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The destiny of The daily show Never was it more uncertain than in the weeks leading up to Comedy Central’s Hail Mary decision to bring back Jon Stewart as a Monday night-only host until the 2024 presidential election.
On the one hand, the show had just won its first Emmy Award since Trevor Noah replaced Stewart in 2015. But on the other hand, it still didn’t have a permanent replacement for the South African comedian more than a year after his departure. as daily program Correspondent Roy Wood Jr. pointedly reminded viewers, saying “please hire a host” from the Emmys stage.
Then, after Comedy Central delayed the show’s post-Christmas return from early January to February 12 and announced what essentially the end of their year-long search For one host, an insider on the show predicted to me that the network might be running out the clock on a possible Paramount merger to kill the show entirely.
But The daily show He was still very much alive, and desperately trying to recapture his old magic, on Monday night when Stewart returned to the anchor desk for the first time in nearly a decade to rapturous applause from the studio audience. He began with the phrase: “Now, where was I?”
Stewart teased that in the coming weeks and months he would likely use his recovered platform to talk about China and artificial intelligence (the two topics that reportedly caused Apple to cancel its program on that service), as well as “something a little lighter.” like Israel and Palestine. But for his first show back, he used Sunday night’s Super Bowl as a way to get down to business in the race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump: “These damn guys?!”
For the next 17 minutes or so, Stewart laid out the battle between the two men, notably using footage of Trump and his adult children failing to “remember” several basic facts during his own remarks after Biden was branded “a man well-intentioned and well-intentioned.” old man with a bad memory” by special prosecutor Robert Hur last week. “Yes, it turns out that the main cause of early-onset dementia is impeachment,” the host joked.
Stewart made it a point to mock Biden’s age-related gaffes as aggressively as he did Trump’s, including everything from the president’s unfortunate confusion during an angry news conference that was intended to allay concerns, to the bizarre videos of TikTok that he decided to publish. that just made him “seem older.”
After briefly noting that Trump is also getting older, Stewart asked, “What the fuck are we doing here, people?” While Biden has “lost a step,” he argued that Trump “regularly says things at rallies that would justify a welfare check,” but his conclusion was that they are “similarly challenged.”
“One thing we know for sure is this: We have two candidates who are chronically outside the norm of anyone who has run for president in the history of this country,” Stewart said, adding that both are “stretching the boundaries of “Being able to do the hardest job in the world.”
And he rejected the idea that voters “should silence concerns and criticism,” arguing that this is the job of the candidates themselves. Finally, he admitted that “Joe Biden is no Donald Trump,” citing the lack of criminal charges, “but what is at stake in this election does not make Donald Trump’s opponent any less subject to scrutiny.”
“If your guy loses, bad things can happen, but the country is not finished,” he said. “And if your man wins, the country is not saved.”
Later in the show, Jordan Klepper, the only current correspondent to start with Stewart, jokingly called out his boss’s “sarchism and both sides.” He imagined Stewart reducing the 2000 election to “George Bush is dumb! Al Gore is so boring! before adding: “All it does is brainwash voters into accepting a corrosive status quo when they could be marching in the streets for change.”
It was a fun bit that culminated in him changing his tune once he found out he would be hosting the show for the rest of this week, but Klepper was right.
Stewart famously left The daily show in 2015, when Trump was still that joker of a candidate who recently descended a golden escalator. And while no one, including Stewart, believes his comedy bits could have done anything to prevent Trump from becoming president, he has said that he wanted to return this year so he could have some influence over the 2024 speech.
So far, it appears that influence includes using his former platform to tell Americans that his two choices for president are not that different and equally terrible.