Social Media ruined The Daily Show

Earlier this year, Jon Stewart returned as host of The Daily Show. Stewart replaced outgoing host Trevor Noah, who had in turn replaced him in 2015. Stewart’s return was met with much fanfare from his fans and the media, and it also sparked a nostalgia-driven boost in ratings. Noah, while critically appreciated, had never been able to garner Stewart’s level of fame or the corresponding viewership numbers.

But Stewart’s return feels like it’s missing something. The ratings, while still higher than Noah’s, have fallen dramatically from their early-year highs.¹ It could be that Stewart is only hosting part-time. He’s on-air for Monday episodes, with other hosts taking the reins the rest of the week. But even beyond that, there’s little urgency or cultural significance to the Daily Show in 2024. It’s a surprisingly juiceless show that feels lost in time. And I think the real story is that social media has made what Jon Stewart does irrelevant.

A Fallen Juggernaut

I’m always keenly aware that half the audience for this blog was in diapers during ye olden days, so I want to take a second to emphasize a basic point. The Daily Show used to really, really, really matter.

When Stewart took over the Daily Show in 1999, he essentially invented a new form of television. Late night hosts had long poked fun at current events and politicians, but it was comedy without edge - a gentle teasing, a knowing side eye. Stewart was a comedian on television who was directly political. He cared about the state of the world, and he wasn’t afraid to yell directly at the people involved. He was pissed off and he wanted you to know it.

Coming from the vantage point of 2024, this seems like the most basic thing in the world. But in the early 2000s it was revelatory. It was a genuine shock that you could be funny and political and angry all at the same time on television. You could be sarcastic and ironic and painfully earnest all at once. That was new! And Stewart’s show and persona took pop culture by storm. What he said and did mattered. When Stewart went on CNN’s Crossfire to rant about how their hack show was hurting America, it actually changed cable news. It was such a big deal that single episode now has a Wikipedia page! CNN cancelled Crossfire and fired Tucker Carlson² because of this episode!

Young people trusted The Daily Show in those years more than the actual network news, and were almost as likely to learn of news events from The Daily Show as anywhere else. Stewart’s on-air commentary was a regular topic of watercooler discussion. Especially during the Bush years, it felt good to see someone as genuinely mad as the rest of us.

What I’m trying to emphasize here is that Stewart’s cultural power was immense. He single-handedly bullied Congress into passing a 9/11 first responders aid bill. He was able to gather hundreds of thousands of people to a rally in DC that was fittingly both an earnest political statement and an elaborate joke. Look at the sheer number of awards he’s won!

And yet, for all the excitement and nostalgia surrounding Stewart’s return to The Daily Show, it doesn’t really feel like he matters any more. His commentary isn’t making national news and it’s not driving the cultural conversation.

Why?

Twitter killed the TV Star

There are two relevant factors that have changed since Stewart was in his mid-aughts heyday. The number of Daily Show copycats exploded, and so did social media.

My friend Jeff Maurer over at I Might Be Wrong documented the explosion of political comedy shows a few years back:

For about a decade, the only political late-night shows were The Daily Show and Politically Incorrect/Real Time with Bill Maher. In 2005, The Colbert Report was added to the mix. In the past five years, I count 17 of these shows on the air!

Real Time with Bill Maher, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Late Night with Seth Meyers, Full Frontal with Sam Bee, Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj, Important Things with Wyatt Cenac, The Break with Michelle Wolf, The Rundown with Robin Thede, The Jim Jefferies Show, The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, Wilmore (different show), The Opposition with Jordan Klepper, Desus & Mero, The Amber Ruffin Show, and Pause with Sam Jay.

And that’s not even considering the avalanche of political stand up sets and specials like Sarah Cooper: Everything’s Fine. Jon Stewart innovated the “angry and incredulous guy reports on the news while telling jokes” format and the rest of us took that format and absolutely beat it to death.

Few of those copycat shows lasted long. The ones that did tended to be more generalized Late Night shows with a side of politics (Colbert, Meyers) or hosted by venerable old dudes established just a few years after the Daily Show (Maher, Colbert again). But Daily Show veterans Sam Bee, Hasan Minhaj, Larry Wilmore, Michelle Wolf, Wyatt Cenac, Larry Wilmore, all tried and failed. And I’m a political junkie and I couldn’t even tell you who Amber Ruffin or Sam Jay are.

Why did so many of these shows fail? Part of it is simply that Jon Stewart is a rare political talent and they aren’t. But Stewart was also operating in a very different media environment. When Stewart mercilessly mocked George W. Bush with genuine anger, that was new and exciting. We hadn’t seen it before on prime time television. When Sam Bee does the same thing to Trump, it feels like a warmed-over review of what Twitter said days ago.

And that’s the central problem - social media. You know what else besides The Daily Show has left leaning politics, is earnest and sarcastic at the same time, and is very funny while also being permanently outraged? Twitter. You could really include all of social media commentary here, but especially Twitter. When a news story happens - Trump says he wants to jail children, or Biden calls the Prime Minister of Estonia by his dog’s name - there are thousands of instantaneous responses on Twitter. We’re yelling at the person involved, making cracks about them, mashing their faces into new meme formats, etc. YouTube essaysists, within hours, will have full rundowns of the situation with even more snappy jokes. Redditors will find every conceivable pun related to the situation and repeat them a thousand times. By the time the political shows have gotten to it, the rest of us have already seen the news, yelled about it, mocked it, memed it, and moved on.

That’s the core reason why most of those shows failed. It’s why Jon Stewart’s rebrand attempt, The Problem with Jon Stewart, was a ratings bomb. And it’s why the new Daily Show, despite some feel good nostalgia holding it up, feels tired and feeble and lame instead of incisive and interesting. Why do we need those shows any longer? We as a society are absolutely drowning in a tidal wave of sarcastic meta-ironic political jokes. We are drowning in outraged commentary online. Why on earth do we need more?

A Path Forward

There’s one show I haven’t mentioned yet in depth that bucks this trend, and I think offers a beacon of hope for political comedy content. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is a genuine success - it’s been on the air for 11 seasons and more than 300 episodes. It’s won even more awards than the Daily Show did. It’s led to real world change so often that pundits coined the term ‘John Oliver Effect’. And it’s probably had more cultural relevance over the last 10 years than every other political late night show combined.³

What makes Oliver different? It’s the format. Oliver still uses the classic tone that Jon Stewart pioneered, a mixture of bemused and outraged. But while The Daily Show focused on quick hitting quips and news-of-the-day content, Oliver’s show comes out once a week and its main draw is extensively researched segments on niche topics like UFOs, corruption in FIFA, or SLAPP lawsuits. Rather than do a quick drive-by with jokes, the show’s staff dives deep into these smaller topics. You can walk away from a good episode of Last Week Tonight feeling like you’ve genuinely learned a lot about a topic you’d never considered before. Sometimes these deep dives are incredibly well researched and sometimes they’re a bit shaky, but it’s a whole different level of analysis than what any other political show is offering.

And that’s why Last Week Tonight works - because it’s doing what social media usually doesn’t have the attention span to do. It’s very much possible to do this kind of content on social media - YouTube essayists and Substack are right here. But these online channels don’t have the reach or the manpower to do as much Oliver’s show can. Last Week Tonight, at its best, combines the free-wheeling silliness of comedy with serious analysis in a way no other political comedy show has approached.

That, I think, is the path forward for political comedy. You can’t compete with the internet, where there are hundreds of thousands of jokesters offering instant commentary on everything that happens. Especially not when we have algorithms that deliver the funniest and most viral of those jokes to us without fail. But you can out-research the internet, because deep research is hard work and requires time, staffing, and effort. I’m not sure whether late night political comedy has a future on TV, a future on YouTube, or a future nowhere. But if it’s going to survive as a format, it’s going to look a lot more like Oliver than Stewart.

1. Stewart’s initial episodes after his return were getting nearly two million viewers - per THR that’s fallen to less than a million per episode for Stewart-hosted episodes and around a 1/2 million for all episodes.

2. Sadly, he would return

3. Jeff I promise I’m not just sucking up to you here.