Why The Daily Show needed to get Jon Stewart back

It’s been almost a decade since Jon Stewart stepped down from The Daily Show, the Comedy Central series that he turned into a crucial part of the national conversation during his 16 or so years as the host. In the intervening years, Trevor Noah stepped in and made the show his own, finding ways to keep it relevant even as random idiots on social media started to replace noted comedians as America’s main source of political news. Noah announced his own departure from The Daily Show in 2022, shocking the studio audience (and apparently some members of his own staff), with Comedy Central embarking on a long quest to find a new host that only sort of ended today when the network announced that none other than Jon Stewart would be coming back—on a temporary basis—one day a week.

Stewart will be hosting Monday episodes of The Daily Show through the end of this year’s election cycle, starting on February 12, and he’ll also be serving as an executive producer in order to help Comedy Central figure out what the heck it’s going to do with The Daily Show. Though it’s exciting news for everyone who has nostalgia for the George W. Bush era (things were shitty in a different way!), it does seem like a clear admission of defeat from Comedy Central: They couldn’t find anyone to replace Noah, so they did the “break glass in case of emergency” play and brought back the old host that everyone loved.

But why couldn’t Comedy Central find anyone to replace Noah? Well, it seems like the problem might’ve been that nobody wanted the job, and the ones who did got rejected by Comedy Central for some reason. Noah admitted after he decided to leave the show that he met with each of the Daily Show correspondents to tell them how hard being the host really is, which may have scared some of them off, but not all of them. Roy Wood Jr., who had been with the show for a long time, was open about wanting the job and was a fan-favorite for the gig, but when a frontrunner was named, it wasn’t him.

Comedy Central wanted Hasan Minhaj, apparently, but after a weird scandal broke in which the comedian was accused of fabricating details in his stand-up act (again: weird scandal), the network supposedly told Minhaj that he definitely would not be getting the job. It had been more than a year since Noah announced his departure at that point, and it wasn’t long before Wood effectively took himself out of the running when he chose to quit his job as a Daily Show correspondent. Wood explained at the time that there was “no sense” in continuing to be a correspondent while still trying to “think of a new thing to do”—the implication being that if he wasn’t going to get the hosting job, then why bother hanging around?

So a year had passed with absolutely nothing to show for it, all while the idiots on social media continued to make more and more headway into the political discourse and the relevance of The Daily Show became more and more questionable. Two people who wanted the job couldn’t have it, which evidently left Comedy Central with zero options—suggesting that either there was no third person who wanted it or that Comedy Central was completely impossible to please.

And, in its defense, why shouldn’t it be? Jon Stewart was great, legitimizing the show and the network in his repeated advocacy for the basic concept of sanity, but it’s impossible to replicate him and the impact he had a decade ago when he’s busy hosting the Daily Show-esque series The Problem With Jon Stewart on Apple TV+.

Or he was, until Apple canceled that show back in October for allegedly shady reasons involving the company’s alleged refusal to do episodes about China and artificial intelligence (two things very important to the iPhone-maker), which led to Stewart and Apple deciding to end the show over “creative differences.”

Suddenly, the only option that Comedy Central was apparently willing to really consider had become viable again, which brings us to to the network announcing the new hosting schedule this morning. Stewart is back on a temporary basis and will be helping to guide the show going forward, which is surely along the lines of what Comedy Central had wished for all along. Noah had put in the work to keep The Daily Show alive, especially during the pandemic, but why bother trying to do something new again if you don’t have to? Doing new things is hard… not that doing the old thing, which Comedy Central is attempting now, is guaranteed to be any easier.

But hey, Jon Stewart is sort of back now. That should be interesting, at least.