I can still remember where I was the first time I watched an episode (or, more accurately, a clip) of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I was 14 or 15 years old and seated cross-legged in my bed, attempting the grown woman’s task of plucking my own eyebrows, when a segment of Stewart’s hilariously excoriating John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign came on. I watched the whole thing rapt, like a good ninth-grade liberal, then made my way to the Comedy Central website to watch more or less everything Stewart and his “best f*cking news team ever” had ever recorded.
Even as a weird, comedy-obsessed kid who should arguably have been socializing with her peers rather than observing a 50-year-old man inveigh against media hypocrisy, I could tell that Stewart was special. He was always prepared with the kind of riposte I wished I’d had ready when someone in class said something snotty, and while I now know a team of writers was behind his signature opening monologue, I still thought of him as something resembling God (if God wore a series of silly little suits). Despite all this adulation, though, I don’t remember ever being crushed out on Stewart. Granted, I was A) a closeted lesbian at the time and B) maybe associating him too closely with my dad (another acerbic, elegantly graying middle-aged Jew), but now that Stewart is back hosting the Daily Show on Mondays and thirst for him has erupted from all corners of the internet, I can’t help feeling like I’m out of step.
I can objectively see Stewart’s appeal in 2024 (I mean, the man looks good for 61; righteous anger seems to work wonders on the skin), but for a more fleshed-out explanation of why he’s captured the heart of so many, I turned to my friend Sophie Strauss, a stylist living in Los Angeles. “There was something very sexy and quite literal-daddy about watching somebody make sense of a confusing world when we were growing up, and do it in a way that was funny,” Strauss says. “I think the other thing about Jon Stewart versus somebody like Stephen Colbert is, he was never afraid to be caught being really sincere and genuine about the things that he felt strongly about. That was rare, especially at that time; maybe it’s more common now, but he was really unafraid of being emotional and getting heated about stuff, and I think that was sexy.” Another friend, whom I’m not naming due to the bawdy nature of her comment, describes her level of attraction to Stewart simply: “I would climb over his desk.”
