Good news for fans of Jon Stewart onThe Daily Show: the comedian revealed Sunday that he hopes to continue hosting the news satire program.
“We’re working on staying. Look, the other thing to remember is it’s not as clear cut as all that,” Stewart told editor David Remnick at the New Yorker Festival, per Deadline. “They’ve already done things that I’m upset about. But then if I had integrity, maybe I would stand up and go, ‘I’m out.’ Or maybe the integrity thing to do would be to stay in it and keep fighting in the foxhole.”
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He summed up his way of thinking about working for the newly merged company that combines Paramount and Skydance: “You don’t compromise on what you do, and you do it until they tell you to leave.”
Stewart began hosting The Daily Show in 1999 and departed in 2015, However, he returned in 2024 to regularly host episodes on Mondays and sometimes other days. But that contract expires at the end of the year.
The Emmy-winning host has been a standout voice of late-night this year, as late-night recently saw both the announced end of CBS’ Late Show franchise — The Late Show With Stephen Colbert will sign off in 2026 — and the temporary suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live over on ABC, following his comments about the death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, which took place amid an ongoing war of words with President Donald Trump.
In Stewart’s regular appearances on the Comedy Central series, he has not let up in mocking Trump or any other politician.
Comedian and activist Jon Stewart visits the White House in 2022.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
In a September episode after Kimmel was pulled, for instance, he took to referring to Trump as “father” and pledged to be “patriotically obedient,” faking smiles and gushing with compliments for those in power.
“I don’t know who this Johnny Drimmel Live on ABC character is, but the point is our great administration has laid out very clear rules on free speech,” Stewart said. “Now some naysayers may argue that this administration’s speech concerns are merely a cynical ploy, a thin gruel of a ruse, a smoke screen to obscure an unprecedented consolidation of power and unitary intimidation, principle-less and coldly antithetical to any experiment in a constitutional republic governance.”
Then he added, “Some people would say that. Not me, though. I think it’s great.”
