Jon Stewart will make a surprising return to The Daily Show, 25 years after starting on the show. He will host the Comedy Central late-night show one night a week through the 2024 election cycle.
The news comes eight years after he stepped down from hosting the show, which revolutionized late-night television and brought through the likes of Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Samantha Bee and Steve Carell.
Deadline told you back in November that one of the ideas floated for a new host was to bring in a major name to front the show through the election. Stewart will host on Monday nights, which are believed to be the show’s most watched day and gives him plenty of news from the weekend to catch up.
For the other nights of the week, The Daily Show will be hosted by its correspondents, who include Desi Lydic, Michael Kosta and Ronny Chieng as well as Jordan Klepper. Last week, Deadline revealed that the show would lean into these correspondents, some of whom were in the middle of contract renegotiations.
Stewart will return on February 12. He also will exec produce every episode of the show through 2024 and 2025 to “shape” the next chapter of the franchise. This reunites him with showrunner and exec producer Jen Flanz, who started as a production assistant and has been with the show for more than 25 years. Stewart’s manager James “Baby Doll” Dixon also has been brought on as an exec producer.
The reason that Stewart is able to return to The Daily Show is that his Apple TV+ series The Problem with Jon Stewart was canceled by the streamer last year as a result of clashes between Stewart and the tech company over its coverage of stories around China and AI.
Stewart took over The Daily Show in January 1999 from Craig Kilborn, who had hosted the Comedy Central late-nighter from July 21, 1996. Stewart’s first guest was Michael J. Fox, promoting Spin City.
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart went on to win the Emmy for Outstanding Variety Series for 10 consecutive years from 2003-2012, before losing to The Colbert Report, a show that he exec produced, for a couple of years, and then coming back to win in 2015 in his final season.
The announcement gives a further boost for The Daily Show, which won its first Emmy under Trevor Noah’s charge last week, and comes as it has not had a permanent host for more than a year. Noah exited in December 2022.
Since then, the show has had 12 celebrity guest hosts: Leslie Jones, Wanda Sykes, D.L. Hughley, Chelsea Handler, Sarah Silverman, Hasan Minhaj, Marlon Wayans, Kal Penn, Al Franken, John Leguizamo, Desus Nice, Charlamagne Tha God and Michelle Wolf. Jones, Silverman, Penn and Charlamagne hosted twice.
There also were appearances behind the desk from news team correspondents including Roy Wood Jr. — who subsequently left the show — Kosta, Chieng, Klepper, Lydic and Dulce Sloan.
“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,” said Chris McCarthy, President/CEO of Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios. “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.”
