Jon Stewart’s vaudevillian genius

By Tom Shone

There’s been a demob-happy, end-of-school looseness to Jon Stewart as he counts down to his final “Daily Show” on Thursday night. For one thing, he has been blowing kisses to Donald Trump with undisguised glee, not just for being a gift from the gods—“comedy entrapment” as he put it—but for helping to push him across the finishing line. Doing a bit on Mike Huckabee’s characterisation of Obama’s Iran deal as marching Israel “to the door of the oven”, Stewart bypassed words altogether, miming slack-jawed amazement, eye-popping incredulity and Scooby-Doo befuddlement (“Urrgh?”) in what amounted to a small masterclass of silent clowning. The idea seemed to come from Stewart’s dismay at having to write another eye-rolling commentary for another burst of Republican crazy-talk, depletion forcing further invention from him. Exhausted, he still riffs, in part because exhaustion is the correct response to a country in which a deal aimed at limiting the spread of nuclear weapons is compared to the Holocaust.

American pop-culture success is dependent on doing two things extremely well: a very complicated thing and a very simple thing. The complicated thing that Stewart did well has been the subject of the many tributes comparing him to Edward R. Murrow and A.J. Liebling. Stewart combed the pronouncements of America’s public figures, painstakingly researched their inconsistencies, teased out their humbug in video montages that made their hypocrisy seem almost self-evident, then sat in frank amazement at the low-hanging fruit with which he seemed to have been presented. By the end, so primed were the audience for his mugging that he shaved it down to the most minimal of expressions: a cocked eyebrow, a look of deadpan despair, a jowly double take. Like Sloppy in Dickens’s “Our Mutual Friend”, he could “do the police in different voices”, tending to a small barnyard of favourite impressions. He reduced Dick Cheney to a single quack, Bush to a Mutley-esque laugh (“heh-heh-heh”) and Trump to a De Niro-esque New Joisey thug.