Apple TV+’s loss is Comedy Central’s gain: Jon Stewart, the legendary host of The Daily Show during its Bush-era peak, returned to the Comedy Central news parody show last night after being unceremoniously dumped from a big money contract with Apple. It’s a very rare win for basic cable during its prolonged slide into obsolescence, and an immediate boost to Stewart’s career. Also, hey: as somebody who was in college when Stewart took over for Craig Kilborn all the way back in the ’90s, and hasn’t really checked in on The Daily Show all that much since, uh, one of them Obama administrations, it’s a refreshing (and not at all depressing…) flashback to have Stewart’s face popping up during Bob Mould’s theme song. Let’s do it, Jon.
In the video below you can see a solid 20 minutes of Stewart-on-Daily Show action, or roughly the entire damn episode. Stewart himself seems as excited to return to the show as his audience does, immediately getting in a couple of digs at his most recent former employer Apple, who scrapped his high-profile (and high-dollar) show The Problem with Jon Stewart over disagreements about Stewart’s coverage of issues including China and artificial intelligence. (Hey: Apple sucks. I’ve been saying it for years. Sure, Viacom and Comedy Central do too, but nobody worships those companies like many do Apple, so it didn’t really need saying. Blanket rule: corporations hate us as much as they love our money.)
After a quick pass on the Super Bowl (uh, it just happened?), Stewart gets to the meat of his return to basic cable: this year’s election. And guess what: he doesn’t really dig either ancient-ass dude running for president. As Stewart ultimately concludes during his main segment, neither Biden nor Trump are “vibrant, productive, or even capable” of ruling our country given their current states, from Biden’s general fogginess, to Trump’s utterly destructive and self-aggrandizing delusions. It’s honestly sad that we need Stewart to return to TV to say these things, almost a decade after he first left The Daily Show, but that’s how miserable the media has become since 2015: one side won’t ever criticize Trump or the Republican party, the other insists on insipid bothsidesism, and the truth is the ultimate victim.
Anyway. Everything sucks. It’s true. But maybe you’ll get the slightest bit of comfort or humor out of Jon Stewart’s return to The Daily Show. You can watch his return below.