The Daily Show has been on the air for almost 30 years had its politically-focused format since 1999. The Comedy Central’s satirical news program has gone through a lot of shakeups during that time, including Jon Stewart hosing for 16 years, leaving for nearly a decade, and then coming back in 2024 to host on a part-time basis, which is still happening on the 2025 TV schedule. On an interesting behind-the-scenes note, I learned from The Daily Show head writer about why the series had to change the way it does callback jokes.
At the end of my recent conversation with Amira, which also included him sharing his theory on why it’s so hard to write a good Donald Trump joke, I brought up how a lot of people these days are watching The Daily Show in segments on websites/apps like YouTube and TikTok, rather than viewing full episodes either on broadcast TV or with a Paramount+ subscription. As such, I was curious if this online popularity factored into writing certain portions of the show, and Amira brought up how it’s required callback jokes to be changed, starting off with the following:
Let’s say you made a joke at the top of the show and then you call it back later in the episode. We used to not worry about if that callback was in a different act of the show because you’re watching the whole show. You’ll understand that that was a reference to the first act of the show.
Dan Amira started working on The Daily Show in 2014, and it’s not as though YouTube and social media wasn’t prominent back then. However, it wasn’t as easy to follow along with the show online outside of perusing the Comedy Central website. So it was all the more important to watch full episodes when they aired on linear, and that meant it’d be easy enough to follow along with a callback joke to the first act after a commercial break.
But now that watching only portions of The Daily Show is more popular than ever, Dan Amira informed me that it’s become necessary to shelve multi-segment callback jokes in order to not confuse online viewers. As he explained:
Now we’re like, you can’t really do like a cross act callback because the way that this stuff is split up on social media, YouTube, Twitter, whatever, it’s never the whole show. It’s a segment and a segment and a segment, and one segment might go viral. If you have a callback, in this segment that calls back to a thing that’s not part of it, you’ll be like, “I don’t even know what you’re talking about right now.’
It hadn’t occurred to me before this interview how The Daily Show’s callback jokes had needed to be tweaked in response to the changing times. It’s one thing to throw back to a joke within the same segment that had been told just minutes earlier, but revisiting that joke within a separate segment will just come off as random to a person who’s pulled up a clip online. I didn’t realize I missed this before Dan Amira mentioned it, but I understand why the callback joke scale-back needed to happen, and it certainly doesn’t detract from my overall enjoyment of the series that’s existed since the mid-2000s.
The Daily Show airs Mondays through Thursdays at 11 p.m. ET, with Jon Stewart hosting on Mondays and a weekly rotating lineup of the correspondents handling the rest of the nights. Stewart is sticking around until the end of 2025, and it remains to be seen if he’ll re-up his deal once again in 2026, or if a new permanent host for The Daily Show will finally be selected.