Stewart's irreverent brand of political and media satire made him a beloved figure on television with influence far beyond the 2 to 3 million nightly audience of "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central. Stewart stepped aside in and has since made only infrequent public appearances, including advocating for wounded veterans and for healthcare benefits for first responders who became ill after the Sept.
Last year he wrote and directed a political comedy film called "Irresistible," starring Steve Carell, that drew mixed reviews.
Subscribe for our daily curated newsletter to receive the latest exclusive Reuters coverage delivered to your inbox. And for a generation of young liberals, his chief influence has been to make outrage, cynicism, and condescension the language of the left.
Stewart, it seemed, had stepped off the national stage just in time to see his entire comedic ethos come to seem insupportable. He released one film in a political satire called Irresistible that attempts to call out the political press corps for its cynicism and offer a defense of much-maligned red-state America. Irresistible tells the story of a small-town military veteran who goes viral when he makes a heartfelt speech against cutting benefits for undocumented immigrants.
Big-player Democratic operatives consider him irresistible bait get it? Everyone in town worked together to concoct the scheme and stage the viral speech in the hope of luring political strategists to town and getting them to pour money into super-PACs.
The town then absconds with the money and uses it to invest in its infrastructure. Stewart has spent the whole movie presenting them to us as unsophisticated rubes, but the punchline of the scene is that they have a media-savvy take on what just went down. In fact, one of the most striking things about Irresistible is how much it repeats the arguments Stewart made again and again on The Daily Show.
He began the Crossfire segment by complaining about the way CNN begins its debate coverage by talking to political consultants on Spin Alley , and ended it with a sweeping condemnation of spectacle-focused media. Irresistible , in turn, begins with a fantasy sequence in which political consultants on Spin Alley break format by actually telling the truth, and ends with an Amusing Ourselves to Death gag. These are all arguments Stewart has been making for more than 20 years now.
That he keeps squandering it on easy cynicism instead. Moreover, it is focused on demonstrably real problems. It struggles, however, with the same problem that has always vexed Jon Stewart: Is this show supposed to kick-start change? Is it supposed to be a news show? Or is it supposed to just be funny? Stewart has obviously thought about those questions. How do we best execute our intention? You state your case in the marketplace of ideas, and if you do it well enough, people will buy your idea and discard the old bad ones.
Stewart made his case for the so-called disenfranchised center very, very well. You run a pedophile ring out of a pizza shop! So Stewart is now left performing a new version of the dance he used to do back when The Daily Show was on, when he constantly and simultaneously insisted on his own righteousness and influence and on the idea that he was just a nobody comic filling time for a network full of puppets who make crank calls.
In , Stewart insists that the platform he offers his guests on The Problem With Jon Stewart is the most concrete thing he can do to change the world, while at the same time maintaining his powerlessness. Stewart ended this argument with a question that seems to cut to the core of all he does.
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Check your inbox for a welcome email. Per the new format, Stewart welcomes a panel of sufferers and their impassioned spouses to discuss the issue, then sits with the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to push for answers.
On an afternoon in late August, the year-old New Yorker piped in from somewhere on Interstate 95 as he drove himself home from D. In a wide-ranging conversation that stretched to two and a half hours, Stewart spoke candidly about his next act as well as his Daily Show departure, his HBO heartbreak and what he got wrong about Donald Trump.
When did that change? Well, Lacey, it was an October night. The wind was howling off the water. It was the one where we showed how the censors operated at MTV by how much butt crack on this one individual we could use. Now, one of the beautiful things about The Daily Show is that it was forgiving. But also, in some ways, it can be more satisfying. I like that this is more of a conversation. We make things, and sometimes those things disappoint people and sometimes they really like them.
Early on, you ride a roller coaster, and you have no baseline of experience. And people fell in love a little bit with The Daily Show , but with that comes a lot of conflicting emotions about what you think I should be saying or doing, and how I should be doing it. But the ride itself is the thing that you construct, and you have to shut out the external expectation and pressure.
The show opens with a montage of possible titles, some clearly more absurd than others, before landing on The Problem With Jon Stewart. Do we do that? And what are we talking about with the show? And going back and forth with ideas is the part that I fucking love. That was a PR guy, and they had meetings every week to talk about the best way to talk about going to war.
And that same meeting is the one that we had to figure out what to call this fucking show. Talk to me about the hiring process with this show. But in this case, it created exactly what we were looking for, which is a varied staff, certainly varied perspectives and life experiences. I did ask Brinda the same question, and she had a similar take with regard to these labels.
That you viewed it as you were going to unwind the hiring. We shared that moment and we took a beat, and then the anchor, you might remember him, Matt Lauer ….
You know, before you go, I have to ask you about Louis C. Oh, OK, then I apologize. Why do you think you do that? So, a lot of that is a self-conscious attempt to read the room and maybe take some of the steam out of it.
The egregiousness of the moment is what led us to want to release it when we did.
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