The Daily Show

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I disagree with you, but I'm pretty sure you're not Hitler.
—Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart at Cabaret 2008 Benefit.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is a Comedy Central program currently hosted by Jon Stewart (born 1962), who will be leaving the show later in 2015. He will be replaced sometime before the end of the year by South African comedian Trevor Noah (born 1984). 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 followed The Daily Show. The Colbert Report sometimes slightly overlapped or interacted with it until the end of Colbert's run in December 2014.

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 host the Late Late Show on CBS. During Kilborn's tenure, the show was significantly more satiric 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. 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] Format

The show generally, but not invariably, goes like this:

  • Seg 1 - The monolog. In the grand old tradition of late-night TV, the first segment is Jon Stewart's monolog, commenting on the news of the day and, often, the cock-ups on Fox News the previous night. Stewart remains seated and does without a sycophantic shill to laugh at his jokes.
  • Seg 2 - The sketches. The middle segment generally includes set pieces featuring the spoof "correspondents." Often the correspondents will be very obviously green-screened into the news hot-spot du jour. The show has pioneered the spoof interview, in which genuinely famous or newsworthy people agree to be made to look like cu idiots, to comic effect. Occasionally goes OTT ("Over the Top.")
  • Seg 3 - The interview. This is an (amazingly) conventional sit-down one-on-one with "A Famous Person," complete with showing the famous person's latest book to Camera 3.

[edit] Investigative reporting for laughs

On some shows, a member of "The best fucking news team ever" (the semi-regular comedians who appear on the show as "correspondents") will do a taped interview segment that challenges some real world absurdity with deadpan snarking. Generally, these segments are made funnier by the reporter implicitly taking one position on a topic and pretending to take the opposite.

These segments can occasionally do a disservice, however. On September 12, 2013, Aasif Mandvi interviewed a farmer who claimed that Monsanto was going around persecuting poor, innocent farmers by mounting horribly unfair lawsuits against them.[2] The farmer mentioned Percy Schmeiser by name, as an example of an innocent victim, neglecting to mention the rather dubious actions Schmeiser engaged in with his own crops. The overall impression was that hundreds of farmers were being sued into poverty by Monsanto every year for unwittingly violating their patents on GMOs, which isn't really the reality at all. On the other hand, their April 22nd, 2015 segment on GMO safety[3] is much more truthful.

[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 criticizing 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. He compared the service Cramer provided to coke and hookers, which, frankly, is terribly unfair to coke and hookers. 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 15 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.[4]

[edit] Quotes

I'm a comedian who makes fun of what I believe to be the absurdities of our government. Tomorrow when you go to the polls, make my life difficult. Make the next four years really hard, so that every morning all we can do is come in and go, 'Madonna is doing some Kabbalah thing, you wanna do that?' I'd like that. I'm tired.
—On the eve of the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election
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
There was an avalanche on Bullshit Mountain.
—Jon Stewart, describing what happened on Fox News as Obama got re-elected in 2012

[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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