‘Indecision 2024: Antiques Roadshow’: Grizzled, Gray-Haired Jon Stewart Spends Entire ‘Daily Show’ Return Roasting the Most Elderly Election in History
Last night, a shockingly silver, ever vulpine Jon Stewart returned to the Daily Show desk nine years after he left it, pointed to the deep lines that time carved into his face, and said of our two potential presidents for 2025, “Look at this. They wish.”
Just two and a half weeks ago, Comedy Central announced that, after an obnoxiously extended “search” for Trevor Noah’s replacement, the most popular host in Daily Show history would return to his old job once per week throughout the 2024 election cycle. This Monday marked the beginning of this flexible schedule semi-return to work, and Stewart spent his first 20 minutes back in the saddle with an uninterrupted rant about the state of America’s only two options for commander in chief come November.
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“What the fuck are we doing here, people?” Stewart asked his audience after pointing out how the 2024 presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden will feature the oldest combined age of the two leading candidates, beating the second-place mark set by Trump and Biden in 2020. This coming from the oldest host in Daily Show history whose runner-up is just 2015 Jon Stewart.
Stewart opened with a subtle dig on his old bosses at Apple TV+, referring to the sudden and untimely demise of The Problem with Jon Stewart and the circumstances surrounding the split by suggesting at the top of last night’s show, “Maybe we’ll talk about China, maybe we’ll talk about A.I.”
He also lobbed some surface-level topical jokes that typical of his previous tenure, including a bit about how Sunday’s Super Bowl offered no champion to the cultural conservatives who had spent the last two weeks politicizing the event. Stewart sarcastically called the city of San Francisco, “The People’s Communist Republic of Gay Pelosi-Stan.” But the biggest targets of Stewart’s return to The Daily Show were, of course, the presidential candidates and their respective fittingness for the position. Stewart mocked the Biden campaign’s confounding decision to use the fanfare of the Super Bowl to launch Biden’s TikTok account with a cringey video in which he awkwardly answered softball questions about the teams involved. Joked Stewart, “How do you go on TikTok and end up looking older?”
Stewart didn’t shy away from pressing on some of the biggest criticisms of Biden, especially the questions over whether Biden’s advanced age and declining mental faculties should preclude him from a second term. Stewart said that Biden and Trump are “both stretching the limits of being able to handle the toughest job in the world” as he challenged both elderly men’s memories and decision-making abilities. Stewart further attacked line-towers and media members on both sides of the aisle who would silence such discussions over mental fitness for men who are more than a decade past retirement age, saying, “What is crazy is thinking that we are the ones, as voters, who must silence concerns and criticisms. It is the candidate’s job to assuage concerns, not the voters’ jobs not to mention them.”
However, The Daily Show didn’t let Stewart off the hook for those same reasons — after some light teasing from Dulcé Sloan that suggested Stewart may be guilty of the same senior pride as the next president, Jordan Klepper came on the show to ask Stewart if his “90s brand of snark and both-siderism” had “saved democracy” yet.
