Jon Stewart
By MARK KENNEDY, AP
NEW YORK — Comedian Jon Stewart is rewinding the clock, returning to “The Daily Show” as a weekly host and executive producing through the 2024 U.S. elections cycle.
Comedy Central on Wednesday said Stewart will host the topical TV show, the perch he ruled for 16 years starting in 1999, every Monday starting Feb. 12. A rotating lineup of show regulars are on tap for the rest of the week.
“Jon Stewart is the voice of our generation, and we are honored to have him return to Comedy Central’s The Daily Show to help us all make sense of the insanity and division roiling the country as we enter the election season,” Chris McCarthy, president and CEO of Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios, said in a statement. “In our age of staggering hypocrisy and performative politics, Jon is the perfect person to puncture the empty rhetoric and provide much-needed clarity with his brilliant wit.”
Over the years, “The Daily Show” — first hosted by Craig Kilborn, then Stewart and Trevor Noah — has skewered the left and right by making the media a character and playing it absolutely straight, no matter how ridiculous.
The show, which won an Emmy Award this month for best talk series, has not had a permanent host since Noah left last year.
Stewart didn’t leave the show in anger in 2015 and has spoken fondly of it over the years.
“When you lose that structure, you’re untethered from the thing that prevents the bad mind from doing its corrupt best,” he said on the Strike Force Five podcast during the Hollywood strikes last year. “It goes south and dark really fast.”
“It’s not like I thought the show wasn’t working any more, or that I didn’t know how to do it. It was more, ‘Yup, it’s working. But I’m not getting the same satisfaction,’” he told the Guardian newspaper in 2015.
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