In his long-awaited return to presenting “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart made no distinction between America’s two geriatric presidential candidates.
The destiny of The Daily Show was never more precarious than in the weeks preceding Comedy Central’s last-ditch move to reinstate Jon Stewart as Monday night-only host until the 2024 presidential election.
On the one hand, the show had recently won its first Emmy Award since Trevor Noah took over for Stewart in 2015. However, more than a year after his departure, there was still no permanent replacement for the South African comic, as Daily Show reporter Roy Wood Jr. sharply reminded viewers, mouthing “please hire a host” from the Emmy stage.
But The Daily Show was still very much alive—and urgently attempting to recreate its former magic—on Monday night, when Stewart returned to the desk as host for the first time in over a decade, to thunderous cheers from the studio crowd. He started with the statement, “Now, where was I?”
Stewart hinted that in the following weeks and months, he would likely utilize his regained platform to discuss China and artificial intelligence—the two themes that apparently prompted Apple to terminate his program on that service—as well as “something a little lighter” like Israel and Palestine. But on his first program back, he utilized Sunday night’s Super Bowl to get down to business about the race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump: “These fucking guys?!”
Over the next 17 minutes, Stewart laid out the battle between the two men, notably using footage of Trump and his adult children failing to “recall” various basic facts during their own depositions after Special Counsel Robert Hur dubbed Biden “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” this week. “Yes, it turns out the leading cause of early-onset dementia is being deposed,” the panelist said.
Stewart made it a point to mock Biden’s age-related gaffes as aggressively as he did Trump’s, including everything from the president’s unfortunate mix-up during an angry press conference intended to allay concerns to the bizarre TikTok videos he decided to post that only made him “look older.”
“What the fuck are we doing here, people?” While Biden has “lost a step,” he argued that Trump “regularly says things at rallies that would warrant a wellness check,” but his conclusion was that they are “similarly challenged.”
“One thing we know for certain is this: We have two candidates who are chronically outside the norm of anyone who has run for the presidency in the history of this country,” Stewart said, adding that they are both “stretching the limits of being able to handle the toughest job in the world.”
And he disputed the concept that voters “must silence concerns and criticisms,” arguing that this is the responsibility of the politicians themselves. Finally, he admitted that “Joe Biden isn’t Donald Trump,” given the lack of criminal charges, “but the stakes of this election don’t make Donald Trump’s opponent less subject to scrutiny.”
“If your guy loses, bad things might happen, but the country is not over,” he went on to say. “And if your guy wins, the country is not saved.”
Later in the broadcast, Jordan Klepper—the sole current reporter who began out under Stewart—jokingly criticized his boss’ “snark and both sides-ism.”
He envisioned Stewart summarizing the 2000 election as “George Bush is dumb!” and Al Gore is so dull!” before adding, “All you do is brainwash folks into accepting a destructive status quo when they might be out protesting in the streets to effect change!”
It was a comical scene that ended with him changing his tune after learning he’d be presenting the program for the rest of the week, but Klepper had a point.
Stewart famously quit The Daily Show in 2015, when Trump was still the joke of a candidate who had just ascended a gilded escalator. And, while no one, including Stewart, believes his comic segments could have prevented Trump from becoming president, he has stated that he wanted to return this year to have some influence over the 2024 debate.
So far, it appears that this includes leveraging his previous platform to inform Americans that their two presidential candidates are not very different and are both equally horrible.
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