I wonder who has the more difficult job: Donald Trump’s public relations representative or Trevor Noah.
Mr. Noah is the personable young South African comic who accepted the challenge of filling Jon Stewart’s chair on The Daily Show. He’s smart, he’s funny and he must be out of his mind. It’s like following Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg; everyone remembers Edward Everett gave a two-hour speech, but nobody remembers anything he said.
2015 seems to be a year of cultural transition, what with losing Stewart, “Stephen Colbert,” Garrison Keillor, Blake Shelton and Miranda Lambert… The old order changeth, but nowhere will it be more closely examined than on The Daily Show, which has evolved way past anything creators Lizz Winstead and Madeleine Smithberg envisioned when they started filling time on a niche cable network called Comedy Central back in 1996.
Back then, political satire was just part of the menu of cultural mockery served up on a variety of TV shows. The Brits seemed better at making fun of pols; both HBO’s Not Necessarily the News and NBC’s That Was The Week That Was had originated on UK television. When The Daily Show began, it was as likely to poke fun at David Hasselhoff and Alanis Morrissette as Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. Hosted by former ESPN anchor and snark master Craig Kilbourn, the show was not universally revered.
“It has about it the glib, tinny ring of a college lampoon in which the sophomore writer’s cleverness is deployed in service of nothing grander than impressing the writer’s freshman friends,” a New York Times reviewer sniffed. “Bereft of an ideological or artistic center, the show is precocious but empty.”
Suffice to say, the nation gave no collective damn when Kilbourn was discharged in 1999, nor did it harbor any great expectations when his replacement was announced to be Jon Stewart, a journeyman stand-up comedian remembered by many only as the host of MTV’s Spring Break.
Who knew that this Jersey funnyman would become the most influential ideological center of his age?
Stewart was low-key as he assumed the mantle of mirth, telling The Baltimore Sun, “I’m a cog in a machine, and hopefully, because of the writing, I’ll be able to help evolve the creative part of it.” Winstead had always wanted The Daily Show to assume a more political agenda, but Stewart’s flair for making the arcane understandable helped make it possible; that, and an unassailably liberal perspective that eventually made The Daily Show the most reliably left-of-center news alternative to the Fox News parallel universe.
Hiring key writing and producing personnel from The Onion, The Daily Show broke big covering the Bush-Gore presidential contest, indelibly entitled “Indecision 2000.” “The recount was where we suddenly began to feel like we were connecting with everything we could do,” Stewart told Variety. “That’s when I think we tapped into the emotional angle of the news for us and found our editorial footing.”
Emotion and editorializing also melded memorably after the World Trade Center attacks in 2001. Stewart returned to the air on September 20 with a passionate monologue. He started with a laugh—“They said to get back to work. There were no jobs available for a man in the fetal position under his desk crying”—but he finished with a touching observation. “The view from my apartment was the World Trade Center and now it’s gone. They attacked it. This symbol of American ingenuity and strength and labor and imagination and commerce and it is gone,” he said. “But you know what the view is now? The Statue of Liberty…you can’t beat that.”
Once the satirical apparatus cranked up again, The Daily Show found the W years to be a gold mine for comedy. Ratings soared, the program began amassing Peabody Awards and Emmys, and its host rapidly became a household name; in households with residents under 30, anyway. At one point the Pew Research Center determined that Stewart was the fourth-most admired journalist in America, despite being the managing editor of what he freely admitted was “a fake-news program.”
The dichotomy was fascinating. By 2010, the ostensibly self-deprecating Stewart felt secure enough in his fake-newsman-hood to cohost (with Stephen Colbert) an astonishing live event on the Capitol Mall called The Rally to Restore Sanity.
Meant to poke fun at nut job Glenn Beck’s pre-election Mall circus, the event instead became a weird celebration of Stewart’s perceived moral authority, masking as a political rally. There were 200,000 people on hand to cheer their heroes, but the 2010 midterm elections, held the next week, were still a resounding beatdown for Democrats.
Later that same year, Stewart devoted an entire program to supporting a bill pledging federal funds to 9/11 responders’ health care, a bill being filibustered by GOP senators. That advocacy journalism—or advocacy satire, if you will— was cited as a prime reason for the eventual passage of the bill, leading The Times to suggest that Stewart might be the modern equivalent of Edward R. Murrow.
Like him or loathe him, there is no doubt that Jon Stewart is a complicated guy, much like David Letterman, who retired earlier this year. Much of the editorial hooraw over Letterman’s departure was based on nostalgia, since it was generally agreed that Dave hadn’t done anything comedically interesting in a decade or so. However, losing Jon Stewart has less to do with the past than the future.
Having Stewart’s sad, sallow face on our screens four days a week for the past 16 years has offered vital continuity in a tempestuous political climate. More importantly, perhaps, he has provided context by way of comedy, using the darkest humor to illumine the idiocy inherent in our public policy. We’re going to miss that during the interminable, enervating process that will result in the inauguration of President Trump.
Godspeed, Jon Stewart. Good luck, Trevor Noah.