Jon Stewart leads late-night's Trump pushback with a classic Daily Show hypocrisy montage
Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon, and Stewart all voiced, in their own ways, solidarity and anger over ABC's decision to yank Jimmy Kimmel off the air.
Over the course of Thursday afternoon, reports started trickling in about how the various (surviving) network late night hosts would be handling ABC’s decision—after coming under public pressure from the FCC and its own affiliates—to fold like a freshly laundered sheet and pull Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air on Wednesday, September 17. The front presented was unified, even as it was filtered through each host’s pervading sensibilities. Stephen Colbert was calm and classy (with just a single, quite good piss joke), expressing his and his staff’s solidarity with Kimmel. Seth Meyers went a little deeper and more thoughtful, doing a full desk segment that ended with calling out Trump’s attacks on free speech by explicit name. (Also, a fart joke.) Jimmy Fallon reportedly expressed a sort of good-natured bafflement, stating “To be honest with you all, I don’t know what’s going on—no one does. But I do know Jimmy Kimmel, and he is a decent, funny, and loving guy. And I hope he comes back.” Not beating the “human golden retriever” charges, admittedly, but still at least a nominal show of solidarity.
But the big news, which came rolling out a few hours into the day, was that Comedy Central’s The Daily Show would be mixing up its scheduling for its Thursday night broadcast, bringing in oldschool host Jon Stewart (who usually holds down the show’s Monday night slot) to tackle the evening’s episode. It was clear Stewart was winding up for a big swing—something that only became clearer when Comedy Central posted the whole 23-minute opening of the episode to its YouTube account for all to see.
Against possible expectations, though, Stewart did not go fire and brimstone on Trump and his various cronies’ efforts to silence Kimmel for the hideous crime of making some monologue jokes. In fact, he pulled a page from his old buddy Colbert’s former playbook, taking on the persona of a successfully cowed toadie in awe of Trump’s presidential glory, singing the praises of Dear Father from a studio “tastefully” redecorated in Trumpian gold. (And frequently, furtively, chastising the studio audience to “Shut the fuck up!” every time they started booing Trump’s various hypocritical comments.) The actual content, meanwhile, was a pretty classic Daily Show satirical blitz, pitting Trump’s own words against himself and allowing the comedy to flow out of the absurdity of “do what I say, not what I do.” If it wasn’t exactly the dose of catharsis that audiences might have hoped for, it was still pretty funny, as Stewart laid on the sarcasm as thickly as humanly possible. (Meanwhile, he let correspondent Ronny Chieng get the best joke of the whole segment: When chastised for not matching his fellow staffer’s “MAGA-red” ties, Chieng shot back with an exasperated “Calm down, god, is this your first dictator?”)
And while the last eight years have, if we’re being honest, been a pretty dispiriting exploration of the limits of late-night TV jokes to put a dent in genuine authoritarian intent, it was kind of comforting to see Stewart play the hits—especially as he, and all the rest of his fellow hosts refused to sit back and be silent in the face of the administration’s pretty obvious threats to people speaking their minds on TV.
