Picture this: You turn on the television and flip through the channels. Donald Trump has just won the Republican primary in New Hampshire, people are talking about Hillary Clinton, feminism, and pop culture — and Jon Stewart is making fun of it all. Is this 2015? No, it is not. It is, somehow, 2024.
In the latest sign of our nation’s intractable lack of change, Variety reported that Jon Stewart will once again host and executive produce The Daily Show through 2025. The comedian, who set the tone for political comedy for the millennial generation, will return to host the show on February 12 — but only on Monday nights. The team’s correspondents will host on Tuesday through Thursday nights, effectively putting the show’s succession crisis on pause.
It is an unusual turn of events for Stewart, who left the position in August 2015 in part to sit out the chaotic primaries and the rise of Donald Trump. But with the end of his Apple TV+ talk show in October, it appears that a large pile of money and an unusual political situation has motivated Stewart to dive back into the daily news cycle. As Showtime/MTV Entertainment CEO Chris McCarthy said, Stewart will “help us all make sense of the insanity and division roiling the country as we enter the election season.” Stewart will be making sense of this insanity for a rather old demo: Nielsen ratings show that the median age of the audience for The Daily Show under its last permanent host, Trevor Noah, was 60.
From one angle, this is yet another sign of American political stasis: No one has emerged in nine years to effectively voice the absurdity of the news for liberal Americans. From another, Stewart’s return indicates a new direction: For the first time since Donald Trump became the Republican nominee, Americans will hear what Stewart really has to say.
Naturally, Stewart downplayed the importance of this career coda:
