The problem with Jon Stewart is he hasn't evolved since The Daily Show as the world has outpaced him

Variety

"To be clear: People in the public eye have every right to take breaks and to come back when they have something to say," says Daniel D'Addario. "But watching Stewart’s attempted return to the limelight is an at-times-vicariously-embarrassing reminder that the audience has the right to move on, too. Stewart, at the peak of The Daily Show, was for his viewers a voice of reason and a reliable untruth detector. But the political response shifted during the Trump era, the years Stewart sat out, in massive ways, and Stewart has lately alternately assumed that his fandom is right where he left them or overcorrected in strident and odd ways." D'Addario adds: "The Trump phenomenon was one Stewart had, in leaving his show when he did, sidestepped. Which means that Stewart is in the happy position of having avoided the most painful and thudding types of resistance-adjacent comedy commentary that were thick on the ground in 2017 or so. It also means that Stewart has a high bar to clear when it comes to getting us to pay attention to him now. His engagement with politics has come to feel fair-weather, as if he is only interested in speaking when he can command the audience’s undivided attention. (One senses here the influence of onetime Stewart protégé John Oliver, who manages both to introduce new information to viewers and to engage with the news of the day on its own terms.) On The Problem, Stewart, freed from having to broadcast during a time of quite so endless breaking bad news as was the previous era, talks about whatever he wants. But once, speaking to an audience about what was on their minds, not his, was at least part of the brief." The Problem with Jon Stewart's "humor is halfhearted, barely there: The show relies on Stewart’s standing as a person to whom we inherently and reflexively pay attention," says D'Addario. "This no longer feels like the case — as viewership numbers are not available, we must rely on an ambient sense, and The Problem’s launch has not been what one might expect from the grand return of a superstar. Perhaps, unlike other kinds of hosts, political satirists depend both on matching the tenor of their times and on staying top-of-mind. Or perhaps attention is earned, and a political comic who took a hiatus through an ongoing political emergency is tapped out."