On the day this column is published, we will be living our first day on the planet Earth after Jon Stewart finished his 16-year run on The Daily Show.
I’m going to presume that the world and its Internet are still standing.
A bold, perhaps foolhardy presumption to make, I know, but there it is.
For many, it may feel like this is the first time The Daily Show has existed without Stewart, but that’s if you don’t remember the show’s original, goofy, look-at-these-wackos incarnation with former SportsCenter anchor Craig Kilborn that aired from 1996-98.
The Daily Show began a year after Jon Stewart’s syndicated talk show, which I used to watch, was canceled. But The Daily Show became THE DAILY SHOW, revered institution of the sardonic liberal everywhere. When Stewart transformed from a thinking-man, Generation X, anti-bullshit ’90s comedian into a left wing America’s Crossfire-wrecking, civility-calling, most trusted newsman running a fake news show.
Because Stewart became a poster boy for a certain kind of pop-culture progressivism that often has felt very exclusively white to me, of people who want a world of racial equality without having to live side-by-side with people of color. Of a liberalism that is willing to cry out against economic exploitation and sexism without seeing much in the way of racial dimensions to those same issues.
Call it the racial bristle.
Something that gets the hackles up. Doesn’t necessarily mean that I dislike the person or their work (though sometimes it does), but a distance is created.
In pop culture, it’s when that person is held up as a universal good, even though their content is missing large segments of the population, and the experiences displayed are told as universal when they’re not.
While all of pop culture doesn’t have to be diverse, and can’t be, the weight of the film, TV, book and music industries being so stacked against people of color, that I just get tired sometimes. I like Wes Anderson’s movies, but I get tired of not seeing myself in them, you know?
That’s the racial bristle.
Women have a gender bristle, LGBT people have theirs as well.
The racial bristle is why Bernie Sanders, with all his insistence on economic injustice over racial injustice, isn’t rating well with black voters yet. I feel the bristle I hear when Annie Lennox cover “Strange Fruit” and won’t say it refers to lynching, or says Beyonce and twerking aren’t feminism.
Amy Schumer makes bad, lazy jokes regarding race from her stand-up to Trainwreck while being named the zeitgeist’s new top feminist for actually searing commentary on certain windows of gender issues?
Racial bristle.
And for me, Jon Stewart, as much as I’ve enjoyed his comedy over the years, also raised the racial bristle more times than I can count.
For a long time, The Daily Show didn’t do great in terms of racial and gender diversity, and greater discussion of racial issues or items in the news weren’t covered while the silliest crap on the planet got some mock-shine.
It got tougher to hear how The Daily Show was certain people’s most trusted source for news, when the show was comedy about the news. And it got harder to accept the it’s-all-absurd, cynical optimism of the show by which it almost felt dependent on government dysfunction to exist, let alone Stewart’s longstanding feud with Fox News. I’m grateful that he feuds with Fox News, but I couldn’t handle years and years of it.
For a bunch of years starting around 2010, I fell off from watching The Daily Show. I kept bristling even though the show remained funny.
Turns out, my racial bristle at The Daily Show was deeper than I thought, after Wyatt Cenac told a story on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast of when Jon Stewart yelled at him to “fuck off” after Cenac questioned the racial implications of Stewart’s Herman Cain impression.
As the only writer on the show who was a person of color, Cenac felt so deflated by Stewart’s actions that he left the office and cried.
I can relate.
Some stories have come out over the years about how Stewart treats his writers poorly, including during the Writer’s Strike in 2007, but this story was so bad that a producer from the show commented on it in apology.
The past few years got a lot better on The Daily Show, with an influx of talent and sharper political commentary on race issues as well as gender, including the intersection of the two. It was getting harder to ignore the racial climate in the country during Obama’s presidency.
With Jessica Williams, Aasif Mandvi, Al Madrigal, Trevor Noah and Larry Wilmore on the program, I started to watch again.
But something flipped during that time when I started watching The Daily Show regularly again. I was tuning in for the correspondents – John Oliver, Samantha Bee, Jason Jones and Kristen Schaal, too – more than for Stewart. His first-segment bits on the news, while still good, felt predictable. The mugging, the sophomoric puns, the yelling and casual swearing that befits a mid-Atlantic human.
Stewart looked tired.
When Stewart took a leave to direct the film Rosewater, John Oliver took his place.
Oliver’s nerdy, schoolteacher-ish energy combined with the rueful tone of humor of an Englishman who has seen his nation spent 70 years in steep decline. Oliver, despite years on the show, was fresh and invigorated in that fake-anchor’s chair.
I wanted more of Oliver. That’s when I knew it was time for Stewart to step away.
So I wasn’t surprised when Stewart announced in April that he was stepping down after 16 years.
It just felt like it was time. These past few months, Stewart has surged again with the finish line so close. And for a show that felt in the past like it was ducking race, Stewart has been coming at it head-on in this year of Black Lives Matter.
2015 has been an interesting year in pop culture, this age of Twitter, Internet clapbacks, political correctness and comedy, and minorities voicing how tired they are of the same old stuff. It’s a time when whiteness and maleness as the dominant defaults have been challenged fiercely in many permutations.
It’s fitting that this is the year when David Letterman retired and Mad Men ended in the same week of May, Larry Wilmore took over Stephen Colbert’s time slot, and Jon Stewart leaves his show in the hands of a black man after trying hard to hand it to a woman.
This moment in pop culture has been building for a few years now, and has seen diversity surge again on TV, with Shonda Rhimes’ empire and the phenomenon of Empire, along with Inside Amy Schumer, Broad City, Playing House, Orange Is The New Black, The Prancing Elites Project, Transparent and I Am Cait.
In print, we’ve seen backlash against Mark Waid and J.G. Jones’ Strange Fruit comic book, dust-ups over the Hugo Awards voters, Daniel “Lemony Snicket” Handler’s awful comments toward Brown Girl Dreaming author Jacqueline Woodson, Dr. V’s suicide after Grantland outed her as transgender for no good reason.
Pop music has gone through the Nicki Minaj-Taylor Swift spat and Iggy Azalea’s downturn, while also giving us Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly album featuring and protest anthem “Alright.”
In movies, we’ve seen Every Single Word, Patricia Arquette’s Oscar speech on the gender pay gap (and criticism by women of color of the get-behind-me approach of her feminism), the smearing of Selma and acclaim of Dope, the reframing of the Jurassic World script away from the lead female and kids being Chinese, to Emma Stone playing a multi-ethnic woman in Aloha.
The Daily Show hasn’t escaped this environment, either, as a bunch of successor Trevor Noah’s really bad jokes involving Jewish stereotypes and domestic violence were uncovered.
I don’t know what tone Noah will strike when he takes the chair this September. The Daily Show may be such an institution under Stewart’s path that the show can’t change much at all. Noah raises the racial bristle at times as well, as a foreigner disdainfully commenting on American blacks and American black culture to largely white audiences.
But Noah’s background as a mixed-race child in apartheid South Africa creates new perspectives and pathways to what could be some really bitter laughter. His international view could enliven him on discussing America’s news in the same way that it does for John Oliver on Last Week Tonight. As long as Comedy Central doesn’t pull a Conan O’Brien on Noah, we’ll see what happens.
And that’s what makes this new day, a day without Stewart hosting The Daily Show, so appealing.
We get to try again. We get to see the show change again.
Frankly, I won’t miss Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. You know when it’s time for someone new and something else. I felt it, and Stewart did too.
But, I appreciate that he was here nonetheless.
