Jon Stewart Has Restored Order to the Comedy Universe

It’s been four months since Jon Stewart returned to The Daily Show, in an apparent resolution to the problems caused when Trevor Noah departed the show in late 2022. Those problems mainly being, the search to find a new host. As a daily news show, albeit with a deliberate comedic bent, hosting The Daily Show is an immense effort, and Jon Stewart only agreed to take back the job he left in 2015 when they offered him the qualifier of only having to host for a single day a week. Although, as he discusses in a recent FYC interview, he had trouble with The Problem with Jon Stewart because of censorship problems, and Comedy Central enticed him back by offering him creative freedom to talk about whatever he wanted.

It’s odd to think about The Daily Show in terms such as this. After all, the show practically invented the current format of late night liberal talk show comedy. This isn’t a genre that’s censored by any means. To the contrary, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, and Stephen Colbert are at this point all running almost identical anti-Trump schticks, and despite lackluster ratings, don’t seem to be going anywhere. To the contrary, to hear the Emmys tell it, they’re still high quality entertainment. Well, if nominations alone count for anything. In practice, in between Jon Stewart’s final Daily Show season and Trevor Noah’s final Daily Show season, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver had a seven year streak of unbroken wins.

What does Jon Stewart bring back to The Daily Show that his imitators aren’t already doing? Well, strange as it is to think, Stewart has made the show fresh mostly by doing the exact same thing he did back in the George W. Bush era that made him famous: He’s willing to mock Democrats. From his very first reappearance on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart inspired outrage by…calling attention to the fact that President Joe Biden isn’t totally there, and openly, exasperatingly suggesting that Biden might not be the champion needed in this moment to vanquish Trump.

This opinion on its own isn’t all that remarkable even in the context of late night liberal talk shows. Bill Maher says it all the time. But then, Real Time with Bill Maher hasn’t received an Emmy nomination since 2017, and Bill Maher’s always been a self-described crank anyway. Jon Stewart, though, is the epitome of respectability, the man who quite literally created the talking point of Fox News viewers being more ignorant than people who watch The Daily Show instead. He also does his very best to be wholesome, ending one early episode of his return with a tearful eulogy to his recently departed three-legged pit bull- a shelter dog his kids bullied him into getting way back during the first generation of The Daily Show. Jon Stewart is very good at playing sincere.

And to be quite clear, this was always Jon Stewart’s basic bit. He was the one sane man. And as he argues in the FYC interview, nothing he’s doing right now is really any different from what he was doing back in the George W. Bush era. Indeed, far from making Trump out to be an unprecedented monster in American history, Stewart directly compares Trump to Bush. Of the many right-wing enemies Jon Stewart has had over the years, Trump resembles reactionaries of years past more than he detracts from them. Even if, apparently, The Daily Show correspondents need four armed security guards any time they go around doing interviews these days.

I call them correspondents but it’s worth remembering-  in the current version of The Daily Show, the correspondents take turns hosting the show in Jon Stewart’s absence. The four most prominent such correspondents, in the sense that they also co-star in the FYC interview, are Desi Lydic, Ronny Chieng, Michael Kosta, and Jordan Klepper. All find themselves stuck in the awkward spot of how correspondents always do a bit, while the host needs to maintain objectivity. They’re also in the awkward spot of Stewart sucking up all the public relations imagery of the show, when he’s only ever even around for exactly one fourth of it. Jon Stewart dominates the FYC interview, not necessarily because he wants to but because he’s the main obvious person to direct questions to.

Really, asking Jon Stewart to host for only one day a week was a stroke of genius on Comedy Central’s part- it restored the credibility of the show, and brought back old fans, while mitigating the burnout that made him quit in the first place. But you can also see the more subtle way his presence/absence influences the rest of the contributors to focus more on making jokes than playing to their perceived target audiences. The three broadcast late night hosts pander to typical liberals. Jon Oliver panders to people who want to go back to school. Bill Maher panders to people who see themselves as rebels, of the cynical pot smoking Gen X variety. Jon Stewart, by contrast, is the guy who’s just exhausted by how obviously stupid everything is. This isn’t a partisan position, or at least shouldn’t be. Nevertheless, people tend to act like it is, leading to surreal moments like Jon Stewart getting attacked in social media for asserting in his interview with Republican Ken Buck, entirely correctly, that the United States has invaded more countries than Russia has, and that this damages the credibility of the United States worldwide.

Like any liberal, Jon Stewart sees the credibility of the United States as a bigger issue than the actual morality of whatever it is the leaders of the United States might be doing at any given moment. But in true one eyed man in the land of the blind fashion, Jon Stewart realizes that simply pretending like Trump is so much more obviously worse than Biden or any other leader in recent memory isn’t a persuasive argument. More importantly, it’s not funny. The bigger question this entire situation poses is how this country got to the point that we knew this was going to happen for years in advance and no one ever even tried to stop it. This whole sentiment looms large in the current iteration of The Daily Show, which leans in to the farce of the moment as going far beyond any one man.

Jon Stewart’s contract with The Daily Show is, incidentally, only good until November. In the FYC interview, he’s evasive about whether he’ll stick around beyond that. Comedy Central, for its part, has likewise been evasive about whether Jon Stewart’s one-day-a-week hosting is just a stopgap for an actual permanent host or something they’d like to keep going indefinitely. One thing I know for sure though- public relations for The Daily Show reached out to me with this FYC interview, something they’d never tried to do before.

To be blunt, my suspicion is that Comedy Central is hoping to build hype for The Daily Show taking back the Emmys, if for no other reason than to encourage Jon Stewart to stay with the program. And frankly speaking, The Daily Show does deserve to take back the Emmys. This is less because The Daily Show is all that exceptional and more because it meets the very bare minimum standard its competitors are either unwilling or unable to meet. It’s willing to make fun of the fact that the incumbent president behaves like a grandparent from whom you have to hide the car keys.