Kyle Smith isn’t as impressed with him as we’re supposed to be:
Though Stewart has often claimed he does a “fake news show,” “The Daily Show” isn’t that. It’s a real news show punctuated with puns, jokes, asides and the occasional moment of staged sanctimony.
It contains real, unstaged sound bites about the days’ events and interviews about important policy matters.
Stewart is a journalist: an irresponsible and unprofessional one.
Yes, as Jim Treacher put it, the “clown nose off, clown nose on” schtick got pretty tiresome. The tears of all those bewailing his departure are delicious.
Not that I have cable and watch either of them, but Jon Stewart is what-you-see-is-what-you-get. An unabashed liberal with a streak of iconoclasm with the courage to “call out” a fellow liberal who has gone just too far. Quite unlike some other people we know and love.
This Colbert fellow is someone I don’t have any affection for. I guess he is always “in character”, and that character is a broad satire or his idea of Reilly, Hannity, Beck, Limbaugh, with a dash of Scarborough? It is such a cheap shot to define other people politically in terms of your simplistic caricature of what you want people to think they are. At least Stewart “plays himself”, sometimes earnestly, sometimes with self deprecation, but he is never phony.
He’s phony when he plays his “clown nose on, clown nose off” game of being a serious commentator when he wants to be, then when called out for falsehoods and nonsense, “But I’m just a comedian!”