Jon Stewart is no longer the man for the job.
What a bummer. When Roy Wood Jr. stood behind Trevor Noah two weeks ago while Noah was accepting an Emmy for The Daily Show—the show that Noah no longer hosted, the show that hasn’t had a permanent host since he left at the end of 2022—and silently mouthed, for all the world to see, “Please … hire … a … host,” Jon Stewart was probably not … who … he … meant.
Yes, Comedy Central announced today that, after a near-decade hiatus from its flagship program, Stewart will return to host the show on Monday nights through November’s presidential election, and then he’ll produce the show through 2025. The choice is both a punt and a surrender, as well as a poetically fitting choice for an election year that already feels like a depressing rerun. It’s the late-night equivalent of renominating Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
The network has been looking for a host for almost two years now—Noah announced that he was leaving in September 2022. Since then a carousel of gifted young performers have been taking turns keeping the seat warm, hoping they might be the one whose butt got the nod to permanently occupy it. And in Comedy Central’s defense, it appeared they’d finally made up their mind late last summer to hire Hasan Minhaj, an eminently qualified, refreshingly modern choice. Then The New Yorker published an article suggesting that Minhaj had taken creative liberties with some of the stories he’d told onstage in the past, and the deal blew up. Now it was back to chair—sorry, square—one.
Read: Hasan Minhaj invites you to take off your shoes
Rather than taking a risk on a fresh talent and choosing from the wide array of young, diverse, and very funny candidates the producers had cultivated over the past two years—someone like Ronnie Chieng, Michelle Wolf, or Wood Jr.—they pulled a Bob Iger.
Stewart’s limited engagement back on TV isn’t the issue here. On its own I might even be excited about it. Jon Stewart is a national treasure. As someone who spent his 20s and 30s watching Stewart on a near-nightly basis, I’m very much looking forward to his Monday-night cameos—I’ll watch them on Instagram, the same way I’ve been watching Daily Show segments pretty much since Noah took over. This is Stewart’s natural element, the best job he’s ever had, the best work he’s ever done. In this respect, Stewart coming back is every bit as welcome as Kate McKinnon periodically returning to guest host Saturday Night Live.
The part that feels like such a bummer is Stewart reclaiming the reins of the whole show. It all but guarantees that The Daily Show won’t have a permanent host until after 2025, because no one genuinely worthy would take that job with Stewart as a shadow boss. It makes the show look desperate, which is bizarre, because The Daily Show should not be, is not, desperate. It just won an Emmy! It’s custom built for the social-media age and as relevant as ever! Chieng (or Wolf, or Wood) would’ve been fantastic. Instead, Comedy Central comes off looking like it’s paralyzed, afraid of picking someone too niche, or too progressive, or too controversial, and petrified of another Hasan Minhaj scenario.
If this feels like a somewhat ignominious retreat for Stewart, a tail-between-the-legs moment after years in the wilderness, yes, that’s exactly what it is. He was only available for the job, of course, because Apple TV+ decided last autumn not to renew The Problem With Jon Stewart, his deeper-diving, more civic-minded follow-up. The problems with The Problem With Jon Stewart were legion, but the two fatal ones were that it wasn’t funny and no one watched it.
Read: What happened to Jon Stewart
And Stewart only took that job after a lucrative multiyear deal with HBO came and went with not a single piece of content to show for it, and after writing and directing a political satire called Irresistible, starring his longtime Daily Show confederate Steve Carell, that moviegoers resisted quite easily.
There’s no shame in making a bad movie, or a flop—at the time, the film seemed like a natural progression for Stewart, and it’s easy to imagine a world in which the outgoing host of The Daily Show delivered a sharp, timely political satire, a Wag the Dog or In the Loop for Trump’s America. But the most disappointing thing about Irresistible was how flat and toothless it was, and how few insights it offered about our election system. Stewart had total creative freedom, all the resources he needed, and no creative juice.
When Stewart departed The Daily Show nine years ago, he seemed to understand that it needed a fresher sensibility. Times had changed. The choice of Noah to replace him suggested that Comedy Central understood that, too. Noah was an astonishingly bold choice at the time—not just a total unknown, a total unknown from South Africa—and Noah rewarded the network by sustaining the show’s excellence when everyone assumed it could never survive without the host who’d built it into an American-comedy institution. Then he left to resume his stand-up career and bat away rumors that he’s dating Dua Lipa. Already his post–Daily Show career is going better than his predecessor’s.
For so long it was assumed that The Daily Show needed Jon Stewart more than Jon Stewart needed The Daily Show. Noah should have taught everyone otherwise. So what happened?
The whole reason Stewart left in the first place, after all, was because he had exhausted his powers of persuasion, his act was at risk of becoming a shtick, and his writing staff too closely resembled the patriarchal establishment that a program like The Daily Show exists to dismantle. Maybe he’ll claim that he’s coming back because this moment in history is just too consequential to resist, that the threat posed by Trump is simply too great, and that this is his way of joining the fight. His most valuable role now, though, is the same as that of a figure like Barack Obama—the senior statesman who uses all that banked goodwill to hype up the next generation’s standard-bearer. The kingmaker, not the king.
The whole point of bringing Stewart back now is that he’s the safe choice. The version of Jon Stewart we watched throughout his first run as host was a trailblazer—the perfect union of a comic voice with a political era. This one is just a guy who needs a job.
The Daily Show Is Better Than This
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25.01.2024
Jon Stewart is no longer the man for the job.
What a bummer. When Roy Wood Jr. stood behind Trevor Noah two weeks ago while Noah was accepting an Emmy for The Daily Show—the show that Noah no longer hosted, the show that hasn’t had a permanent host since he left at the end of 2022—and silently mouthed, for all the world to see, “Please … hire … a … host,” Jon Stewart was probably not … who … he … meant.
Yes, Comedy Central announced today that, after a near-decade hiatus from its flagship program, Stewart will return to host the show on Monday nights through November’s presidential election, and then he’ll produce the show through 2025. The choice is both a punt and a surrender, as well as a poetically fitting choice for an election year that already feels like a depressing rerun. It’s the late-night equivalent of renominating Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
The network has been looking for a host for almost two years now—Noah announced that he was leaving in September 2022. Since then a carousel of gifted young performers have been taking turns keeping the seat warm, hoping they might be the one whose butt got the nod to permanently occupy it. And in Comedy Central’s defense, it appeared they’d finally made up their mind late last summer to hire Hasan Minhaj, an eminently qualified, refreshingly modern choice. Then The New Yorker published an article suggesting that Minhaj had taken creative liberties with some of the stories he’d told onstage in the past, and the deal blew up. Now it was back to chair—sorry, square—one.
Read: Hasan Minhaj invites you to take........
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