Jon Stewart will return to ‘The Daily Show’ as a weekly guest host

A familiar face will return to the Daily Show next month: Comedy Central has announced that Jon Stewart will soon guest host weekly.

Stewart will kick off as Monday host of the Daily Show on Feb. 12. The weekly gig will go on through the 2024 elections, according to Comedy Central. It’s a throwback for Stewart, who spent 16 years hosting the show from 1999 until 2015. Off-air, he’ll also return to executive producing the program.

In a statement, Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios CEO Chris McCarthy called Stewart “the voice of our generation.” During this time of political turmoil,” he added, Stewart is “the perfect person to puncture the empty rhetoric and provide much-needed clarity with his brilliant wit.”

The news comes on the heels of the 25th anniversary of Stewart’s hosting debut. His initial run on the Daily Show changed the course of late-night TV, as Los Angeles Times deputy editor for arts and entertainment, Matt Brennan, recently told NPR’s Andrew Limbong.

“Stewart took the sort of style of sitting at the desk and – which had already existed – and he focused it on politics and the news and the media in a way that hadn’t been done before, and then spawned so many imitators that I think it now qualifies as a subgenre,” Brennan said. “Folks like Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Samantha Bee, all of whom came up under Stewart, then launched their own shows with a similar kind of style but their own bent on it. And now that kind of news satire is a familiar part of American culture in a way that it was not in 1999.

The Daily Show has not had a permanent host since Trevor Noah’s departure in 2022 and is expecting a rotating roster of correspondents, in addition to Stewart, to host through November. Most recently, Stewart led The Problem with Jon Stewart on Apple TV+ until its ultimate cancelation. [Copyright 2024 NPR]