Tonight is the conclusion of Jon Stewart’s run on The Daily Show which will be greatly missed not just by Libruls and Socialists but by people who aren’t factually challenged. Despite how much Jon skewered the Republicans, Faux News, Conservatives and Libertarians; all the other camps were called on to the carpet when they tried to tell the world “2+2=5.” The earlier groups appeared more often on the show because they just made it too easy.
Politics aside, The Daily Show went after pick-up artists, pornographers, flat earthers, spammers and other flimflam sleazoids trying to get away with a false narrative. Those Jon and the gang angered probably never watched for they were too busy pushing the “liberal media” myth.
When Craig Kilbourn left around 1999 and I heard that Jon Stewart was taking over, I felt The Daily Show was dead. Many forget how Stewart wasn’t a very strong host of anything plus I hardly found anything he said funny. Before the gig he was a weak co-host on Short Attention Span Theater Comedy Central in the early Nineties and his talk show on MTV was dreadful. He was quickly filling the role Billy Crystal had until SNL and Dave Chapelle with Chapelle Show; a hack somehow constantly being foisted on us by a showbiz power broker. The first glimmers of hope happened during the last two seasons of The Larry Sanders Show when Jon was added to the writing staff and played a version of himself as Larry’s new permanent guest host. He poked fun at himself, his past work/shows and once or twice was a villain (he seduced guest Winona Ryder away from Larry in the green room).
With The Daily Show, Jon did the right thing by hiring an Onion staff writer and moving the program more toward current events. I wish he could’ve brought the co-creator Lizz Winstead back into the fold since I read this was what she wanted to do originally; Kilbourn screwed her over. This decision reinvented the show and Stewart at the same time while making The Daily Show the true successor to Politically Incorrect.
Imitators have followed. Jon Oliver’s show is more focused, has more outrage thanks to the HBO safety net. Real Time is a modified Politically Incorrect with the HBO net, I think pay TV suits Bill Maher better. The Colbert Report ended already and was the perfect follower, satire news chased by ironic editorializing. David Spade’s Hollywood gossip thing wasn’t different enough to last. I do like Larry Wilmore’s stuff so far, he was a hilarious Sr. Black Correspondent, I wish CC had the spine to keep the original title The Minority Report and the host needs time to gain traction, I think he could get there within a year. Patrick Stewart and Seth McFarlane have Blunt Talk on the horizon but it seems to resemble a more updated Larry Sanders. Then comes the Right’s hilariously awful attempts to replicate Stewart’s success, formula and relevance. They’re 0-2 lately. It’s not impossible since there are competent comedians with a Right-wing viewpoint on stage and/or in their personal lives (Drew Carey, Nick DiPaolo, Larry Miller…you thought I was going to mention Dennis Miller, nope, he became pretty irrelevant after HBO dropped his ass). The people who are put in charge of such a project have fallen flat because they forget to present actually funny material and if your host needs to telegraph/explain the joke, then the host is inept, their politics don’t matter here.
Thanks again Jon. It’s troubling you did a better job at calling bullshit on Clinton, Bush II, Obama and the usual gang of idiots than our SCLM has. I blame the election of Reagan for making SCLM so timid. I think we’ll be seeing him around in the producer role and other cameos in the near future. Maybe he will be The Daily Show’s new Sr. Sr. Correspondent.