No one needs to know my politics or the politics of any other person who writes about sports and entertainment for a living.
That said, I feel compelled to say that after once being a rabid political partisan, I stepped out of a dualistic “Democrat-or-Republican” mindset at the start of this century. I dropped out of full engagement in both presidential politics and mainstream cable news after the 2004 presidential primary season.
It was the perfect time for me to watch The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, which brings up the larger and more fundamental point: Any time of disillusionment or disgust in relationship to American politics and current affairs is a good time for anyone to watch The Daily Show.
You don’t need to be a Democrat or Republican, a liberal or a conservative, to think that the larger theater of American politics is absurdist in nature. You don’t have to own a specific ideology or a sharp philosophical preference to conclude that what passes for “news” coverage on cable networks is simply appalling when measured by basic journalistic standards. Jon Stewart thumbed his nose at the participants in national American politics, and he happily eviscerated news outlets for the ways in which they covered our elected leaders. Removed from elections and individual personalities, the issues of the day in our national political discussions also received biting satirical treatment from Stewart. News organizations which embarrassed themselves in covering those topics were skewered just as readily on The Daily Show.
Most of the time, Stewart’s tone was playful, but when — as will inevitably happen in life — a tragic event occurred, the anger felt by Americans led Stewart to be accordingly more angry on his program. Stewart polarized many, but his lack of buttoned-down restraint is something you’d never see on a “straight news” broadcast. Viewers appreciated it then, and they appreciate it now, as Stewart prepares to say goodbye to the show he’s anchored since the late 20th century (1999).
This is where a conversation about The Daily Show and Jon Stewart’s greatest legacy comes into focus.
Political satire in the form of something resembling a “news” program from an anchor desk is nothing new. The general appearance of the program is hardly revolutionary. What Jon Stewart did was to bring this format into the modern age, with a nimble video research staff that could compile dozens of instances in which politicians or news commentators said something embarrassing, contradictory or ironic (or all of the above).
Stewart’s occasional departures from the happy satirist to the angry truth-teller also lent a freshness to what he offered the viewing public. This ability to cultivate a wickedly entertaining program — sometimes pathetically sophomoric, it should be acknowledged, but not nearly often enough to overwhelm the show’s generally consistent quality — represents an achievement in itself. Yet, the ability to mix entertainment with a little pinch of outrage is more precisely Stewart’s contribution to what can be called “the skewering business.”
Properly locating the national mood and its appetite for a certain kind of conversation at the right time — that’s what Stewart did with his mixture of (four parts) satire and (one part) editorializing, and it’s why so many people are going to miss him.
Everything that’s been said up to now could easily be viewed as Stewart’s greatest Daily Show legacy. It would be quite a legacy for anyone to establish, something any aspiring satirist would want to be remembered for.
Yet, with Stewart, that doesn’t seem quite the heart of his immense contribution to the culture (and to the art of editorial commentary).
You see, everything Stewart was so skillfully able to do on The Daily Show has been exceeded — albeit in two very different ways — by men whose talents he cultivated on his program: Stephen Colbert and John Oliver.
https://youtu.be/PvqJLG3SyL8
What is true for basketball players and other superstars in team sports is also true for pioneering entertainers and artists: Many great ones can and do exist independent of those around them, but the really great ones do make others around them better.
Jon Stewart didn’t just build his own program. He gave time and opportunities to talented individuals who used The Daily Show as a springboard to their own more personal platforms and larger levels of professional fulfillment.
John Oliver, on Last Week Tonight, has taken the Stewart formula of “revelry with just a bit of vinegar” and made it into his own immensely heralded and acclaimed program. In the lower-constraint world of HBO programming, Oliver is unshackled in more ways than one. He and his staff are able to sink their teeth into various stories, such as the FIFA mess. When that particular story gained traction and then law-enforcement breakthroughs, Oliver had scored something of a coup. Oliver might have been born for the job he currently has, but the skill set needed to do that job was cultivated over time at The Daily Show.
With Stephen Colbert, the story is different, because Colbert is simply a different kind of cat, and always will be. Colbert hasn’t really taken Stewart’s formula so much as he’s remained his own man and added layers to it. Yet, The Daily Show was for many the introduction to Colbert and everything he could allow himself to become in front of a camera.
What is worth noting is that Colbert’s move to a different show hardly felt like a loss for Stewart — at least, Stewart never gave that impression on the air. Everything I’ve seen and read about the two men points to a rich and profound friendship. Their interactions during the hand-offs from Daily to The Colbert Report were always spiced with a sense of mischief and leavened with the underlying sense that this was all one big inside joke between the two men.
You do have to have a massive ego to be in this line of work, much as you have to own a similarly large ego in national politics or solo-athlete sports such as golf or tennis. You have to have an outsized belief in yourself and your capacities to do great things… people don’t attain those heights without the appetite and drive that propel them in the first place.
What is impressive about Jon Stewart is that for all the times his ego has spun wildly and alarmingly out of control — most conspicuously in the case of Wyatt Cenac, documented in recent weeks — he remains, on balance, the kind of entertainer who is happy to see the people he works with go on to bigger and better things. That Stephen Colbert and John Oliver are very probably better than Stewart as solo hosts of satirical programs could be seen as a diminishment of Stewart, but the verdict here is that it’s just the opposite.
Are you a bigger and better person if you’re the one standing on the shoulders of others, or if you’re providing the shoulders for successors to stand on? There’s a chicken-and-egg dimension to that question, but the key point to realize is that Stewart’s brand of humorous commentary is continuing with John Oliver, and has indirectly enabled Stephen Colbert to be in a position to potentially redefine late-night TV as we know it. Without The Daily Show, we wouldn’t see — or appreciate — that larger reach of influence in Stewart’s career.
His legacy is undeniably rich in terms of his own shows, performances, and responses to important moments in our culture and polity. Yet, Jon Stewart and his Daily Show have allowed American television viewers to see Stephen Colbert and John Oliver in fuller — and brighter, and better — lights.
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart is ending, but the man behind the program can know that his legacy lives, breathes and increases with each new edition of Last Week Tonight. It will expand even more when CBS formally inaugurates a new late-night era in September.
Living on after you or your program dies — isn’t that what we all want? Jon Stewart has that. He’s a talented man, but giving other talents a chance to shine even more brightly is the kind of contribution we should all want to make in our respective professions.
