In his long-awaited return to The Daily Show, Jon Stewart offered little greater than his ’90s brand of snark and bothsidesism, taking satirical potshots on the absurdity of the political process that coaxes voters into accepting a corrosive established order as a substitute of marching within the streets to effect change. It was, in brief, the identical shit all once again.
And that’s just what Stewart’s co-workers had to say. In a canny bit of preemption, Stewart’s first show after a nine-year hiatus delivered the criticisms of his fitness for the role straight to his face. Correspondent Dulcé Sloan popped up in the center of a check-in from the (mock) campaign trail to query whether two “old white dudes” ought to be competing for a job they’ve already had. “It’s so desperate,” she sighed. “Let someone else run the show!” And Jordan Klepper cut off one of Stewart’s attempts at a pensive monologue with a sarcastic slow clap: “Did you save democracy yet?”
TV writers call this “lampshading,” the technique of foregrounding an obvious shortcoming to make bringing it up after the very fact seem redundant. But it’s also a way of acknowledging flaws without doing anything to correct them. It’s good to know that Stewart and the Daily Show’s writers even have the web, that he has spent his years off the air mulling no less than some of the more persistent and germane criticisms of his 16-year reign. But it was also clear that Stewart’s idea of his place within the discursive cosmos has not fundamentally shifted. Even his go-to repertoire of funny voices has not expanded.
Stewart’s fundamental segment was classic bothsidesism, even though it was no less than devoted to an arena where there really are issues on each side. After just a few low-ball Super Bowl jokes to warm up the gang, he dove into the special counsel’s report that raised issues about Joe Biden’s mental acuity, and especially his ability to lead the country into 2029. Juxtaposing Biden’s apparent lapses under Robert Hur’s questioning with Donald Trump’s repeated “I don’t remembers” from a 9-year-old deposition fell wide of the mark: There’s a difference between failures of memory and deliberate evasions. But he did eventually work his way around to some of Trump’s more odd utterances from the campaign trail, including the past weekend’s claim that Democrats have plans to change the name of the state of Pennsylvania.
The incontrovertible fact that the identical comparison had been made dozens if not a whole bunch of times online before 11 p.m. Monday illustrates one of the most important challenges facing each Stewart personally and The Daily Show writ large: How can a late-night TV show regain a spot at the middle of a discourse that moves much faster than it did even nine years ago? If rehashing the Hur report felt a bit bit last-week, the bit where campaign correspondents weighed in from different parts of the identical diner might have been kept in a vault since 2016, not precisely the strongest salvo for a series trying to reassert its vitality.
In a more sincere attempt to confront his own limitations, Stewart defended the legitimacy of questioning the candidates’ age-related decline by acknowledging his own. Cutting right into a close-up whose noticeably sharper focus brought out the creases around his eyes, Stewart threw up a 20-year-old photo of himself just to heighten the comparison. He is indeed an old white dude, and if he has anything necessary to say, it is going to be because of and not in spite of that. His strength isn’t the flexibility to dissect the political discourse a lot as his instinct for knowing when to step away from it. If each parties have chosen the oldest presidential candidates in American history—breaking the previous record each men set after they ran in 2020—the query is less which is more likely to hold on to his faculties for the subsequent five years than it’s, as Stewart put it on broadcast TV: “What the [bleep] are we doing here, people?”
It’s not clear if Stewart genuinely believes there’s a bipartisan middle left in American political life or that he can conjure one through sheer force of will, but he stays determined to speak to each left and right as if it’s possible to reach them on the identical frequency. Stepping away from meta-punditry, he delivered a spiel in regards to the importance of engaging in civic life on day-after-day of the yr, not only Election Day. “If your guy loses, bad things might happen, but the country is not over, and if your guy wins, the country is in no way saved,” he said in his best let’s-all-calm-down voice. “I’m not saying you don’t have to worry about who wins the election. I’m saying you have to worry about every day before it and every day after it, forever.” It’s true that the fight won’t be over on Nov. 5, irrespective of what it’s you’re fighting for. But the suggestion that simply “grind[ing] away on issues” can function a bulwark against encroaching fascism feels more like a fairy tale than a life lesson.
Credit : slate.com
