The Daily Show

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Jon Stewart at Cabaret 2008 Benefit.
There was an avalanche on Bullshit mountain.
—Jon Stewart, describing what happened on Fox news after Obama got re-elected


The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is a Comedy Central program currently hosted by Jon Stewart. It was originally hosted by Craig Kilborn, although Craig was apparently just hanging around on set for a few years until Jon Stewart showed up to fulfill his cosmically pre-ordained destiny of being the host of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

One of the show's most notable correspondents, Stephen Colbert, left to host his own show, which immediately follows The Daily Show. The Colbert Report sometimes slightly overlaps or interacts with it.

The Daily Show's title temporarily changed during the Writer's Guild of America's strike in 2008 to "A Daily Show with Jon Stewart."

The content of the show is mostly built around mocking the inadequacies and faux pas of politicians and other public figures, and while much of it has a liberal bias, Stewart is happy making fun of anybody's foolishness. For instance, during his famous "Indecision 2008" and "The Long, Flat, Seemingly Endless Bataan Death March to the White House" coverage, a lot of the humor was based on elements of the Obama-Clinton rivalry.

Interestingly, The Daily Show had more viewers on average than any Fox News program with the exception of The O'Reilly Factor in May of 2011.[1]

Contents

[edit] In the beginning

The Daily Show was originally hosted by Craig Kilborn, who eventually left to work late-night comedy on some other network, but no one remembers this. During Kilborn's tenure, the show was significantly more satirical than political, full of cigar jokes and otherwise making fun of the evil liberal media. Comedians such as Colbert, Steve Carell and Nancy Walls used their roles as correspondents on the show to springboard their own careers out of sketch comedy and into television and movie roles. After Kilborn left, Comedy Central tapped Stewart for the anchor position and never looked back...and for a very good reason.[2] Stewart's nightly "Moment of Zen" is the one held-over gimmick from the Kilborn era, although the weekly segment "Back in Black" (featuring perennially-pissed-off-about-politics comedian and common sense proponent Lewis Black) has been around ever since the show's inception.

[edit] Notable shows

Frequently, an interview is going so well Stewart doesn't bother to end it on air, instead being content to finish it in due course and post the whole thing on the show's web site. This used to happen most often when he had Bill Kristol as a guest; now it happens three or four times a week.

On March 12, 2009, following a week of lambasting the cable network business "news" television shows for their apparent complete lack of expertise regarding the 2007/2008 economic meltdown, the entire show was devoted to an interview with cable business "news" show host Jim Cramer. Stewart proceeded to lambaste Cramer and the whole industry for general mendacity and incompetence. The show was, unusually, repeated on Monday March 23, 2009, due to intense levels of attention in the "real" news.

On March 18, 2010, the first fifteen minutes of the show was devoted to a lengthy vivisection of notorious wingnut Glenn Beck, with Jon imitating Beck's body language and his odd habits. It was absolutely riveting.[3][4]

[edit] Quotes

You know what, it's okay. If Bill O'Reilly needs to have an enemy, he needs to feel persecuted, you know what, here's my Kwanzaa gift to him: [a Christmas-themed holly border appears on the screen] I'm your enemy; make me your enemy. I, Jon Stewart, hate Christmas, Christians, Jews, morality! And I will not rest until every year families gather to spend December 25th together at Osama's Homobortion Pot and Commie Jizzporium.
—December 7, 2005, after Bill O'Reilly described Stewart as the enemy of Christmas.
You know, I'm sorry. Normally we have all the writers. We've got a big group of people kicking that soundbite around, but right now it's just me. So... let me see if I can, just quickly, whip something up here; erm... erm... ooh! I've got something. FUCK YOU!
—Response to Mitt Romney's concession speech wherein he declares that allowing the Democrats to win would be a "surrender to terror," February 7, 2008

[edit] Publications

  • The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction, 2004
  • The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents Earth (The Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race, 2010

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Footnotes

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