The Daily Show

This is a great show. Stewart has the perfect sense of humor to deal with the outrageness of his correspondents. He remains the center of sanity as reporters like Colbert, Carrell, and Rocca act in the strangest of ways. The seriousness that their interviewing subjects show is absolutely amazing. They pick on everyone equally. If the Onion had a TV show, this would be it. The only area were the show could slightly improve is Jon's interviewing technique. He doesn't match up with Conan as far as getting funny stuff out of the celebrities, but he is better than most. This show is absolutely incredible and I hope it lasts forever.

Ok, I'll be the first to say: When Craig Kilborn left the show, i thought it was going to suck. Boy was I wrong.

This is the one show on television that i make an effort to watch. Amidst a wasteland of stupidity, this is the last bastion of entertaining intelligence. Since the major television networks have turned into crap factories: turning out one crappy reality show after another, it's comforting to find a place in The Daily Show that makes fun of those people.

Jon Stewart is one of the funniest (not to mention brightest) people out there. Whenever I get bored, i watch old clips of him interviewing the Spice Girls or the one about Executing the Retarded. Somebody give this man a raise (no--that was not a short joke); he has earned it.

Jon is the man!

I WAS a Daily Show fan for years, but am completely confused at the decision to place Trevor Noah in the anchor seat. As with all nightly talk shows, it seems The Daily Show wants to be more frat party than talk show. Obviously, anyone who replaced John Stewart was going to be facing great scrutiny, but Trevor just is not a good fit. Gone is the sly wit, emotional connection, and light banter that The Daily Show excelled at. It was a struggle for me to stay up so late the watch this show (because I get up so early in the morning), but I always thought it was worth the effort. I guess now, I get an hour more sleep every night. Healthy for me, but it feels like something is missing now.

Jon Stewart took over a nondescript comedy show and turned it into a venue that aired some of the best political satire on television on nearly a daily basis for about a decade and a half. In a world where politicians and the media that are supposed to cover them seem to compete with each other over who is most morally bankrupt, most corrupt, most cynical, and most stupid, Stewart's show provided moments of relief and sanity and common sense, packaged as comedy around a body of top-notch research.

The Daily Show used to be extraordinary. It spawned a few other shows where former cast members explored interesting variations on the theme of satirizing public life, and might have created or defined a genre in the process. Those days are over.

I tried to like its new host, Trevor Noah. There is a phase of comparison anybody in his position has to overcome, where he is seen as replacing somebody rather than simply a voice of his own. There are all these small differences, some deliberate, others maybe not, that might annoy old fans just because they are different from what they are used to, and wouldn't have been even noticed otherwise (the out-of-breath voice of the announcer in the opening credits, introducing the Moment of Zen standing up, ...). It takes a while to find one's voice in this kind of job, and Noah still looks like he can't quite believe his luck, or how funny the jokes are (even when he messes them up), but it took Stewart a little bit of time to find the Zone of Anger at "the system" necessary for his brand of satire, so maybe Noah just needs more time to get there. All of these things are fixable.

A more serious problem, I think, is that Noah is moved by something less interesting than Stewart. When news people, cornered by public opinion that trusted a comedy show more than what they tried to create, "accused" Stewart of being their (biased) competition, he would insist that his primary motivation was comedy based on the absurdity of the system, rather than a specific political agenda. Many (especially conservative) folks dismissed this as a tactical response, but I think it was essentially true. Of course most viewers of Stewart's show would be "liberal", but I think it could have been watched and enjoyed by a conservative, too, for its irreverent criticism of across-the-aisle stupidity and callousness and Stewart's non-partisan sense of fairness that allowed him to have many productive and interesting conversations with people he deeply disagreed with.

Noah's show is different. His primary motivator isn't comedic wonder at the theater of the absurd that is American public discourse, but a specific political view. He wants viewers to think about things in a certain way, and he has little to offer to those that don't. Where Stewart's classical foe was Fox News, Noah just piles on the Trump, an easy target, but without its refraction in incompetent and biased media only of passing comedic value. Of course, Trump would have found a prominent place in Stewart's show, too, but while we enjoyed laughing at his antics, we would also have learned something about how his story was told to us by our media. Noah tries to emulate the taste of Stewart's show, but without the fiber. He has lost the essence of TDS because his interests are essentially different from Stewart's, and we are just a little poorer for it.

When a big story breaks, where do you turn for news coverage? CNN? FOX? BBC? CBC? No, no, no, and no. It's....Comedy Central? Oh yes. Believe it.

The Daily Show is the #1 fake comedic news show out there. Every weekday night on Comedy Central (or Comedy Network for me) Jon Stewart, officially the second funniest man in America, hosts a show that everyone needs to see. The whole show follows the main news stories of today and comments on them with hilarious political satire. Not only that, but everyday, a guest comes in for an interview. And I'm not talking guests nobody has heard of. We're talking about Bill Clinton, Matthew Broderick, Desmond Tutu, John Kerry, etc.

The Daily Show is definitely worth your time. Give it a try. You'll be glad you did.