Portside

Few genres on television are more reliably disappointing than cable news and the late-night talk show. One delivers very little news; the other delivers very little pleasure. Yet when, sixteen years ago, the comedian Jon Stewart took over “The Daily Show,” he did something radical: he took the two formats and reformatted them, creating a series that was not merely useful and funny but emotionally powerful.

In Stewart’s hands, “The Daily Show” levelled up, from a program that resembled “Weekend Update”—a delivery device for over-it potshots—to a consistently scathing and original media critique. For young viewers in particular, “The Daily Show” provided a more trustworthy daily news summary than almost any show on Fox News or CNN (a low standard, admittedly). But Stewart’s series also provided a psychic salve, especially during the worst parts of the past few elections and the run-up to the Iraq War. If you were driven nuts by the twenty-four-hour shouters, if you couldn’t bear to watch any more flashing chyrons and Sam the Eagle gravitas, here was your catharsis. Like “Get Your War On,” David Rees’s post-9/11 comic strip, “The Daily Show” became a gathering place for the disenchanted—a place that let viewers know they weren’t crazy.

For Democrats, the final run of Jon Stewart, along with the retirement of the meta-version of Stephen Colbert (whose creator is now headed for David Letterman’s desk), is a loss. By stealing the role of the class clown from Rush Limbaugh and the like, Stewart and his cadre rebranded left-wing politics as sharp and outrageous, the hipper way to see the world. Over the years, Stewart changed, too, from a leather-jacketed Gen X wisecracker, into the equivalent, for many viewers, of Walter Cronkite. His brand was decency. For his generational cohort, those Olympic champions of eye-rolling, Stewart was a valuable corrective: he revived the notion that satire might be an expression of anger or sadness, the product of high standards, not a nihilistic game for know-it-alls.

Early on, Stewart had a habit of making “little me” remarks, in which he’d shrug off his own influence. Such poor-mouthing never suited him, particularly as he began blurring boundaries, jumping from the fake fake news to the real fake news, visiting “Crossfire” to beg the talking heads to “stop hurting America.” (It must have been the cherry on the top of Stewart’s career to see that show cancelled, twice.)

To some critics, this type of behavior turned him into a sanctimonious scold. (As Will Rogers put it, “A humorist entertains, and a lecturer annoys.”) Others, including Jamelle Bouie, in Slate, argued that Stewart’s show was not galvanizing viewers but in fact sedating them: watching the host vent about hypocrisy was enough social action for the day. Bouie, an early fan of “The Daily Show,” attended Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear,” where he was frustrated to hear Stewart reduce Washington gridlock, in his speech, to “a case of bad manners and not deep-seated ideological differences about government and its place in the world.” Bouie felt let down: in his eyes, Stewart was not wrestling with complicated ideas but suggesting that debate itself was a dead end.

The truth is that Stewart was often at his most exciting when he got down in the dirt, instead of remaining decent and high-minded, your twinkly-eyed smartest friend. Five years ago, when he confronted MSNBC’s financial reporter Jim Cramer over his coverage of Wall Street, Stewart refused to be collegial. He nailed Cramer on his manipulations, airing clip after damning clip, and shouting “Roll 212!” with prosecutorial glee. He was a good interviewer with people he admired, but in some of the show’s most memorable segments he relied on search technology—in particular, his staff’s ability to cull clips and spin them into brutal montages—to expose lies that might have gone unremarked upon. Over time, he became not merely a scourge of phonies but the nation’s fact checker, training others in the craft. You can see that influence not only among hosts who started out on “The Daily Show,” including Colbert, John Oliver, and Larry Wilmore, but everywhere online. Twitter, on its best nights (and they do exist, doubters), can feel like a universe of sparkling mini-Stewarts, cracking wise but also working to mob-solve the latest crisis, and providing access to a far wider array of perspectives than any one comic could.

That kind of digging, of disrespecting authority, was a model for reinventing journalism, not comedy. In recent years, it became hard to distinguish Stewart from, say, the liberal cable anchor and jokester Rachel Maddow, separated as they were by a thin wall of genre. Last week, when the NBC anchor Brian Williams was suspended, after exaggerating stories about a helicopter incident in Iraq, the Internet began to joke that he should just switch places with Stewart, “Freaky Friday” style. It was easy to imagine Williams behind Stewart’s desk: he’s a funny, charismatic guy. But it was unnerving to imagine Stewart as the anchor on the nightly news. What would it mean to get Jon Stewart’s vision of journalism straight, no chaser?

In his announcement that he was stepping down, Stewart told the audience that he didn’t want to force it to deal with a host who was checked out. He did seem unhappy at times, toward the end, as if bored by his own agility. There’s a long history of comics who rose to fame as truthtellers—from Lenny Bruce to Dave Chappelle—and then burned out or fled the scene. In an episode of the British sci-fi television show “Black Mirror,” titled “The Waldo Moment,” Daniel Rigby, playing a comedian on a nightly satirical show, is the voice behind Waldo, a foulmouthed cartoon bear who mocks politicians. When his producers suggest that Waldo intervene in an electoral campaign, the comedian, horrified, blurts out, “I’m not dumb or clever enough to be political.” He understands that the hazard he faces is a moral one: when you’re protected by the screen of deniability called a joke, it’s tempting to view the whole world as a game of gotcha.

Stewart’s gift was that he didn’t fall into that trap—he grew more attached to reality, not less, over the years. Rather than keep his persona under careful control, he risked naïveté and earnest anger. It will be interesting to see what he creates, once he steps from behind the desk: more serious movies, like “Rosewater,” the one he recently wrote and directed? Investigative documentaries? Books? If he’s no longer the hippest figure on the scene, that’s not so bad. There’s something to be said for losing your cool. ?

Emily Nussbaum is the television critic for The New Yorker.