As former Daily Show host Trevor Noah accepted an Emmy for his final season, the correspondent Roy Wood Jr. emphatically mouthed a silent plea from the stage: “Hire a host. Please.” After Noah dropped the surprise announcement in September 2022 that he was stepping down, Comedy Central struggled to formulate a plan to hand off its most enduring franchise, complicated by a New Yorker article accusing Hasan Minhaj, widely assumed to be Noah’s heir apparent, of fabricating anecdotes about his personal experience of racism. Three weeks after Wood’s lip-synced entreaty, the network announced its decision. The new host of The Daily Show would be … no one.
The most anticlimactic struggle for succession since the end of Game of Thrones did, however, come with one shocking twist: Jon Stewart, who almost nine years ago left the show he transformed into a cultural force, would be returning to his desk every Monday beginning Feb. 12, with a rotating cast of guest hosts filling out the rest of the week. It was both a failure of nerve and the answer to a prayer that the show’s most devout fans had never stopped whispering.
Stewart, who spent the intervening years directing a movie and working on various nonstarting projects, including an animated series and a pair of standup specials, had been clear that he had no plans to return to The Daily Show. Even when he tried out his own version, a short-lived Apple TV series called The Problem With Jon Stewart, it felt as if the man who had launched the careers of John Oliver and Samantha Bee was emulating their topic-driven long-form approach. Now he’s back at his old stomping ground, and while the attempt to revive The Daily Show’s past glories instead of forging a new path forward may feel like a pure nostalgia grab, for those who’ve spent the past nine years clamoring for Stewart’s calming presence, it’s the equivalent of getting to vote for Obama a third time.
When Stewart left in 2015, Slate’s Chris Wade argued that it was “time to retire The Daily Show for good.” The show had served its purpose, run its course, and been surpassed by the legions of commentators he inspired. The common-sense centrism to which Stewart proclaimed his allegiance no longer felt like a tenable position, and in the wake of 2016, that kind of neutral civility came to seem less like an aspirational ideal and more like an actively harmful delusion. The Daily Show was famous for taking aim at hypocrisy, using rapid-fire montages to catch politicians and pundits speaking out of both sides of their mouths. But it turned out that no amount of deft editing and artfully crafted zingers could make public figures grow a sense of shame, or prompt followers increasingly comfortable with placing political victory above personal principles to abandon ship. As Stewart admitted in one of his final episodes, many of the people the show had, in the bloggy lingo of the time, “DESTROYED” ended up entirely unscathed.
Even for those who were glued to their TVs during Stewart’s heyday—or those who clicked on every aggregated morning-after clip—it’s difficult to fully remember just how elevated a station he came to occupy. When the New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani asked if he was “the most trusted man in America,” the question was merely a formality. He wasn’t just America’s conscience; he was its confidant, the equivalent of the person you turn to after watching a sound bite of some outrageous distortion and ask, “You’re seeing this too, right?” He was the country’s most prominent media critic, but he was also a kind of feeler-in-chief, a soothing presence who offered, as Adam Sternbergh wrote in New York magazine, “psychic relief from the relentless idiocy of the world.”
To Stewart’s critics, that psychic relief was precisely the problem. Stewart’s humor salved wounds without healing them, transmuted righteous anger into resignation. It might not have been true, as the Baffler’s Steve Almond wrote in his out-for-blood takedown, that the show’s “criticism of the Iraq war—a series of reports under the banner Mess O’Potamia—might have done more to diffuse the antiwar movement than the phone surveillance clauses embedded in the Patriot Act.” But the show did act as a release valve, instilling a sense that, however crazed the political landscape might seem on any given day, there was a place where reason would ultimately prevail. The “Moment of Zen” that ended each episode was most often a comic non sequitur, but Stewart still wanted to leave you feeling centered, not unsettled.
Some of The Daily Show’s most indelible moments were when Stewart broke out of that mode, like the 2010 episode devoted to slamming congressional Republicans who had stonewalled a bill providing support to survivors of 9/11. None was more potent than the first show after the attacks, which opened with a visibly shaken Stewart delivering a lengthy monologue from his desk. Where real news anchors struggled to maintain a sense of normalcy and other comedians hastened to get to the jokes, Stewart occupied the middle ground, openly lost but struggling to get by, just as his viewers were. Walter Cronkite told it like it was. Jon Stewart also told us when he didn’t know what to say.
In a New Yorker profile not long after that defining moment, Stewart explained how he set his Daily Show apart from the now-forgotten era that preceded it. The show’s original host, Craig Kilborn, came across as a smarmy frat guy, tossing barbs from above the fray. But Stewart told his writers that their ultimate goal should be to express “how we really feel.” If, as studies showed, The Daily Show’s “fake news” became regarded as more trustworthy than the genuine article, it was because Stewart and his correspondents did away with the fiction that you could immerse yourself so deeply in the fetid soup of American political discourse and not emerge furious at the people who made it that way.
The media landscape is almost infinitely more chaotic now than it was when Stewart hung up his suit, the political arena bloodier and more toxic. The idea that a TV show devoted primarily to critiquing other TV shows could occupy as central a place in the culture as Stewart’s Daily Show once did feels like a fever dream, as vanishing as the neutral ground Stewart once tried to occupy.
And the comic techniques that The Daily Show used to throw darts at politicians became weapons in those same politicians’ arsenals. As the New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum wrote shortly after Trump’s inauguration, jokes are now often “powerful accelerants for lies.” But if the power of Stewart’s jokes has diminished, perhaps the power of his feelings has not. Only three years younger than Cronkite was when he retired, Stewart no longer functions as an instant sight gag the moment he sits down behind a mock anchor’s desk. But perhaps this time around, he won’t be quite so insistent that he’s just a comedian. The mantle of national bullshit detector has been waiting for him to take it up, and it might fit more snugly than ever.
