Jon Stewart, who hosted The Daily Show from 1999 to 2015 and made it a comedy institution, has returned to the show — kind of. The host will be back behind the Daily Show desk for the duration of the 2024 U.S. election cycle, but only on Mondays. Today is the first day he’s back and, as you might imagine, there’s a lot of hype, and a lot of questions, about what he will do next. Stewart left the show just prior to the 2016 election, implying at the time that he did not want to be part of the wave of low-effort, mean-spirited satire that came into fashion around the time Donald Trump announced his run for the Presidency. Now, he returns specifically to cover Trump’s third major run at the office (although he did have failed primary and third-party runs prior to 2016).
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Stewart, who had been hosting The Problem With Jon Stewart over at Apple TV+, ran into a conflict with the streamer, reportedly after some of the topics he planned to cover conflicted with Apple’s business interests. The episodes in question reportedly dealt with China and the artificial intelligence hype bubble.
“I very much wanted to have some place to unload thoughts as we get into this election season,” Stewart told CBS Mornings during an interview today. “I thought I was going to do it over at — they call it Apple TV+. It’s a television enclave, very small. It’s like living in Malibu. They decided, they felt that they didn’t want me to say things that might get me in trouble.”
Heading back to The Daily Show is something that has seemingly always been an option for Stewart — or at least since late 2022, when Stewart’s successor Trevor Noah left the series. Comedy Central has not replaced Noah yet, opting instead for a rotating panel of guest hosts. While some of have been more exciting than others, fans have been loathe to get too invested in a show that doesn’t seem to have an identity of its own.
Stewart says that while he’s pleased to have a venue again, he doesn’t know how much influence he actually has.
“I don’t know about hoping to have an influence, but I’m hoping to have a catharsis and a way to comment on things and a way to express them that hopefully people will enjoy,” he said. “But as far as influence, and you guys know from doing this, just about everything I had wanted to happen over the 16 years that I was at The Daily Show did not happen, if you were hoping for influence. And I think I’ve learned that post-Daily Show…I don’t really view it as ‘I really want to have an influence on this issue, this election,’ things like that.”
In addition to CBS Mornings, Stewart has been making the media rounds more broadly, appearing on Late Night With Stephen Colbert and on The Daily Show‘s Ears Edition podcast.
“If you want to be present in this world, you have to be present in this conversation and you have to be as relentless and as tenacious as the counter-narrative that’s being formed,” Stewart said in the podcast appearance. “So much of the information that we see now is weaponized … and it keeps taking exponential leaps. It’s not just the election. It’s AI. It’s the way that we’ve militarized all our conflicts. It all ties together to one larger idea, which is the form of government we love so much is an analog — I don’t want to say dinosaur — but it is analog and the world now moves at an increasingly infinite digital pace and reconciling those two things, I think, is the challenge of the moment for people.”
