Jon Stewart’s return to television didn’t feel particularly relevant to me. After a near decade off-air it didn’t feel like there was much missed while he was gone. No one could meet the moment of Trump anyways. How many times did news/late-night programs offer assessments like “this is the day Trump finally became president” or ruffle Trump’s hair? Not to mention, Stewart’s pen-clutching rage felt a bit pedestrian by the end of his first run of The Daily Show. He was an Obama era comedian exiting at the right time.
For Stewart’s return, it felt more like an effort to keep The Daily Show alive, a reboot in the same way Hollywood is recycling old IP like a glass bottle processing facility. But for last night’s episode, it wasn’t a ghost of the old version of Stewart; it was a hint at the sharper, more relevant show that used to generate its own headlines. Stewart was at his sharpest with a 29-minute long monologue that functioned as a complete takedown of Trump’s Epstein involvement and CBS and Paramount’s decision to cancel Stephen Colbert and the Late Show. Plus, he broke the Scarface record for the most profanity in a single minute.
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During the segment, Stewart urged American institutions to “sack the fuck up,” and not comply in advance to Trump’s to ever-expanding overreach. The whole segment was taking his own advice; he never once tried to pretend he was doing something righteous, just someone sharing an opinion on television. But that monologue did something that’s becoming increasingly rare: prime-time programming unconcerned with trying to appease advertisers, corporate suits and viewers.
Stewart was excellent, the jokes were tight and the rage didn’t feel manufactured. There was no impression that he was delivering anger because it was an obligation or because that was the only way to tackle whatever terrible shit Trump had most recently done. Stewart was spiteful, daring, taunting. He was telling Paramount: I’m not afraid of you, I’m not a coward.
That willingness to piss the network off, to treat Trump as a pathetic afterthought of his own chaos, was where Stewart really shined.
“Since we’re on the topic of corporate capitulation to the whims of a pussy-grabbing enigma, last week, as you may have heard, CBS, which happens to have the same parent company as the network this program currently airs on, unceremoniously canceled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” Stewart said at one point. “Now, obviously, I am certainly not the most objective to comment on this matter…”
But that’s what we need from Stewart. We don’t need objectivity, or a balanced assessment of all parties. We need unfettered opinions, spoken plainly. If he can be funny at the same time, that’s all the better.
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