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Thursday, January 25, 2024

Jon Stewart Returning to Late Night


Jon Stewart will take the reins of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” the show he hosted to huge success from 1999 to 2015, for one night a week through the 2024 presidential election, the network said in a surprise announcement on Wednesday. Stewart’s first show will be on Feb. 12, The NY Times reports.

“The Daily Show” has been without a permanent host since Trevor Noah stepped down in late 2022. Stewart will also be a producer on all episodes of “The Daily Show.” Other episodes of the show will be hosted by a rotating lineup of the show’s news team.

Stewart’s relentless focus on politics over his 16-year “Daily Show” run, unusual for late night at the time, transformed him from a promising comedian into one of the nation’s foremost political and media critics. Mr. Stewart had his detractors, and the viewership of “The Daily Show” lagged others at the time but his influence was outsize — and long lasting.


Stephen Colbert and John Oliver, two “Daily Show” correspondents who catapulted to fame during Mr. Stewart’s tenure, landed their own late night shows, which they still host. And like Mr. Stewart’s “The Daily Show,” their shows also have a laser focus on current events — nearly always with a left-leaning bias — and helped reorder the late-night landscape in the process.

Stewart taped his final episode of “The Daily Show” just hours before the first Republican debate of the 2016 election cycle, an event that shattered ratings records and formally introduced Donald J. Trump to the country as a prospective politician.

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