has not dulled his comic chops. He told the crowd that after the election, someone asked him if he was “worried about anti-Semitism.” His reply: “I think anti-Semitism will be just fine,” which led him to tell the story of posting a remembrance of his beloved three-legged pitbull, who had died, on social media. While most of the replies offered condolences and tributes to their own late pets, one response stood out: “Why did you change your name, Jew?”
Addressing his age, Stewart, who is 61, told the crowd, “The other day, I needed my reading glasses to jerk off,” and after the guttural laughing died down, he added: “I hear the rumble of recognition.” His final bit was an extended story about his son, Nate, a sophomore in college. Stewart recalled leaving his sleeping son at home to visit a nearby VFW post, where he met an impressive veteran who had enlisted at the age of 18 and deployed three times to Afghanistan. When Stewart returned home, continued, he received a text from his son, who was still in his bedroom. The message: “I’m up. Make me a bagel.”
4. Mark Normand
Normand was the rookie comedian of the night. It was his first time at the benefit, but he clearly wasn’t worried about whether he’d be invited back — which was a very good thing for unrepentant comedy fans in the audience. He opened his set by riffing on the election, and a few gasps peppered the laughter when he imagined Robert F. Kennedy saying to Donald Trump, “Now that you’ve been shot, you feel like family.” Normand also said he’d like to have sex with a non-binary person because it could be interpreted as a threesome. If someone asked, “Did you have sex with her?”, he could reply, “No. Them.”
And when all four comedians took to the stage to eat up a few minutes before Springsteen’s set, Stewart gestured to Normand, who at 41 was the youngest of the group, “We’re a boy band, and we finally found a young singer.” “I used to do Diddy parties,” Normand replied. “It’s good to be here. I escaped.”
5. Jim Gaffigan and Jerry Seinfeld
Although they performed separately, both Gaffigan and Seinfeld are Jedi masters of observational comedy, and they had the crowd roaring. Gaffigan began his set with a bit on “running late” and traveling. When he sees someone running for their gate at an airport, he said, “I think to myself, I hope they don’t make it.” Otherwise, he added, “How are they going to learn?” He also noted that he takes a lot of connecting flights, which often involve sitting in an airport “for two hours and counting all the losers with neck pillows.”
Gaffigan then told a story about hustling along a New York City street — because he was late — and seeing a crowd of people with their cell phones raised. When he asked one of the amateur photographers what she was shooting, she replied, “The sunset!” Gaffigan said the response left him wanting to “kill” that person knowing “that that photo would be used to bore someone.” “I gotta be honest,” he said. “I want to kill a lot of people.”
Seinfeld also took on the subject of cell phones. When some in the front row broke out their handhelds to snap pictures of him, he encouraged them to proceed because “I choose to enjoy your dumbness.” He added that he also doesn’t give a “rat’s ass” about the photos on other people’s phones. “We need to stick to looking at our own phones, heads down,” he said, and, possibly referring to the election, “ride this disaster of the moment into the ground where it belongs.”
Moving to AI and its potential out-think humans, he said, “We were smart enough to create it; dumb enough to need it; and stupid enough to not know if we did the right thing.” One of the biggest laughs he got came from the simplest punchline: “Why was Frankenstein wearing a sport jacket?”
6. The Heroes
It was impossible to not be moved by the group of veterans who took the stage and, one by one, described the challenges they faced after returning from their deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan, and how they benefited from the programs funded by the Bob Woodruff Foundation. Among those who spoke was Jerrod Reynolds, who became homeless and a drug addict. He explained that the MACV organization found him housing, which led him to conquer his substance abuse. He has since joined VMAC, where he works with Amanda Hooper.
The last to speak was Frank Williamson, the medic who saved Woodruff’s life when he was seriously injured by an improvised explosive device in 2006 while covering the Iraq war for ABC News. Williamson explained that treating hundreds of soldiers life-threatening injuries left him rudderless and despondent when he returned home. He also turned to drugs and was rehabilitated by one of the foundation funded programs. When Williamson finished, Woodruff emerged from the wings, and the two men embraced, brothers in arms.
