The New Anti-comedy of Jon Stewart

It seems obvious now, in hindsight, that people expected too much from comedy in the first two decades of the new millennium—that it could make us , make us , , , , even . Those were enticing ideas, but Jon Stewart never seemed to fall for them. His job was making a comedy show, as he essentially told Tucker Carlson during a 2004 appearance on CNN’s . Comedy is comedy, and news is news—one of those things is supposed to inform people accurately and impartially about the world, and the other is Laura Ingraham. But seriously, when wrapped up his 16-year run hosting Comedy Central’s , in 2015, dedicated to all of the things he’d supposedly “eviscerated” or “destroyed” or “annihilated,” including Fox News, racism, and the Islamic State. Despite all the breathless headlines, he said, “the world is demonstrably worse than when I started.”