Jon Stewart taking a summer vacation from The Daily Show to make a fun movie about Iran

Having grown weary of the four-days-a-week, 42-weeks-a-year grind of goofing on the news and talking to celebrities, Jon Stewart has announced via press release that he’ll be taking a 12-week break from The Daily Show, beginning this June. The hiatus will find Stewart kicking back and relaxing by directing his first feature film: the breezy, summery lark Rosewater, based on BBC journalist Maziar Barahi’s story of the time he was sent to cover Iran’s 2009 presidential election, leaving his pregnant fiancée at home, only to wind up spending 118 days being brutally interrogated in Iranian jail. (It’s an adaptation of Barahi’s book Then They Came for Me: A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, And Survival and, loosely, the 1983 Tom Cruise romp Losin’ It.) While Stewart will be off telling this Scott Rudin-produced tale of geopolitical tension, harrowing personal drama, and hot fun in the summertime, he’ll be replaced for eight weeks of Daily Show episodes by John Oliver—yet another British usurping of an American entertainment job that is very serious indeed. Sorry to bum everyone out.