Walking into the 11th Avenue studio of “The Daily Show” on Tuesday night was instantly an odd experience. Typically, recordings for the Comedy Central staple are crackling with energy. People talk and laugh, quoting late night jokes or comparing their list of favorite correspondents. But on election night, the queue crowd wasn’t excited so much as tense as it filed in around 10:15 p.m. ET, when the first results were showing a lean in Donald Trump’s direction.
It was a feeling that continued throughout the hourlong live special. What started as a fun way to spend the evening morphed into something akin to taking a sick dog to the park for one last game of fetch as the results came in. But the mounting dread permeating the studio audience highlighted one key insight: we still need Jon Stewart, perhaps now more than ever.
Of course, this unease had little to do with the actual show. There’s no question “The Daily Show” in its current form has a strong team, and it was a rare treat to see them all perform together, something that happened for perhaps the first time all season.
The series took care to embrace the strengths of each of member of the News Team. Jordan Klepper, who spent much of 2024 on the road covering various Trump rallies, pretended to rush back to New York from Pennsylvania with suitcase in tow. His sketch was short but served as a pointed reminder of the impressive on-the-ground work he’s been doing for years.
Michael Kosta, who typically embodies the role of comedic straight man when he hosts, embraced his silly side. Channeling Steve Kornacki he supplied Stewart with a series of useless meters and graphics, such as the Kamala-o-meter and an electoral map that made states kiss.
Ronny Chieng put his aggressive brosona to good use in a recurring bit that saw him bullying undecided voters. As for Desi Lydic, she got the biggest applause of any correspondent during the evening, and that was before she repeatedly screamed “F–k you” and chugged a bottle of wine.
Correspondents Troy Iwata, Grace Kuhlenschmidt and Josh Johnson also had fun moments throughout the evening, but theirs tended to be more generic rather tuned to their specific comedic style.
But even this reunion and Stewart’s ever-changing list of best friends couldn’t shake the charged sense of doom that slowly infiltrated the special. As the event wore on, the applause between each commercial break started to feel more forced. Similarly, Stewart’s jokes about how no one in the room knew what was happening — an observation that earned a great deal of nervous laughter at the start of the night — brought out fewer and fewer chuckles.
To his credit, Stewart tried to keep the energy up. Repeatedly, Stewart padded out the program with victories he knew his Democrat-leaning audience would enjoy, such as Kamala Harris taking New Jersey and New York. After announcing that Democrat Angela Alsobrooks won the Senate seat in Maryland, Stewart even acknowledged the strategy, saying that they tried to include “some that you like.”
This almost fatherly reassurance continued when the cameras weren’t rolling. Stewart started the show by asking his studio audience if they had anything they wanted to ask him. A question about his voting plan caused Stewart to reveal he brought Dunkin Munchkins to the poll workers and earned several glares from the citizens of his largely red town. When the studio played Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” during a commercial break to keep up the energy, the audience sang “Ay ay ay,” a moment that delighted Stewart so much, he mentioned it on air. Later when Aerosmith’s “Dream On” played, the late night host and occasional drummer played the beat of the song on his desk.
But all the excitement and hype up music in the world couldn’t change the fact that Stewart was performing in front of a room of mostly liberals as a second Donald Trump presidency became more and more of a possibility. In the final three minutes of the special, Stewart made it clear why Tuesday night marked his fifth time hosting a live election special and why “The Daily Show” can’t seem to quit him.
Initially, he chronicled some of the biggest sweeping statements pundits made in elections past — like the notion that we were moving to a “post-racial America” in 2008 — all of which were proven to be wrong. As he continued his closing remarks, the studio audience fell silent.
“My point is this: F–k!” Stewart screamed. “But this isn’t the end! I promise you, this is not the end. And we have to regroup, and we have to continue to fight and continue to work day in and day out to create the better society for our children, for this world, for this country that we know is possible. It’s possible.”
After the credits rolled, Stewart then addressed the studio audience directly. He thanked them for being part of this experience and providing him and his team “a beautiful distraction” on a night he would have been tempted to throw things at his TV. He then assured the audience that we all will continue the process of “digging ditches for democracy.”
And that was it. The doors to the studio opened, people started to anxiously turn their phones back on around 12:15 a.m. ET only to find that Trump was even more ahead and a daze fell over the crowd, the sort of feeling that can only exist when excitement meets dread.
From start to finish, “The Daily Show” never promised to be the most accurate way to watch the 2024 election. But led by Stewart’s earnest looks and the entire team’s curse-filled exclamations, in some bizarre way it did feel like one of the most emotionally honest ways for a Democrat to experience the historic event. “The Daily Show” under Stewart has always managed to go beyond the surface level, offering an often unseen combination of boundless empathy with sharp, well-researched criticism. The series’ election night special offered the best of those qualities even as it documented what may prove to be one of the worst times for liberals.
This is all to say, thank God Stewart will still be hosting through 2025. The country’s going to need some laughter and empathy to handle what’s coming next.
