Jon Stewart’s Response to His Critics Was Savvy—and Insufficient

In his long-awaited return to The Daily Show, Jon Stewart offered little more than his ’90s brand of snark and bothsidesism, taking satirical potshots at the absurdity of the political process that coaxes voters into accepting a corrosive status quo instead of marching in the streets to effect change. It was, in short, the same shit all over again.

And that’s just what Stewart’s co-workers had to say. In a canny bit of preemption, Stewart’s first show after a nine-year hiatus delivered the criticisms of his fitness for the role straight to his face. Correspondent Dulcé Sloan popped up in the middle of a check-in from the (mock) campaign trail to question whether two “old white dudes” should be competing for a job they’ve already had. “It’s so desperate,” she sighed. “Let someone else run the show!” And Jordan Klepper cut off one of Stewart’s attempts at a pensive monologue with a sarcastic slow clap: “Did you save democracy yet?”

TV writers call this “lampshading,” the technique of foregrounding an obvious shortcoming to make bringing it up after the fact seem redundant. But it’s also a way of acknowledging flaws without doing anything to correct them. It’s good to know that Stewart and the Daily Show’s writers also have the internet, that he has spent his years off the air mulling at least some of the more persistent and germane criticisms of his 16-year reign. But it was also clear that Stewart’s idea of his place in the discursive cosmos has not fundamentally shifted. Even his go-to repertoire of funny voices has not expanded.

Stewart’s main segment was classic bothsidesism, although it was at least devoted to an arena where there really are issues on both sides. After a few low-ball Super Bowl jokes to warm up the crowd, he dove into the special counsel’s report that raised issues about Joe Biden’s mental acuity, and especially his ability to lead the country into 2029. Juxtaposing Biden’s apparent lapses under Robert Hur’s questioning with Donald Trump’s repeated “I don’t remembers” from a 9-year-old deposition fell wide of the mark: There’s a difference between failures of memory and deliberate evasions. But he did eventually work his way around to some of Trump’s more bizarre utterances from the campaign trail, including the past weekend’s claim that Democrats have plans to change the name of the state of Pennsylvania.

The fact that the same comparison had been made dozens if not hundreds of times online before 11 p.m. Monday illustrates one of the biggest challenges facing both Stewart personally and The Daily Show writ large: How can a late-night TV show regain a place at the center of a discourse that moves much faster than it did even nine years ago? If rehashing the Hur report felt a little bit last-week, the bit where campaign correspondents weighed in from different parts of the same diner could have been kept in a vault since 2016, not exactly the strongest salvo for a series trying to reassert its vitality.

In a more sincere attempt to confront his own limitations, Stewart defended the legitimacy of questioning the candidates’ age-related decline by acknowledging his own. Cutting into a close-up whose noticeably sharper focus brought out the creases around his eyes, Stewart threw up a 20-year-old photo of himself just to heighten the comparison. He is indeed an old white dude, and if he has anything important to say, it will be because of and not in spite of that. His strength isn’t the ability to dissect the political discourse so much as his instinct for knowing when to step away from it. If both parties have chosen the oldest presidential candidates in American history—breaking the previous record both men set when they ran in 2020—the question is less which is more likely to hold on to his faculties for the next five years than it is, as Stewart put it on broadcast TV: “What the [bleep] are we doing here, people?”

It’s not clear if Stewart genuinely believes there’s a bipartisan middle left in American political life or that he can conjure one through sheer force of will, but he remains determined to speak to both left and right as if it’s possible to reach them on the same frequency. Stepping away from meta-punditry, he delivered a spiel about the importance of engaging in civic life on every day of the year, not just Election Day. “If your guy loses, bad things might happen, but the country is not over, and if your guy wins, the country is in no way saved,” he said in his best let’s-all-calm-down voice. “I’m not saying you don’t have to worry about who wins the election. I’m saying you have to worry about every day before it and every day after it, forever.” It’s true that the fight won’t be over on Nov. 5, no matter what it is you’re fighting for. But the suggestion that simply “grind[ing] away on issues” can serve as a bulwark against encroaching fascism feels more like a fairy tale than a life lesson.