Jon Stewart’s Final ‘Daily Show’: Our Moment of Zen
After 16 years of being mad as hell, Jon Stewart finally doesn’t have to take it any anymore. On his emotional farewell to The Daily Show, he didn’t even try to hide his relief that he can now go entire weeks at a time without watching Fox News. The last shebang had a roll call of Daily Show superstars, along with Bruce Springsteen doing “Land of Hope and Dreams.” John McCain said, “So long, jackass.” (All these years later and McCain still can’t keep his Nineties MTV comedy bros straight — Jackass was Johnny Knoxville, MTV Sports was Stewart, or wait, wasn’t that Dan Cortese?) Craig Kilborn, a man who has exhibited astounding restraint and discipline lately, said, “I knew you’d run this thing into the ground.” “It’s a pause in the conversation,” Stewart said. “So rather than saying ‘goodbye’ or goodnight, I’m just gonna say I’m gonna get a drink. And I’m sure I’m gonna see you guys before I leave.”
That’s the line you say at at a party — or a comedy club — when you’re ditching your crew and making a stealth exit. And Stewart spent his final days beefing up his connections to stand-up comedy, rather than politics. His final-week guests could have been a parade of A-list politicos, but instead Stewart called on Amy Schumer, Denis Leary and Louis C.K., as well as making a surprise stand-up appearance at an NYC club. That was a retiring politician’s last visit to his old precinct, just to make sure the locals remember his name before he returns as a civilian. In a weird way, the scene it evoked was George H.W. Bush on Election Day 1992, when he made an excursion to a sporting-goods store to buy some fishing equipment.
When Clinton won that night, Bush announced he was “going heavily into the grandchild business,” and so is Jon Stewart — except his home precinct is the comedy club, where you get your laugh and drink your drink and don’t have to spend every waking minute thinking about Trump. The fact that several of the world’s most awful white men staged the GOP debate on the same night was a great joke in itself — Stewart looked delighted he never has to think up a 10,000th way to take the piss out of any of them.
Like so many things that started up in the Nineties, The Daily Show was a gift from Bill Clinton. There was no Eighties equivalent, because that would have required people to feel a bemused disgust for Reagan, who was strictly a love-or-hatred president. But Bill Clinton was to bemused disgust what FDR was to cigarette smoke — he rolled around all day in a cloud of that shit, because he loved the smell. He was the politician Jon Stewart was born to make fun of, except he was gone before Stewart really had the chance. His job got nastier because America did; he had to surrender his bemused disgust and get meaner. So he spent all those years with the smoldering resentment of a guy who clearly wished he had a funnier bunch of enemies to make jokes about. His job got less fun because America did.
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