When fake news darling The Daily Show caught flack from Jezebel.com this summer for being ‘a boys’ club where women’s contributions are often ignored and dismissed,’ one of the first people to speak out in defense of DS was show cocreator Lizz Winstead. Who’s quite clearly a woman. Jon Stewart has since adopted her baby (“he raised it and it went to Harvard,” she’s said in earlier interviews), but Winstead helped pioneer the next generation of political satire—taking it to Comedy Central, Air America, Off-Broadway (Wake Up World), and on the road as a stand-up act. She’s in Seattle this Friday with her one-woman show My State of the Union, but she shared her love of information, hypocrisy, politics and the media for a Culture Fiend edition of Quote Unquote.

LW: My roots are in stand-up, that’s where I started.

I just feel like there need to be more voices in the world that combat all the insanity—like the crazy racism as we approached 9/11, with the mosque and the Quran burner—and just general media dropping-the-ballery that seems to happen on a daily basis.

It’d be nice if someone invented a fact-checking zap collar—like you put on your dog to make it stop barking—so every time [Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin] said something that was factually inaccurate, they would get jarred. I’m all for it.

The right has jumped on me for saying that—they said I’ve advocated the electrocution of Glenn Beck. If you Google “alleged comedian Lizz Winstead” you’ll find it.

I don’t think there are topics that are off-limits. It’s all about how you choose to frame your comedy. For example, if you were to tackle 9/11, you wouldn’t take on the victims, you might take on, say—like when the Onion launched their 9/11 page and it just said “Holy Fucking Shit!” I think that really summed it up.

You mean, what news sources do I read to make me smarter, versus the ones I read that make Americans dumber? I have to get through both.

I’ve gotten myself a little up-to-date on the Dino Rossi/Patty Murray crazy train. It’s awesome to come to a state where your governor and two senators are women—although there’s not a lot of excitement coming out of those three. It’s very stable.

First of all, I think Jezebel is completely dishonest. They send out all these reporters who know nothing about how television is made, and then write about a show that has done nothing but champion all people—40 percent of the staffers at The Daily Show are women.

Being somebody who hired the first batch of writers, I can tell you I got 150 writing submissions and only three from women. Since then, all names are stripped off the writing submissions, and you don’t know the gender of the person. It’s based purely on submission.

The fact of the matter is, it’s not a boys’ club or a girls’ club—it’s a nerd club. To be able to write in the voice of that show, you have to be equal parts historian and news junkie, and then be as funny of a writer as you are a complete news nerd. There just aren’t a lot of people who can do that. If there were, there would be more shows on television like those shows.

My State of the Union: An Evening with Daily Show Cocreator Lizz Winstead is Friday, September 17 at 8 and 10 at Theatre Off Jackson. Tickets are $15 on brownpapertickets.com. Winstead will also hold a political satire writing workshop on September 18 from 11 to 2 at Theatre Off Jackson; registration is $40 at brownpapertickets.com.