The Daily Showcontinues to blend the fake anchor shtick with fake news skits, "reported" by zany correspondents such as Samantha Bee, Wyatt Cenac, Jason Jones, Aasif Mandvi, Rob Riggle, and John Oliver. Where once Stewart could be as clownish as his reporters, he now plays calm. He still curses and goofs around, but he never strays far from being the trusted voice of authority.
It's impossible to watchThe Daily Show without quickly divining that Stewart is Jewish. "Stewart brings a sharpness of wit and a clear desire to never let the audience forget who he is by bringing his Jewishness up again and again," observes Moshe Waldoks, a rabbi in Brookline, Massachusetts, and co-editor of The Big Book of Jewish Humor. His cultural Jewishness, that is; Stewart regularly hosts The Daily Show on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. (A New York Mets fan, Stewart did name one of his pit bulls Shamsky, after Art Shamsky, a Mets player who declined to play on Yom Kippur.)
Well-versed in Jewish affairs, he is the first to admit that his knowledge of the religion doesn't run deep. "I'm not a religious scholar," Stewart conceded to viewers in 2001. "Let's face facts: Very few people would confuse me with Maimonides." He gently pokes fun at his own lack of observance. "I fasted today, not out of any religious duty but because I don't want to let a day go by where I can't feel worse about myself. So Happy Yom Kippur to you!" Stewart wished his audience in 2003.
Nevertheless, his satire reverberates with a Jewish sensibility. "We have a long tradition of important Jewish comedians, all dealing with social and political issues," says Arthur Asa Berger, a professor of communications at San Francisco State University and author of the book Li'l Abner: A Study in American Satire, about the comic strip by the famed humorist Al Capp (his given name was Alfred Gerald Caplin). Stewart's lampooning of America's political and media elites also has Jewish roots. "I think that there is such a thing as a Jewish psyche, a sense of the prophetic tradition, of speaking truth to power," says Waldoks.
Stewart himself counts Woody Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg) and Lenny Bruce (born Leonard Alfred Schneider) as well as George Carlin and Richard Pryor among his influences. It's worth noting that Seinfeld, the show Stewart holds up as the gold standard for his own, has often been called the world's most famous Jewish comedy in which the word Jew was rarely heard. While Stewart is far more open about his Jewishness than Jerry Seinfeld, his humor is not as centered around it as, for example, Sarah Silverman's, who styles herself as a Jewish American princess.
Nor is he angrily anti-religion like Bill Maher, the half-Jewish, half-Catholic agnostic who recently brought America the film Religulous and who mercilessly attacks religion on his HBO show,Real Time with Bill Maher. "I don't have a problem with religion," Stewart once explained to Larry King. "I think that religion provides a lot of people with comfort and solace, but you know, I think what people who aren't that religious object to is [the belief] that the only way to find values is through religion."
Religious fundamentalism often crops up as a target in Stewart's comedy. In 1999, soon after he began hosting The Daily Show, ultra-Orthodox protesters heckled a co-ed group of Reform rabbis for praying together at the Western Wall. "Ultra-Orthodox Jews, desperately fearful of biblical cooties, got all Jewier-than-thou when they discovered that a handful of Reform Jews who actually allow their women to do something other than breed and cook also had the chutzpah to be praying nearby," he said. "Ultra-Orthodox Jews believe themselves superior to other Jews, claiming the Word was handed to them directly, right before [God] handed us big noses and took away all our athletic ability."
Like clockwork, Stewart mentions Jewish holidays throughout the year -- like the night he joked about the midnight apple drop into a bowl of honey at Times Square on Rosh Hashanah. Another time, on Larry King Live, he said: "Who amongst us hasn't thought around Hanukkah, ‘Oh, you're celebrating the birth of your Savior, and we're celebrating the fact that the oil lasted longer than we thought it would -- what value!'"
The show even gets Jews laughing at sacred cows of all sorts. Stewart is not anti-Israel: "I'm a Jewish guy," he said during a 1996 standup routine. "I've been to Israel; I'm really glad it's there." But certainly Israel gets its share of Daily Show attention. Take the preface to John Oliver's 2001 interview with Dan Gillerman, then Israel's ambassador to the United Nations. Oliver, the tongue-in-cheek British correspondent, pointed to the Holocaust, Spanish Inquisition, and pogroms as evidence that "Jews seem to have trouble getting along with people, so it was better to get them their own place." Later, Oliver asked Gillerman to put to rest the "nasty conspiracy theory . . . that your country is run by Jews."
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