The new Daily Show host, Trevor Noah (above), is smooth and charming, but he hasn’t found his edge. Here is a brief excerpt from an article by James Parker for The Atlantic. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
Photo Credit: Evan Agostini / Invision / AP
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It’s a psychic law of the American workplace: By the time you give your notice, you’ve already left. You’ve checked out, and for the days or weeks that remain, a kind of placeholder-you, a you-cipher, will be doing your job. It’s a law that applies equally to dog walkers, accountants, and spoof TV anchormen. Jon Stewart announced that he was quitting The Daily Show in February 2015, but he stuck around until early August, and those last months had a restless, frazzled, long-lingering feel. A smell of ashes was in the air. The host himself suddenly looked quite old: beaky, pique-y, hollow-cheeky. For 16 years he had shaken his bells, jumped and jangled in his little host’s chair, the only man on TV who could caper while sitting behind a desk. Flash back to his first episode as the Daily Show host, succeeding Craig Kilborn: January 11, 1999, Stewart with floppy, luscious black hair, twitching in a new suit (“I feel like this is my bar mitzvah … I have a rash like you wouldn’t believe.”) while he interviews Michael J. Fox.
Was he leaving us now? Really? Deserting us just as the gargantuan shadow of the Trump campaign, that neo-fascist bouncy castle, began to rise wobblingly over the country? Kick out the Mexicans. Ban the Muslims. Mock the disabled. Restore America. He’s saying what everybody thinks, we’re told. Indeed he is: Trump isn’t a demagogue; he’s a one-man mob. Now, right now, was when we needed Stewart, our great perforator of mental tyrannies. Who else could pick out the semitones in the hot comic drone of the Donald’s voice? Who else could puncture the ideological bloat? Who else could parse this phenomenon for us as it traveled from a joke to beyond a joke to…?
So fine then. Go. Say goodnight, Jon Stewart, and let’s have a look at the new guy. What’s his name? Trevor Noah. Who? Okay, he’s black, a 32-year-old comedian from South Africa, a sharp cultural operator in his own country (apparently) but a sweet naïf in this one. Hell of a gamble, Comedy Central. I salute you. And at first, yes, it was pleasant to see young Trevor smiling away and deeply dimpling in the Stewart seat, the seat that had lately grown gray hairs. He was fresh and he was sleek. The show’s format—the monologue delivered to the camera, then the segments with the correspondents, then the interview—was unchanged, and the writing hadn’t suffered appreciably since the handover. The idea seemed to be that Noah, while coyly advertising his outsider status (“Black Friday—or, as we call it back in Africa, Friday”), would simply and smoothly channel the geist of The Daily Show.
And he was handling it, bless him, handling the material, distributing rays of easy charm. The Trump gags sounded good in that clipped, musical South African accent, and they even had a new global vibe: Trump as “the perfect African president.” And that little TV blandishment that Stewart could never quite get comfortable with, the “We’ll be right back” at the end of a segment? It tripped off Noah’s tongue. His body language was relaxed; where the old guy had hunched over his desk, with satirical voltage crawling hairily out of his wrist-holes, the kid sat back and rode it. Triumph. Come to my arms, my beaming boy!
Slowly, though, it began to sink in: the dimension of our loss. Jon Stewart was gone—our sanity, our balance. This had of course been the 10‑ton irony of his career: In nuking the news-givers, petarding the pundit class, he became one of them—became, in fact, the pundit/news-giver for a generation of viewers. As far back as 1969, Renata Adler described “that natural creator of discontinuous, lunatic constituencies, the media.” In 1976, Paddy Chayefsky’s Network raised this perception to the level of prophecy, with a rained-on, mad-as-hell Howard Beale heralding the age of the crank with a microphone, the Great Splintering and the end of the singular, authoritative, Cronkitic voice. In 1994, the British show The Day Today, a fake news program, parodied with surreal brutality the style of the news, the noise of the news, news itself as a production. TV news should have been impossible after The Day Today, but naturally it wasn’t.
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James Parker is an Atlantic contributing editor. Please click here to check out his other articles.