Opinion: Was The Daily Show truly radical?

In 1996, American comedian Jon Stewart hosted a short-lived series for the BBC, Where’s Elvis This Week?.
Even by the standards of the time – this was the era when Shed 7 were considered the future of British music – it was a bizarre proposition, with the loudmouthed Stewart trying and largely failing to dial down his Big Apple snark for a UK audience. Despite such relatively heavyweight guests as Christopher Hitchens and Nora Ephron, Where’s Elvis This Week? was cancelled after five episodes – making it less successful than the fake Alan Partridge chat show that aired around the same time. Irish viewers tuning in may have tagged Stewart as just another brash, soon-to-be-forgotten American, his talent inversely proportional to his loud-hailer speaking volume.
Stewart was 34 when Where’s Elvis This Week? was canned and on speaking terms with rejection. He’d already fronted two seasons of a more conventional chat show for MTV, only for it to be scrapped when it failed to become the Gen X equivalent of David Letterman’s Late Show. After parting from the BBC and apparently deemed unemployable by American networks, he went back to his day job as a mid-tier stand-up in Manhattan, earning a living but slouching towards irrelevance. What happened next surprised everyone – Stewart most of all surely.
In late 1998, comedian Craig Kilborn was hired as presenter of The Late Late Show (not the Tubs/Gaybo time capsule but ANOTHER of those interminable wee hour chatfests American networks churn out). That left a vacancy on The Daily Show, the completely obscure Comedy Central flagship Kilborn had fronted.
Stewart, out of television since Where’s Elvis, jumped at the opportunity to replace Kilborn. He made his debut on the first day of 1999 and was to leave an indelible stamp on American comedy and news programming. Soon Stewart was The Daily Show.
After months of speculation, it was recently confirmed that Stewart would sign-off from The Daily Show on August 6. Following a decade-and-a-half in the host’s chair – and a brief sabbatical during which he directed the movie Rosewater — he’s itching for new challenges. His decision to step down had been announced in February (though he had at the time declined to say when exactly he would go) – a bombshell that reduced the American news media to stunned apoplexy. For those ancient enough to remember, it was like Gay Byrne quitting The Late Late, the end of Glenroe and the End Of The World rolled into one.
America is the land of hyperbole and, as the final edition of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart looms, it is important not to partake too freely of the Kool Aid (the show goes on with a new host, South African Trevor Noah). Yes, Stewart was a spiky voice who held a mirror up to the absurdities of US politics and broadcast news – that he was essentially shooting carp in a barrel in lampooning Fox News, MSNBC et al is slightly beside the point given that, before The Daily Show, nobody was taking potshots at all.
The context in which The Daily Show became a phenomenon was also telling. The American late night talk show has been in decline since the ‘80s: Stewart arguably represented the moment this broadcasting institution was supplanted entirely. To get a sense of where America was, all of a sudden you needed to tune into Stewart, not Letterman or Jay Leno (a state of affairs that continues today with the talk show landscape dominated by the vaudeville schtick of Jimmy Fallon and co).
“Stewart single-handedly transformed our national nightly viewing habit from one of glamour-tinged escapism to one of ritual political catharsis,” New York magazine pointed out earlier this year. “Stewart’s soon-to-be-concluded 16-year run as the host of The Daily Show wasn’t a prolonged audition to host The Tonight Show or The Late Show but rather a prolonged campaign to systematically render shows like The Tonight Show and The Late Show obsolete.”
Watched with European sensibilities, The Daily Show is not always easy to warm to. It could be crass and self-aggrandising and Stewart’s outraged citizen persona was obviously a shtick. As with many successful Americans, the presenter was also prone to showboating and clearly very pleased with himself (something Americans can admire, but which lodges in the craw of almost everyone else).
There have also been occasional murmurings that the chilled dude speaking common sense we saw on screen wasn’t a reflection of the real Stewart. That the Daily Show’s writing team was overwhelmingly male was a sensitive topic practically from the start. African-American comedian Wyatt Cenac recalls an ugly stand-off with Stewart when, during his stint on the Daily Show writing team, Cenac had a row with his boss over what was perceived as racial insensitivity. “I raised a concern, like, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’... He got incredibly defensive. I remember he was like, ‘What are you trying to say? There’s a tone in your voice.’ I was like, ‘There’s no tone. It bothered me.’ And then he got upset. He stood up and he was just like, ‘F— off. I’m done with you.’ And he just started screaming that to me, and he screamed it a few times. ‘F— off! I’m done with you.’ And he stormed out. I didn’t know if I had been fired.” Others have lamented that The Daily Show, with its brittle, nervy humour, spawned a deluge of wannabes, which mistook jeering for wit.
“The trouble is that success breeds imitators; everyone wants to be a comedian now, and not just the professional news outlets,” wrote Joanna Weiss in the Boston Globe. “Read through nearly any comment section, under nearly any article, on nearly any website, and you have to trudge through a pile of snide jokes, most of which don’t land. Comedy is hard. The shortcut is to sneer.”
Stewart’s achievements include highlighting the sleeve-dribbling insanity of American gun laws and the sclerotic relationship between its executive and legislative branches of government. Then again, the fact that merely disputing the right of the mentally ill and emotionally unstable to lay their hands on automatic weapons could be considered radical tells us more about public discourse in the United States than about The Daily Show. Stewart said what needed to be said – what’s truly damning is that he was the only one speaking up.