Jon Stewart Can't Go Home Again
Because I don't think he knows the way
Jon Stewart is returning to The Daily Show. It’s hard to overstate the impact Jon Stewart had on me; he’s one of my main standup influences, I loved his Daily Show to death, and getting hired by one of his spin-off shows1 was my “big” (relatively speaking) break. My style of political comedy — viewpoint + snark + enough f-words to knock a planet out of orbit — is his style. Jon Stewart is the fish that flopped ashore in primordial times and gasped air, and most organisms that live in the political comedy ecosystem today are descended from him.
So why am I not excited about his return to The Daily Show? I have been the crankiest of cranky old men about the state of comedy; I make Statler and Waldorf seem like Roger Ebert on ecstacy. Shouldn’t my downstairs be a-tingle about a possible revival of the old Daily Show? It should be, but it’s not. That’s because I think “the old Daily Show” means something different to me than it means to Jon Stewart. From what I can tell, Jon Stewart doesn’t know what made the old Daily Show a hit in the first place.