But now it seems like maybe he didn’t understand how it was. Should Stewart still be doing his Daily Show thing? Should he ever have done it? What does it mean to be Jon Stewart - Jon Stewart! The man who taught a generation how to see the world! - and does even Stewart fully understand the platform he has?įor a long time, Stewart was the guy people could trust to tell it like it was. Even more crucially, it’s not clear that his continued assertions that he was just a comedian who happened to tell jokes about politics were ever all that honest.Īs a result, The Problem With Jon Stewart seems to be haunted by confused questions that no one involved seems to have quite figured out the answers to. Yet in the aftermath of the Trump administration, it’s no longer clear that the liberal landscape Jon Stewart helped construct was an unalloyed good. Stewart is the man who gave millennials most of their news as they came of age politically the man who prompted the New York Times to ask in 2008, “ Is Jon Stewart the most trusted man in America?” And he did it, always, with a smirk and a wave of his hand, a constant protestation that he was really just out here to tell jokes and make people laugh. Sign up to receive our newsletter each Friday.

Vox’s German Lopez is here to guide you through the Biden administration’s burst of policymaking. His was a coherent worldview: Politicians on both sides of the aisle are hypocrites corrupted by cash everyone’s lying about their professed values but especially those idiots who aren’t even willing to follow the science and the only rational response to all the dishonesty and stupidity of the world is to laugh at it. Stewart built his reputation on using comedy to cut through the sanctimony of conventional journalism and politics to give his center-to-liberal audience the truth about the world. The confusion over whether The Problem With Jon Stewart is funny, or whether it even should be funny, is part of a larger question that has seemed to follow Stewart for his whole career.

“I guess that answers whether or not the show’s going to be funny,” Stewart cracks early on, after the debut episode’s very first joke falls flat. But while Stewart always maintained that The Daily Show was meant to be funny first and foremost, The Problem With Jon Stewart wears its comedy with a distinct lack of ease. Stewart’s new TV series, The Problem With Jon Stewart on AppleTV+, is a news-comedy hybrid, and sort of a loose update of the format Stewart pioneered during his time as host of The Daily Show. Jon Stewart is back, and it’s a little bit weird.

America (The Book) by Jon Stewart