Jon Stewart's return to `The Daily Show' felt familiar
No, Jon Stewart really wasn't sitting at his desk at Comedy Central for the last nine years, waiting for someone to turn the lights back on.
Yet it almost felt that way during Stewart's return to “The Daily Show” Monday night. His signature moves — blunt satire, facial grimaces, incisive use of video and some occasional lectures — were all intact. Public figures are served notice that the media's sharpest bull detector is back on the job.
Stewart has said that the lack of a comedic outlet for his observations as the presidential campaign unfolded largely drove his decision to reprise his most memorable role, one night a week through the election. The much-diminished Comedy Central, unable to find a successor to Trevor Noah as host, happily welcomed him back.
Questions about the future of late-night TV, which is rapidly shedding viewers and losing influence, won't be answered in one night. Neither will that night prove Stewart can regain the position of prominence he stepped away from in August 2015.
But it was a promising start.
“Are you disappointed yet?” Stewart said after one sophomoric joke, about naming “The Daily Show” election coverage, “Indecision 2024: Electile Dysfunction.”
Stewart seemed to take a page from MSNBC's Rachel Maddow when she turned a daily hosting role into a weekly one. Both resisted trying to do too much, to cram a week's — or in Stewart's case, nine
years — worth of material into one show. He moved swiftly into the news, and up-to-date doings of President Joe Biden and his Republican rival.
In Biden's case, it meant directly addressing questions about his age and fitness for office, which the president's supporters surely want to avoid. He examined Biden's news conference last week meant to counter characterizations in special counsel Robert Hur's report on classified documents found in Biden's home.
“Joe Biden had a big press conference to dispel the notion that he may have lost a step and, politically speaking, lost three or four steps,” he said.
He said about Biden aides who thought it was a good idea for him to turn down a Super Bowl interview in favor of a TikTok appearance: “Fire everyone.”
Stewart showed tape of administration officials like Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democrats testifying to Biden's sharpness and suggested it might be a good idea to film the president in those meetings
so the public can see him.
Yet Stewart also used tightly-edited videotape of Donald Trump and his family during depositions saying they couldn't recall things to counter the notion that Biden is alone in showing memory issues during such high-pressure legal proceedings. “The Daily Show” even found one where Trump said he couldn't remember talking about how good his memory is.
His main point: Worries about whether either the 81-year-old Biden or 77-year-old Trump are up to the toughest job in the world shouldn't be swept under the rug.
“It is the candidates' job to assuage concerns, not the voters' job not to mention them,” Stewart said.
Based on one night, a handful of critics noted Stewart's seamless transition.
Alison Herman of Variety wrote that “it almost seemed like he never left,” a phrase repeated in the headlines of reviews by both NPR critic Eric Deggans and CNN's Brian Lowry.