What Happened to Jon Stewart?
variety.comDaniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticThe most surprising thing about Jon Stewart’s recent defense of the comic and podcaster Joe Rogan might have been that it made waves at all.Stewart, on a podcast affiliated with his Apple TV Plus series “The Problem With Jon Stewart,” called the reaction to claims Rogan has made about COVID-19 vaccines “a mistake.” Stewart compared Rogan, the podcaster and comic, to “dishonest, bad actors,” and said that identifying such people “is so much more important to me.” He added, “You have to engage.
Like, how do you not engage with people? The whole point of engagement is, hopefully, clarification… It might be a fool’s errand, but I will never give up on engagement.” This argument brought Stewart — a discourse-shifting TV icon in his time as host of “The Daily Show,” and a figure who has lately struggled to break into the conversation — back into the news.
But Stewart making the point that engagement is deeply necessary feels off, or as though he isn’t aware of his own past five or six years.
Stewart retired from “The Daily Show” in 2015; his first splashy public act after that was releasing the movie he wrote and directed, “Irresistible” in 2020. (HBO and Stewart mutually walked away from a planned animation project in 2017.) To borrow Stewart’s phrasing, during a time when identifying dishonest, bad actors was as urgently necessary as any in recent American history, Stewart chose to give up on engagement, making his statements now feel hollow at best.To be clear: People in the public eye have every right to take breaks and to come back when they have something to say.
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