Much as they did with David Letterman before he bid farewell to late-night TV, the guests have tried to stop Jon Stewart from making a huge mistake.
Some have told him it's the exactly right time to leave because he's totally lost his stuff (Translation: Don't go!!!!). President Barack Obama volunteered an executive order. Denis Leary offered to just co-write the whole damn thing with Colin Quinn and Chris Rock for the bargain price of $25 million if Stewart would stay put.
But alas, the day that we've been dreading since he announced his intention to leave back in February is here. Tonight is the final episode of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.
The Emmy-winning Comedy Central institution will of course go on under the guidance of incoming host Trevor Noah, who is charming and brilliant and seems pretty funny. Meh. He'll be great. Whatever. We'll probably even watch and enjoy it.
But this is the end of an era, one that we would have been perfectly happy living in until...well, forever.
Aside from the fact that the 52-year-old comedian, auteur and family man is gleefully jumping ship just as the races for the Republican and Democratic presidential nominations are really getting going, even at the 11th hour it remains hard to fathom the pothole-pocked TV-news landscape without Stewart's increasingly expert stewardship.
"Increasingly" being the operative word, because the Big Daddy and Death to Smoochy actor didn't start out being the go-to guy for common sense and the exact-right-amount of sarcasm when it came to parsing through the biggest stories of the last 16 years.
It just turned out that way. Building on the estimable tradition of poking holes to allow the light to shine in, he ended up becoming one of the most trusted names in news.
As Stewart himself noted the day after his big announcement, he's not dead. But we can't help but eulogize a hosting job that set the bar so high, it may as well be bronzed and toted away to the Smithsonian right now because no one need dare try to replicate it. (In fact, his whole set is headed to the Newseum in Washington, D.C.)
It's been impossible to narrow down the feelings and, as they tend to do in times of sorrow, words may fail us, but we'll give it a go. Aside from everything, here are 10 things we're going to miss about The Daily Show With Jon Stewart:
1. The Faces: Not to mention the sounds, the glorious "oooohs," "mmmms" and wide-eyed "whaaats" that said it all. As Stewart actually recently proved, commentary was optional at times because his facial expressions stood in for all the words. His malleable face communicated glee and pain, frustration and skepticism, bemusement and bewilderment, each second a screengrab waiting to happen. Whether swallowing the proverbial canary or, more often, looking as though he'd just heard the most ridiculous thing ever, he's been the Buster Keaton of the late-night talk set.
2. A Man for All Campaign Seasons: It's hard enough knowing that there won't be a Daily Show postmortem of tonight's clown car of a Republican debate on Fox News, let alone acknowledge the fact that we have to traverse the rest of the interminably long presidential campaign season (the Iowa caucus isn't even until February!) without Stewart's discerning—and oft googly—eye.
"We're going to miss him during those primaries—am I right or am I f--king right?!" guest Richard Lewis, making his 17th appearance on the show in June, entreated the audience. "It's not going to be fine!"
From Indecision 2000 to the beginning of Democalypse 2016, Stewart has been there to point out the good, bad and the ugly, the candidates' foibles and the broken system they have to appease. Bush vs. Gore, hanging chads, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (on the eve of the 2004 general election, Stewart asked his viewers to make his job harder—and his viewers probably tried, but the electoral votes didn't swing that way), Sarah Palin, Obama's historic ascension in 2008, Mitt Romney's binders full of women...
Stewart guided us through the circles of absurdity like a regular Virgil.
3. The Outfoxing of Fox News: A recurring theme. From pointing out the 50-times-Fox-News-was-wrong-in-6-seconds to telling the lot of them to go f--k themselves with full choir accompaniment, Stewart did his absolute best to make the News Corp.-owned cable network see the error of its fear-mongering ways. Fox News initially tried to make light of Stewart over the years; then tried to discredit him, nitpicking every mistake he ever made (all two or three in 16 years); and most recently they opted to turn him into a dangerous liberal propagandist, an Obama-visiting tool of the righteous left. Which is exactly why he's leaving, of course. He's striking while the liberal-propagandist iron is hot!
Ultimately Stewart only reaffirmed that you can't argue with crazy, that you can't flip a switch and make those intent on discrediting you magically understand logic and inarguable fact. But he fought the good fight. And every minute of it, right up until he took a flame thrower to their feud just this week, was brilliant TV.
4. The Needling of CNN: Who's going to point out all the times CNN starts reporting something but admits mid-report that it might not really know anything?! While Stewart frequently dinged Fox News for having more sinister ulterior motives, CNN's similar raison d'être—ratings—didn't go unscathed. The coverage of CNN's coverage of the search for the then-missing Malaysian airliner, with all the bells and whistles and holograms and miniature planes, was worth an Emmy all by itself.
5. His Causes: Stewart wanted to go all in in times of hope, we all did. But such is the nature of politics: Even the most impressive-seeming of leaders can't help but disappoint. And sometimes the more they impressed at first, the more they disappointed later on certain issues. For all the naysayers who have accused Stewart till the bitter end of blindly pushing a liberal agenda, remember that he has repeatedly honed in on the missteps of the left, the center and the left-of-center, as well as on those of the right.
And in the last few years, Stewart hasn't let up on veterans' services, financial reform, health care expansion, gun control, human rights and other issues where, invariably, whoever's been in charge hasn't been doing enough.
6. His Way With Celebrities: Aside from his sit-downs with fellow funnymen, during which he always seemed as though he was jawing with an old friend (because he usually was), Stewart chatting up movie and TV stars was usually just eight minutes of softball questions and him overstating his physical inadequacies.
Was he doing the smart-guy thing, trying to land the first blow (usually against himself) in order to get ahead of the conversation? The 19-time Emmy winner couldn't have been a chronic interrupter out of nervousness! Or was he bored when not mixing it up with authors, activists and policymakers? We know he read the books but didn't watch the movies...
But he made it work, and some conversations even stick out as serendipitous, such as when he consoled a newly single Robert Pattinson with ice cream.
7. Angry Jon Stewart: Remember when Stewart wouldn't let former lieutenant-governor of New York Betsy McCaughey off the hook in 2009 for helping usher the idea of what would ultimately be called "death panels" into the lexicon as she advocated against the Affordable Care Act? Or when he positively ripped Mad Money host Jim Cramer a new one over CNBC's coverage of the viability (or lack thereof) of the likes of Bear Stearns before the financial collapse of 2008?
If you don't, do review.
8. The Serious Moments: We traversed a tragic number of man-made and natural disasters together. While the overarching point of The Daily Show has always been to put a funny spin on the day's news and poke fun at the coverage of the news, Stewart leveling with the injustices of the world was always must-see TV, too.
9. A Second Round of Rummy: Stewart castigated himself time and again for not going harder at Donald Rumsfeld when the former defense secretary was in the hot seat in 2011. Even though he still went pretty hard. Last year, while interviewing Elisabeth Moss, he talked missed opportunity, saying that Rumsfeld "started a war for no reason and lied a lot about it... and I thought, like, I'll nail him… but I didn't."
And he told the U.K.'s Guardian just a few months ago, "I should have pushed, but he's very adept at deflecting...That interview with Rumsfeld went s--tty, but it's still just an interview. He's the one who has to live with the repercussions of what he really did, so there's nothing that could happen on my show that carries that same level of regret."
Not that the Known and Unknown author was coming back anytime soon, but we're sorry that Jon's sorry he didn't ask tougher questions. And the what-could've-been bummer extends to all those who were on the deserving end of a Jon Stewart grilling but never made the trip.
10. The Light in His Eyes When He Talks About Donald Trump: Jon looked so delighted when Trump entered the presidential race, we almost thought that might be enough to make him stay. How could any self-respecting comedian just walk away from that embarrassment of riches? But since he's still intent on leaving, we'll have to savor our memories of that mischievous gleam.
And so this chapter closes, and we await whatever Jon will do next. (Not that we wouldn't go too if we had a date with Jon Hamm to go gaze at the Northern Lights as soon as we wrapped up this whole Daily Show thing.)
So while our big regret may be that no tribute to The Daily Show With Jon Stewart will ever truly do it justice, we too will end on an upbeat note.
Here it is, your moment of Zen: