Comedian Jon Stewart is going to be returning to ‘The Daily Show‘ as a weekly host and executive producer through the 2024 U.S. elections cycle.
Comedy Central stated that Stewart will host the topical TV show, where he formerly held the spot for 16 years starting back in 1999, every Monday starting February 12. There will also be a rotating line of regular hosts on for the rest of the week.
“Jon Stewart is the voice of our generation, and we are honored to have him return to Comedy Central’s The Daily Show to help us all make sense of the insanity and division roiling the country as we enter the election season,” Chris McCarthy, president and CEO of Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios, said in a statement. “In our age of staggering hypocrisy and performative politics, Jon is the perfect person to puncture the empty rhetoric and provide much-needed clarity with his brilliant wit.”
Over the years, the show has seen the likes of Craig Kilborn, Stewart, Trevor Noah and more.
The show, which recently won an Emmy Award this month for best talk series, has not gotten a permanent host since Noah left as of late.
Current correspondents include Desi Lydic, Michael Kosta, Ronny Chieng and Jordan Klepper.
Stewart didn’t leave the show in anger in 2015 and has spoken fondly of it over the years.
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“When you lose that structure, you’re untethered from the thing that prevents the bad mind from doing its corrupt best,” he said on the Strike Force Five podcast during the Hollywood strikes last year. “It goes south and dark really fast.”
“It’s not like I thought the show wasn’t working any more, or that I didn’t know how to do it. It was more, ‘Yup, it’s working. But I’m not getting the same satisfaction,’” he told the Guardian newspaper in 2015.
Recently, Stewart’s “The Problem With Jon Stewart,” which debuted in 2021, was canceled on the Apple TV+ streaming service. It took on polarizing topics such as racism, climate change, mass incarceration and gun control, but its stridency rubbed some critics the wrong way.
The Los Angeles Times in a review said, “The host spends some time searching for his old rhythm, the soft-loud-soft approach, in which he rockets from calm to horror to a person crouched in a corner croaking ‘help.’”
Many online were upset when the show was ended due to clashes between Stewart and Apple over its coverage of stories around China and artificial intelligence.
Stewart will serve as an executive producer through 2025, which the network said would also have him help shape the show’s future.
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