Jon Stewart’s return to The Day by day Present has been, on the metrics, a hit. Based on Comedy Central, his first episode again on February 12 was watched by 1.85 million whole viewers throughout premiere simulcasts and encores, up 110 % from Trevor Noah’s closing episode in 2022. It’s additionally a significant enchancment on Stewart’s final present. The Drawback with Jon Stewart, which ran on Apple TV+ from 2021 to 2023, was routinely drawing in audiences as little as 40,000 individuals.
“Jon Stewart” and “The Day by day Present” on their very own are flawed manufacturers. “Jon Stewart on The Day by day Present,” however? That’s a mix of such heady nostalgia that the viewers pour in.
Nonetheless, Stewart’s first episode proved that his attraction is not only pure nostalgia. There’s some sort of alchemy that happens when Jon Stewart will get behind that previous Day by day Present desk. He is aware of the format of the present so nicely; he performs it like a virtuoso.
He eases into his monologue with no rush, breaking out the identical Borscht Belt voices and self-deprecating barbs he used to play with in 2015, speaking in the identical relaxed patter that builds to the identical crescendo of righteousness. He’s so delighted by the prospect to play a gotcha reel (on this case, members of the Trump household repeating “I can’t recall” throughout depositions after a dialogue of Biden’s allegedly failing reminiscence) that he virtually manages to make the previous trick really feel new once more. He virtually manages to make you assume, “Wow, Jon Stewart may have finished one thing with the Trump period.” Nearly.
Jon Stewart’s nice satirical reward is his capacity to puncture hypocrisy, which is why he turned probably the most trusted sources of reports in America throughout the 2000s. George W. Bush was Stewart’s excellent foil: a president who talked of compassionate conservatism and grand existential battles of excellent versus evil whereas mendacity to the general public and embroiling America in soiled, vicious wars that dragged on for many years. Nobody may puncture Bush’s pieties in addition to Jon Stewart. Nothing was extra satisfying to observe than Stewart’s mugging face, eyes vast with fake shock, subsequent to a video montage that promised to show, as soon as and for all, that Bush administration doublespeak.
Stewart’s model of The Day by day Present misplaced a few of its urgency throughout the Obama administration, because the model of liberal centrism he championed ascended to cultural primacy and he misplaced his capacity to place himself because the scrappy outsider unmasking a mendacity president. Nonetheless, most presidents have their hypocrisies, and Stewart discovered loads to puncture throughout the Obama years: his initially tepid help of homosexual marriage, the drone warfare, the IRS focusing on of Tea Occasion teams. He left The Day by day Present in 2015, simply earlier than Trump turned the Republican candidate and the liberal consensus worldview of Day by day Present viewers shattered.
Stewart, by and huge, sat out the Trump years, so we don’t know for positive what his comedy would have seemed like in that troubled period. We did, nonetheless, watch all of the comedians who got here up on The Day by day Present try to fail to grapple with Trump, a president who by no means bothered to veil his indiscretions, who was so straightforwardly villainous that he had no hypocrisy there to be uncovered. Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, John Oliver, Trevor Noah — the extra they talked about Trump, the extra they appeared to develop into much less humorous and extra earnest. They may not make his actions extra absurd by hyperbole. Sarcasm was now not enticing to audiences, who craved clear demarcations between the comedians who had been on their aspect and people on Trump’s aspect. Robbed of their simplest weapons, liberal comics ended up spending the Trump years like a lot of the left did: alternating between rage and tears.
“For the final 20 years we [the left] have owned the cultural terrain of comedy and irony, arguably to good impact,” Nick Marx, a media scholar who research political humor, instructed me in 2022. “The Trump period made liberals neglect that. It made our comedians need to act like paternal figures who would pat us on the top.”
As liberal comedy faltered, right-wing comedy rushed to fill the facility vacuum. Conservative comedians now place themselves because the really edgy and transgressive ones, the individuals talking reality to the facility of liberal elitists, the heirs obvious to the custom begun by Jon Stewart.
“There’s a rebelliousness in the best way individuals consider this right-wing comedy, proper?” Matt Sienkiewicz mentioned in 2022. Sienkiewicz co-authored That’s Not Humorous: How the Proper Makes Comedy Work for Them alongside Marx. “Even when it truly is regressive and pointing again to previous dominant concepts. However it may be branded as being the alternative of Stephen Colbert crying about January 6 throughout his monologue, which may be very a lot not cool to the teenagers.”
Stewart’s return comes not throughout the Trump period however throughout the Biden presidency, simply because the nation begins to stare down the potential for a second Trump time period. Biden is the kind of conventional president Stewart excels at dealing with; it’s not shocking that the sharpest second of his first episode got here when he criticized Biden’s administration for making an attempt to disgrace the press out of masking criticism of Biden’s age. However Stewart has but to show his capacity to cowl a person like Donald Trump, particularly in a second when the best has efficiently positioned itself as the house of transgressive comedy.
Nearly as good as Jon Stewart’s scores had been on his first evening, The Day by day Present wasn’t the most-watched present on late-night. Over on Fox Information, Gutfeld! obtained 2.2 million views. Irrespective of how skillful Stewart’s efficiency has been, it’s arduous to keep away from the sense that he’s delivering a coda to a golden age that ended way back.
