Funny business at The Daily Show.

• Author: Clinton, Kate
• Position: Unplugged

When Jon Stewart announced that he would be leaving The Daily Show, fans, both famous and "not so much," tweeted their encomiums. I would have, too, but that Twitter world can turn on you for the nicest thing. No wonder innocuous kitty videos are so popular. More on Twitlandia later in our discussion of Trevor Noah, the recently named host-to-be of The Daily Show.

After sixteen years of making hard work look easy, Jon must be tired. Night after night, he has been a civic rhetorician parsing political terms of art and a public defender with access to the world's best video archive of evidence.

Of course, Jon has had a great Emmy-winning, mostly male writing team, but great material doesn't deliver itself. He has had a great roster of "reporters" that he seemed genuinely to enjoy and has generously made them look great.

News of Stewart's departure surely made the right breathe a sigh of relief. They will deny it. See: Bull O'Really. But as this season's Game of Thrones presidential election looms, the left will miss him, especially with the bloviating Stephen Colbert retooling himself for David Letterman's job.

For years, I have called for a woman to be a late-night network host. The unspoken theory is that testosterone looks best at night. Estrogen is for daytime use only. I lobbied for Jessica Williams, the young, hilarious feminist and race reporter on the The Daily Show. She knows the ropes and the tropes, and would have been a perfect in-house promotion, the new Queen of Meme. She humbly, graciously nipped our lobbying in the butt. Sigh.

Comedy Central's choice of Trevor Noah, a thirty-one-year-old South African, surprised many, but he has the chops. He is an internationally known stand-up star. He has years of experience on radio and television. He's a wordsmith and a polyglot with killer accents. With Noah, Comedy Central is hoping to shore up the coveted eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old male demographic that has been leaching to Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show. Fallon is Mr. Entertainment. He is talented but saccharine, so different from the sharp, bitter after-taste from David Letterman. I'll miss it. It helped me sleep.

Somehow, Noah is not...