Is Jon even funny anymore?

It seems Jon Stewart really regretted retiring from the Daily News early.  To think he missed out on Trump's previous two runs for president while he was busy pushing legislation on Capitol Hill that would help veterans suffering from Gulf War Syndrome and surviving first responders of 911.  Those were noble causes but apparently not enough for Jon, as he is back at The Daily Show offering us his weekly take on Indecision 2024.

I've tried to watch him but there is only so much of his smug persona that I can take.  I don't remember him being that smug before.  Maybe he was, but now it is insufferable.  Those long pauses after each punchline as if to say come on laugh, I know you can, and the audience duly responds.  He froze so long after one punchline that I thought he might be having a stroke.  He snapped out of it and reminded a member of his audience that he didn't have to pay to get in.  A good thing.

There was a time I would have paid to see Jon Stewart but not anymore.  His delivery is flat, the jokes stale, and nothing behind his commentaries to pack any real punch.  John Oliver has far outdown him on Last Week Tonight with his funny and often pithy commentaries that sum up the week's major events.  Why he didn't take over The Daily Show after Jon left, I have no idea.  Instead, Oliver gravitated to HBO where he has been regaling us the past ten years with his weekly show that often takes deep dives into pressing issues like painkillers, corporations buying up trailer parks, and what happened to the translators from Afghanistan and Iraq after the wars.  By contrast, Stewart does little more than off-the-cuff comments about what he observed last week on television.  Kind of like Mystery Science Theater 3000 for news junkies.

John Oliver had tried to avoid Trump, as much as he could anyway, but you have to cover him because he says so much stupid shit you need to fact check him from time to time.  By contrast, Jon Stewart has pretty much left Trump off the hook.  He went after Biden from day one, scribbling away at his faux news desk as he still mocks John Kerry 20 years later.  This resulted in a backlash from his primarily Democratic audience.  He offered no mea culpa.  Instead, he smiled smugly and reminded everyone this is a comedy show.

It was the same back in 2004 when he went on Crossfire and gave his memorable response to Tucker Carlson when asked why he didn't play hardball with John Kerry when he had the chance.  After all, Jon had criticized the media for playing nerf football with Kerry, who was running for president against George "Dubya" Bush.  Jon smugly responded, isn't that your job?

Fair enough, but these "comedy shows" tackle serious issues and elections, so they do owe some adherence to what little is left of the Fairness Act from 1954.  Oliver does this.  Stewart does not.  There is little if any context to his jokes.  Not that he has any real fear of being sued since he isn't battling big corporations the way Oliver does on his program.  But, a little context wouldn't hurt.  

The flippant comments have become tiresome, especially when he wouldn't let go of the age issue concerning Biden.  He tried to play it off by saying how old he looked now compared to what he looked like when he first took over the show in 1999.  He missed the irony that he chose to come back to the show after his retirement, not much unlike Joe's 2020 run.  I suppose he thought only he could do The Daily Show right.

Joe is "demonstrably old," as he repeatedly quipped, but so is Trump.  If Americans were so eager to have younger candidates they would have voted for them in 2016 and 2020 when they had the chance.  Those were primaries with over 20 candidates to choose from.  Yet, somehow we ended up with the septuagenarians.  I think it would have been more funny to explore why Americans have this obsession with granddads?  The independent alternatives are all over 70 as well.  As much as I watched of his show (admittedly not much), I didn't see any such commentary.  Only how old Joe was and why should we have to bear his haggard visage a second time around?  Let's just trade him for another haggard visage.

Well, all that changed when Joe decided to withdraw from the race on July 21.  While there had been rampant speculation for a month that he would, it still seemed to catch everyone by surprise, even Jon Stewart.  He was a good sport about it, calling the move "legend" on X,  and leaving it open to interpretation until his next podcast.  

Watching the podcast, you see how much Jon needs writers to pull off his Daily Show.  He's even more off the cuff here, unable to come up with the words to capture the moment, making you wonder if maybe he needs to take a cognitive test himself.  Here was Jon criticizing the media for feeding the speculation surrounding Biden's surprise withdrawal, yet he was feeding it just as much on his weekly show and podcasts.  Not much self-reflection here.

I suppose that comes with having been such a dominant television personality for so many years.  You don't feel like you have to answer to anyone.  Makes me think of Jerry Seinfeld, who has been steadily losing his audience ever since he decided to return to television with all his off-the-cuff comments concerning "wokeness."  Even Julia Louis-Dreyfus took exception to Jerry's woke rants, saying "that's bullshit!"

One of Jon's old segments was "Bullshit Mountain," which grew out of a leaked tape from the 2012 election where Mitt Romney called 47 percent of Americans a bunch of loafers dependent on federal government.  Each week, Jon would assail the most audacious claims made on television.  It was vintage Jon Stewart, but that Jon Stewart is gone.

His weekly harangues lack any real punch and leave me wondering what happened to him.  His attempt to cover the Democratic National Convention was bad.  In fishing for anything to make fun of, he settled on the sharp contrasts in speakers over the course of the four-day event and mused how there wasn't time to have a Palestinian-American speaker.  They had just about everyone else.  This was in reference to the ongoing protest outside the United Center in Chicago calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.  Jon poked fun at how the Democrats were both for peace and lethal force, showing a clip of Leon Panetta describing that fateful night Obama decided to launch the assault on bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad.  He felt there wasn't enough criticism of the war in Gaza.  Yada yada yada, he smugly went on.  It is a comedy show but even his studio audience seemed confused by what he was trying to say.  Honestly, I don't think Jon knew himself.  It was if his writers were still on strike and he had to wing it like one of his podcasts.

I suppose he feels Trump is old hat.  It's more fun to poke the Democrats.  Give them a taste off their own medicine.  Like Trump, he hasn't quite figured out what to make of Kamala, but at least he isn't purposely mispronouncing her name.  He tried to make fun of one speaker garbling a line of how Kamala calls her best friends on her birthday.  "Her birthday," Jon facetiously asked?  "Hey girl, it's Kamala, anything you have to say to me?"  Okay ... I can't quite call Jon a boomer, as he is a Gen X'er like myself, but he sure is acting like a disgruntled boomer.  

To be fair, he had "fun" with the Republican Convention as well.  Of course there was much more to work with like Marjorie Taylor Greene's attempt to pitch unity to the convention delegates and Ron Johnson's memorable "wrong speech."  But, you don't get much pushback teasing, or is it triggering the Republicans.  It's more fun to trigger the Democrats.  They let their feathers get ruffled more easily these days and so Jon duly obliges.  Some conservative pundits even wonder if Jon has flipped, stealing a few of his Democratic barbs.  Well, no, but he has become an equal opportunity comedic pundit.

Adhering to the Fairness Act?  No on that too.  Comedians have long felt they are above any reproach as they are purveyors of satire and therefore should not be held accountable for their acts.  We see this quite often today as everyone from John Cleese to Jerry Seinfeld blabbers on about wokeness taking the punch out of comedy.  Jon hasn't quite gone that far, making fun of these anti-woke comedians as well.  I suppose he wants to maintain the show's tie to the Gen Z and Millennial audience that Trevor Noah had cultivated while he was gone.  It seems more about positioning. 

The schtick worked while Biden was still in the race as most of his young viewing audience was just as tired of Biden as they were Trump.  But, now he has Kamala to deal with.  So far he has been positive, reacting more to what people are saying about her than what she says herself, but you get the feeling that won't last long.  One false move and he will pounce, as he so often does, hoping to squeeze as much comedic mileage out of it as he can.  

Unfortunately, the bite just isn't there.  It's like one of those sitcom reunions.  You want to laugh.  The gang is all back but they just don't seem that funny anymore.