Jon Stewart has said he’s not going anywhere, and he’s trying to put that in writing.
The comedian, whose contract to host The Daily Show is up in December, said “we’re working on staying” during a conversation with New Yorker editor David Remnick at Sunday’s New Yorker Festival, when Remnick asked if the Comedy Central host was going to “sign another” contract.
Beyond that, when asked by Remnick if he does indeed want to stay at the helm of the Comedy Central late night show he left in 2015 and returned to in early 2024, hosting on Mondays, Stewart agreed. If it’s up to him, he wants to stay.
It was roughly a year ago when Stewart announced he was staying on at The Daily Show through December 2025, but since then Donald Trump has returned to the White House and Paramount has merged with David Ellison’s Skydance.
Stewart even referred to Paramount Skydance CEO Ellison, the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, as his “new boss.”
In recent months, Stewart’s Paramount colleague and former Daily Show co-worker Stephen Colbert announced that CBS’ The Late Show would be ending, and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel had his show suspended. CBS, which like Comedy Central is owned by Paramount, announced in July that Colbert’s The Late Show would come to an end in May 2026. Though the network claimed it was “purely a financial decision,” the move came just days after Colbert criticized Paramount for a $16 million settlement with Trump in a lawsuit he had filed over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with his 2024 Democratic challenger Kamala Harris. ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! was suspended for less than a week after comments Kimmel made in a monologue about conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassin went viral, FCC commissioner Brendan Carr threatened ABC’s affiliate licenses over the host’s remarks and at least two affiliate groups, Nexstar and Sinclair, planned to pre-empt Kimmel’s show.
Stewart too has criticized the 60 Minutes settlement and suggested that the Late Show cancellation was connected to Colbert’s critical comments about the lawsuit and President Trump. And he skewered the Kimmel suspension with a satirical, “administration-compliant” edition of The Daily Show.
“The fact that CBS didn’t try to save their No. 1 rated late night franchise that’s been on the air for over three decades is part of what’s making everybody wonder: Was this ‘purely financial’? Or maybe it’s the path of least resistance for your $8 billion merger to kill a show that you know rankled a fragile and vengeful president who’s so insecure that he’s suffering terribly from a case of chronic penis insufficiency,” Stewart said on The Daily Show days after news broke of The Late Show cancellation.
He added, “If you’re trying to figure out why Stephen’s show is ending, I don’t think the answer can be found in some smoking gun email or phone call from Trump to CBS executives or in CBS QuickBooks spreadsheets on the financial health of late night. I think the answer is in the fear and pre-compliance that is gripping all of America’s institutions at this very moment, institutions that have chosen not to fight the vengeful and vindictive actions of our … commander-in-chief. To those corporations and advertisers and universities and law firms, all of them, if you still think that bending the knee to Trump will save you, I have one thing to say [breaking into song]: I know you’re scared, I know you’re weary, I know your plans don’t include me, but these are troubled times, so sack the fuck up!”
And he said at the time of his own late night future: “I’m not going anywhere. I think.”
Paramount Skydance has also made changes at CBS News. The conglomerate has hired the former CEO of the conservative-leaning Hudson Institute, Kenneth Weinstein, as CBS News’ ombudsman and contrarian journalist Bari Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS News, with Paramount acquiring her The Free Press.
More to come.
