I could do without the others all together. It’s Stewart that makes me laugh.
Are you talking about Olivia Munn? If so, then, yeah she was pretty bad. I wonder if she’s even still there, as I haven’t seen her in awhile.
NM Double post
I agree. Kristen Schaal is very awesome.
Just look at the glee with which she portrays a horse.
The problem the Daily Show has is that anyone who’s a regularly good correspondent can go off and do their own thing. It’s the perfect launching pad. I still think it’s reliably very good, though.
There have been periods over the years when Stewart was better and periods when Colbert was better. It cycles and whatever is happening today doesn’t necessarily mean much for tomorrow.
It’s a year to go to the election and I think everybody is already sick of talking about the candidates. So they made another laughable gaffe. Is that #487 or #1928? Who cares? We’re into outrage fatigue.
The low quality of the regular correspondents is a problem, I agree. The irregular commentators: Hodgeman, Whitmore, Black, Schaal, are far funnier. Probably because the writers are better at commentary than at skits. People here are talking like those people write their own stuff. I don’t think so. But Sarah Vowel probably does which is why she was such a disaster on Thanksgiving.
Really? I always found Rocca insufferable and not very funny. He’s always on “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” and I saw him on CBS last week doing a regular news interview. (By the way, he looked horribly aged. Maybe it was just the super gray hair, but wow, he looked bad.)
I think that John Oliver is perhaps the second best reporter the show ever had. (with Stephen Colbert quite ahead. You can go and watch his old interviews again on dailyshow.com, they are great.) Sam Bee is weak, and Jason Jones is okay, but he is sort of unsophisticated, he cannot make satire like Oliver or Colbert.
Also, the show is as good as it has ever been.
Stewart, of course, has a great sense of humour, impeccable comic timing, and is actually really good at impersonation. Something that bothers me a little about him, are his small unscripted sort of jokes, that the audience always laughs at, but are rarely actually funny. Also overuse of some jokes (spraining his shoulder, his props are not real. Not about being Jewish, that’s always funny.)
Mo Rocca is also on CBS News Sunday Morning regularly as well as doing occasional news pieces on the evening news.
If Sam Bee is on I always come close to changing the channel. Jason Jones I don’t care about. John Oliver is usually good (but I am also most aware of him since I also listen to his Daily Bugle podcast).
I loved the Sarah Vowell Thanksgiving piece. The delivery was a bit off, but it was the first time and I loved what was in it. I very rarely watch the remotes, I do think that is suffered over the years from greater societal awareness of the Daily Show. If one of them is great I assume that I’ll hear about it and can circle back.
But I also don’t watch it obsessively. I’ll watch for a few weeks on Hulu, then come back a couple months later. I thinkn part of the problem is that any daily comedy show is going to have to rely very heavily on patterns to fill the time and it doesn’t take much watching for the infrastructure to become apparent and that undercuts it.
Another problem is that while the specific topic of the moment may change, the underlying flaws in media and politics that the Daily Show skewers don’t really change that much. It may still be just as objectively funny, but if it is the second time you’ve heard it, it’s going to lose something.
As for Olivia Munn, the Daily Show website still lists her as a member of the news team, but the same page also refers to her role on Perfect Couples in the future tense (a show that lasted only half a season before being replaced by The Paul Reiser Show).
I have noticed the last couple of weeks that I have been watching, Jon Stewart has not been wearing his wedding ring. Could he be off of his game due to marital strife? Anybody heard anything about trouble at home? I always noticed his wedding ring prominently in watching the show for the past several years.
That’s the one. I’ve blocked her name and anything else about her. TDS tries a one-size-fits-all approach to the correspondents and it doesn’t work for everybody. He should let the comics be themselves more often, rather than trying to do formulaic material.
Jon Stewart just sent me mail to tell me about his great trip to Afganistan and to ask me for money for the USO. Sounds like he has had a vacation.
They used to spend a lot more of the middle segment finding people who were on some truly asinine crusade (The only ones I remember are the “Toy guns for Harlem tots” guy, and some guy insisting he was the victim of a lesbian campaign.) and having the correspondent sit down and interview them. The comedy wrote itself, all the correspondents had to do was occasionally say “Do go on.” They don’t seem to do that as often, maybe because as the show grew, people became more cautious around correspondents. Their middle segements suffer now.
Yeah, Stewart has become more angry and less funny. I can’t really blame him, but I watch the show for a laugh, not to get more enraged by the state of things than I already am.
I think they just need to use the rest of the cast more. Stewarts good, but 25 minutes of TV four nights a week is a lot of time to fill with funny, especially with variations of the same material (US news is kinda repetitive). And they seem to have really cut back on the pre-taped bits, where the rest of the cast gets a chance to actually do something without Stewart.
I kind of wonder if Comedy Central isn’t just being cheap. Its presumably cheaper just to have Stewart do funny voices for five minutes then pay another cast member to go film a new bit.
But I like most of the current cast. Oliver and Hodgeman are amongst the best the shows had. Mahdvi and Cynac, aside from being hard to spell, are excellent. Jones and Bee are less so, but they’re funny when they get a good bit (and I think Bee has been on the show longer then Stewart, I’d be kinda sad to see her go).
Stewart took over The Daily Show in '99 and Bee didn’t join until '03.
Also according to wikipedia Bee and Jason Jones married in '01 and Jones joined TDS in '05. He initially got the gig to replace Bee because of her pregnacy and I guess people liked him enough to keep him around.
I think that if you watch a show regularly, you’ll see it go through strong and weak periods and there will also just be periods where you get kind of bored with it. I’ve seen almost every Daily Show episode over the last five years (and plenty on and off before that), and I know it’s that way with me. Sometimes you need a break.
His acting career does seem to be picking up and he’s been around less. I see he’s working on a potential show for CBS. He actually turned up on last night’s show.
Years ago - probably around the time some of the best-known correspondents started leaving - somebody pointed out that if your name isn’t Jon Stewart, you ultimately don’t have a future on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. If you get good enough and popular enough, you’ll wind up doing something else. But that’s how that goes.
I don’t think he ever has. See this interview, about 2:30 in:
I’ve had to stop watching since they discontinued their 7:00 p.m. reruns, so yes, *please *tell me the show sucks now.
Sorry. One of the few good things from living in California - I get the new show at 8 pm, early enough that I can DVR it and skip the ads, and also early enough that I can catch the 11 pm rerun if the DVR screws up.
Nope, not suckage. Stewart is still a necessary counterpoint to all the hysteria over at Fox and on the right in general. I just think he needs to tone down the histrionics a bit and possibly tweak the format. Shouting isn’t comedy unless you’re Bobcat Goldthwaite or Sam Kinneson.