Comedy

Comedian Shane Gillis hosted “Saturday Night Live” this weekend, leading some to criticize the famed TV sketch show for giving a platform to the controversial comedian, who has a well-documented history of making racist comments.

No, Jon Stewart really wasn’t sitting at his desk at Comedy Central for the last nine years, waiting for someone to turn the lights back on.

Yet it almost felt that way during Stewart’s return to “The Daily Show” Monday night. His signature moves — blunt satire, facial grimaces, incisive use of video and some occasional lectures — were all intact. Public figures are served notice that the media’s sharpest bull detector is back on the job.

Jon Stewart returned to The Daily Show on Monday night after a 9-year hiatus—and Mary Trump has slammed the comedian's take on the upcoming presidential election.

The comedian, who began hosting the satirical news show in 1999 and left in 2015, is presenting the show again on a part-time basis through the 2024 election season. His return follows Trevor Noah's departure in December 2022 and comes amid the series' unsuccessful search for a new permanent host.

Jon Stewart: Conservative.

Really? In the eyes of some liberal commentators after the longtime host’s return to “The Daily Show” on Monday … yes.

Mr. Stewart took some shots at President Biden’s declining mental acuity in his first show back … and the knives came out.

Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann called Mr. Stewart a “bulls—t bothsidesist” for making fun of a Democrat at a moment of national crisis.

A day after the U.S. Department of Energy’s report asserting that Covid-19 likely leaked out of a Chinese research lab in Wuhan, Jon Stewart condemned critics who had dismissed the comedian as a racist and conspiracy theorist after he endorsed the theory more than a year earlier.

Tech journalist Kara Swisher interviewed legendary British comedian Eric Idle on Monday, where he spoke extensively about the state of comedy in his heyday and said he hated conservatives.

Swisher asked, "How do you look at cancel culture today, because now everybody is watched under great scrutiny," asking if Idle had seen the recent Dave Chappelle's monologue on "Saturday Night Live."

"What do you think of the comedians like Dave Chappelle, for example, who’s saying that he’s being subjected to censorship?" she asked.

Dave Chappelle addressed several contentious topics in his latest “Saturday Night Live” monologue, focusing mostly on Kanye West’s recent antisemitic comments.

In a lengthy stand-up set, Chappelle name-checked former President Donald Trump and Senate candidate Herschel Walker – and also may have alluded to the negative reaction to jokes he’s made about transgender people.

CBS late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert lost his proverbial crown as king of late-night television in August to Greg Gutfeld, according to Fox News.

Gutfeld’s late-night show, “Gutfeld!,” which airs in a late-night time slot in the Eastern Time Zone, averaged 2.19 million viewers a night compared to 2.15 million viewers per night for Colbert’s “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” Fox News reported. The show also outperformed “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon,” “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” and “The Daily Show” in average viewers per night.

Late-night comedy show host Stephen Colbert on Monday addressed the arrests of members of his production team on the grounds of the Capitol last week.

If Will Smith had slapped one of the female hosts at last night’s Oscars, onstage in front of millions, would there even be a debate about consequences?

Then again … Hollywood wonders why most Americans find it hypocritical.

And Academy leaders wonder how to reverse the struggle for eyeballs and relevance.