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One of the big winners of the first Presidential debate is Jon Stewart and “The Daily Show.” The Comedy Central originally saw its highest ratings in seven years thanks to Stewart’s live post-debate episode, TheWrap has exclusively learned.
Overall, the episode was the highest rated for “The Daily Show” since September of 2017. Its ratings were also 92% higher than those of an average episode hosted by Stewart (0.572 vs. 0.298). Additionally, the live episode saw the best share for “The Daily Show” since Stewart left the series in August of 2015. The share was up 62% compared to the average 2024 episode hosted by Stewart.
In total the episode was watched by 966K viewers live, outpacing the year-to-date Stewart average by 28%. It was also the No. 1 cable entertainment telecast on Tuesday among viewers aged 18 to 49. Socially, it garnered 2.8 million views and 517 thousand social interactions — the most for the show since 2022. When it came to social engagement, the episode surpassed fellow similar content from late night hosts Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert.
Stewart didn’t hold back when it came to addressing Tuesday night’s debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. He repeatedly mocked the former president for his baffling comments about people in Springfield eating pets and praised Harris for her answer on the issue of abortion.
“Holy s–t. She crushed it,” Stewart said during the live episode. “This is like one of those ‘Groundhog Day’ movies where you get to go back and fixed the bad way something happened earlier to the good way.”
Stewart also pressed back on Trump’s claims that he had nothing to do with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. “I had nothing to do with that, other than they asked me to make a speech. I showed up for a speech,” Trump said during the debate.
“You spent two months riling up your base that our country had literally been stolen from them through fraudulent means, that you could never even get a whiff of in a court of law, and let yourself just abuse them,” Stewart said in response. “You pressed on. You abused their trust. You showed up for a speech? You f–king tweeted, ‘Join me on Jan. 6, it will be wild.’” Watch the full monologue above.
