You might have heard that President Joe Biden has been struggling to reach certain voters lately. It’s telling, though, that he hasn’t responded with an uptick in White House press conferences or by scheduling a sit-down with a star news anchor. In fact, instead of sitting for the traditional pre-Super Bowl presidential interview this year, Biden created a TikTok — and people hated it.
His next stunt makes more sense, in that it may have some goodwill from “Late Night with Seth Meyers” viewers. Biden joined Amy Poehler onstage for a “surprise” reunion honoring the show’s 10th anniversary; the two appeared on Meyers’ first late night almost to the day a decade ago.
Biden gamely joked about the “Dark Brandon” meme and his age versus that of his opponent, and maybe we would have been talking more about all that if he hadn’t already been upstaged by Dipper, Jon Stewart's dog.
Stewart ended his third Monday night broadcast since returning to “The Daily Show” by eulogizing his beloved three-legged pittie mix — tearfully, despite his strongest efforts to dam up that river.
Dipper, he explained to the audience, was “part of the OG Daily Show dog crew” who would wait for him offstage until each taping was done.
Dipper met every kind of famous person, Stewart said, including presidents and kings, which means he very well might have wagged his tail in Biden’s presence back when he was Barack Obama’s veep.
Jon Stewart remembers his best boy, Dipper. pic.twitter.com/S8p4nuOFZ5
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) February 27, 2024
“And he did what the Taliban could not do,” Stewart said, “which was put a scare into Malala Yousafzai.” At this, he rolled a clip of Dipper bounding down the hallway toward Yousafzai, who quite adorably said, “Oh dear, it's a dog!” before making an about-face to hide behind the “Daily Show” staffers.
In the days following, Stewart’s tribute to Dipper went viral, inspiring people to post photos of their beloved and departed pets. The Washington Post reported that Animal Haven, the New York City shelter from which Stewart and his family adopted Dipper 12 years ago, was flooded with more than $35,000 in donations.
Yousafzai, herself, offered sympathy on X, adding: “I know Dipper was a very good boy. I’ve gotten over my fear of dogs, and I hope you’ll have me back to meet your next pup.”
The days of presidential candidates touring late-night shows may not be over, but they’re certainly unnecessary. Donald Trump has Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson to give him a platform whenever he wants, and Biden’s performance on “Late Night” proved that he’s probably not up for much of a sparring match.
Though he’s made his share of jokes about the commander in chief, Meyers was gentle and genial, only pressing Biden on the Gaza war to the point of telling the president that he found the accounts and images coming out of the conflict to be horrifying.
One imagines Stewart wouldn't go so easily on Biden. If the president makes a stop at “The Daily Show,” which he should and likely will, odds are that would happen closer to the election, when everyone’s good and freaked out about the too-close-for-comfort polling numbers.
Stewart isn’t likely to mellow between now and then, but he'll have logged enough Monday telecasts for people to better appreciate his evolution into a personality versed in the human side of headlines resulting from crises.
So far, this approach is resonating. Viewership for Stewart's Monday night episodes is up, with 2.44 million total viewers watching his Feb. 19 episode, a 48% increase from the 1.65 million-strong audience who tuned in for his return, according to Nielsen live plus three-day numbers reported by The Wrap.
The Stewart of yesteryear radiated passion, frustration and outright anger in witnessing and analyzing systemic failures of every kind, particularly in politics and the media. His two recent broadcasts revisited a couple of those greatest hits: Twenty years ago, Stewart eviscerated Carlson, Mortal Kombat-style ("Flawless victory! Fatality!"), on CNN’s “Crossfire.”
On Feb. 19, he leapt for Carlson's exposed jugular again, this time concerning the full body massage the former Fox News host provided to Russian President Vladimir Putin in a sit-down interview posted on X. (Putin went on to tell a Russian interviewer that Carlson was a letdown: “To be honest, I thought he would be more aggressive and ask tough questions,” the strongman scoffed.)
Last Monday’s introduction subtly nodded toward a 2014-era “Daily Show” bit, in which the correspondents bellowed at Stewart’s every mention of Israel and Palestine. Stewart began the segment with a faux nervous disclaimer, acknowledging that there were only so many yuks one can wring out of circumstances related to the horror of asymmetrical warfare.
Hussain and Rosenberg forged a friendship through a dialogue that began as a social media shouting match between opposing viewpoints, which Stewart opined made them better and more accessible experts than he.
All of Stewart’s guests over his first three weeks back behind the desk have been either journalists or academics. Constitutional experts and law professors Melissa Murray and Kate Shaw were his second broadcast's guests, following the editor-in-chief of The Economist, Zanny Minton Beddoes, who joined him for his first show back in the host’s chair.
Stewart understands the power he wields with this platform; more to the point, he gets what this platform can do through his presence. His exchange with Hussain and Rosenberg promoted the humanity in these debates instead of turning them into a battle of statistics: These are people who have lost family and friends in this war and aren’t inclined to purely intellectualize the whys and hows of it. He pontificated, and they filed down that sharpness respectfully.
At one point, Hussain mentioned his ability to compartmentalize his emotions in these conversations to some extent, to which Stewart responded by talking about our cavalier view of war as it’s filtered through the news cycle.
This brings us back to Dipper and the outpouring of sympathy the public directed toward the host and, without him asking, the largesse bestowed upon Animal Haven.
In the best of times, people have a soft spot for pet stories. Indeed, if you want company for your heartbreak, announce your animal companion’s death on a social media platform.
When Biden was running four years ago, the Democrats sold him as a man of the people who understood grief, which is at odds with the man who last Monday told reporters over a scoop of ice cream that he expected a ceasefire in Gaza within a week before joshing around with Meyers on his show.
Right now, the public is zeroed in on Biden’s age and his mental acuity, but there will come a point at which his empathy becomes as vital of a test of his leadership capabilities.
The scale of our reaction to Stewart’s loss further demonstrates the sorrow and unrest gripping us right now. Sometimes, he’ll also mention the work he has done on Capitol Hill on behalf of veterans and first responders, which he dug into more deeply on “The Problem with Jon Stewart.”
That Stewart wept on air for the loss of his best friend is to be expected, even as he mightily tried to be the consummate pro and not break. That type of grief is close to the surface, one kind of sadness piled atop many, the same as the rest of us.
The experts who Stewart brings on his broadcasts help us to make sense of the unfathomable, which he jazzes up as well as he can with a bit of comedic seltzer here and there. But the main attraction to his "Daily Show" broadcasts is his unvarnished fatigue at where our nation’s policies and politics have brought us.
It appears that Stewart wants us to understand and show some understanding toward “the other.” That is the interviewer you want to cross-examine Biden — and the one we hope he would want to square off with, too.
"The Daily Show" airs at 11 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays on Comedy Central and streams on Paramount+.
