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One of the highlights of the 2023 Emmy Awards was comedian and former Daily Show correspondent Roy Wood Jr. taking the stage to celebrate the show’s Outstanding Variety Talk Series win and silently mouthing, “Please hire a host. We don’t care which host, just hire a host.” The Daily Show has been employing a carousel of temporary guest hosts since Trevor Noah’s departure in December 2022, and Wood, who was in the running for the vacant chair, opted to leave the show in October 2023 rather than wait around for Comedy Central to make a decision. Perhaps this public shaming was the final push Comedy Central needed to get its act together, because on January 24, the network announced its next step for the show — and it includes the return of former host Jon Stewart.
Starting February 12, Stewart, who hosted the show for 16 years before passing the torch to Noah in 2015, will host The Daily Show every Monday to see the show through to the end of the 2024 election cycle. The show’s team of correspondents will share hosting duties for the rest of each week. Stewart will also serve as an executive producer and help the show decide on a new, more permanent direction.
“Jon Stewart is the voice of our generation, and we are honored to have him return to Comedy Central’s The Daily Show to help us all make sense of the insanity and division roiling the country as we enter the election season,” Chris McCarthy, president and CEO of Showtime and MTV Entertainment Studios, said in a release. “In our age of staggering hypocrisy and performative politics, Jon is the perfect person to puncture the empty rhetoric and provide much-needed clarity with his brilliant wit.”
Stewart has been a free agent ever since October 2023, when his Apple TV+ talk show The Problem With Jon Stewart was canceled, reportedly due to creative differences between the host and the tech giant. We’re currently counting down the days until the next major awards show where Wood takes the stage to see what he thinks of Comedy Central’s new solution.