Last Updated on February 5, 2024
Jon Stewart, formerly Jon Leibowitz, is returning to The Daily Show on Comedy Central on Mondays. The move puts Stewart back into the talk show game in competition with The Campaign Show with Patrick Howley, which airs on X and Banned Dot Video in the 8 AM timeslot.
President Donald Trump had a pretty epic tweet about Jon Stewart in 2013. Trump tweeted: “If Jon Stewart is so above it all & legit, why did he change his name from Jonathan Leibowitz? He should be proud of his heritage!”
Stewart’s return to a lazy once-a-time-a-week Monday hosting gig has attracted such spirited Beatlemania-esque headlines as “Jon Stewart will return to ‘The Daily Show’ as host — just on Mondays” (AP) and “Jon Stewart returns to ‘The Daily Show’ — but only on Mondays” (CNBC) and “What If Jon Stewart Comes Back and Everybody Just Shrugs?” (Bloomberg). Can you feel the momentum?
Stewart is known for losing an epic confrontation with Tucker Carlson on CNN, in which Carlson sincerely said that he would not want to have dinner with Jon Stewart. Even though the media pretended at the time that Stewart won, the reality is that Carlson came off with class and Jon Stewart just rambled on in a pretentious faux-populist prattle. Stewart recently failed on Apple TV+ with his show “The Problem With Jon Stewart.” Imagine that a show called “The Problem” didn’t take off. The show only lasted 20 episodes and might have actually gotten censored due to Apple’s relationship with China and some China criticism that Stewart was going to make. But regardless, Jon Stewart is lame. Tucker Carlson explained why on C-Span’s Washington Journal:
“He’s shrieking and disheveled and very short. Really short, too short to date. Was he always that short? What happened? Where’s he been in the last seven years? If you know, let us know. We want answers,” Tucker Carlson said of Stewart in 2022.
Stewart responded with a vulgar and unfunny comedic scenario, saying, “Friends. Tonite I am sad. @TuckerCarlson believes me too short to date … and yet somehow, miraculously, I remain tall enough to not know what [Hungarian Prime Minister] Victor Orban’s a** tastes like!… “Is it goulash Tucky? Seems like it would be goulash.”
Not funny!
Tucker Carlson has always been funnier than Jon Stewart, and now Tucker Carlson is the emperor of media with his show Tucker on X.
Jon Stewart has always been unfunny, as evidenced by his failed talk show on MTV and Short Attention Span Theater on Comedy Central, which was not funny. However, in the mid-2000’s he had a very strong theme song on The Daily Show and the disaster of the Bush war machine (which Carlson also strongly opposes) gave Stewart an anti-war image that made him a star. While this was indeed an accomplishment in the discourse, the fact is that Carlson is now the face of the anti-war movement to a new generation of Zoomers, the demographic that traditional conservative media refers to disparagingly as “Gen Z.” The game is smarter, faster, and much more sophisticated now. Tucker Carlson is the champ. Let’s see if Stewart’s comeback will be a Mickey Rourke in “The Wrestler” or a Corey Feldman music career.
