For Desi Lydic, The Daily Show Desk Fit—So Why Not Wear It?

Desi Lydic never seriously considered hosting The Daily Show.

She was thrilled to have been hired as a correspondent when Trevor Noah was the new host, successor to the show’s iconic star, Jon Stewart.

“I watched Jon and all the correspondents on the show all through my 20’s,” Lydic says, “and I thought: That is what I want to do.”

For ten years that’s what she’s done, playing an airheaded faux news correspondent, in the best Daily Show tradition.  “I like to say I’m overly confident and under-informed,” Lydic says of her character. “Not that she’s not smart, but she did not do her homework.”

Then Trevor Noah left (and later, Stewart returned as anchor, but just for one night a week), opening up some very appealing real estate behind the desk.

Lydic had a background in improvisational comedy. She’d never been a stand-up comic, and had never delivered scripted topical jokes in the TDS style.

So the idea that she could do the job that Stewart and Noah had done to widespread critical praise gave her, she acknowledges, a frisson of trepidation.

“But I knew I had to shoot my hand up in the air,” she says, “without even thinking about it, and say: “Put me in coach,’ and hope for the best.”

The best has come to pass, as can be seen tonight when Lydic takes her turn—among the regular TDS non-Stewart foursome—following Stewart’s Monday night showcase with three consecutive nights of issue-oriented, joke-intensive, late-night hosting.

Lydic has performed with polish and poise, and a well-judged mix of disbelief and skepticism about the latest outrages in the news.

The homework is obviously being done.

“When you host you are a version of yourself,” Lydic says, separating the anchor role from her ill-informed correspondent character. “You have to bring a certain amount of authenticity. That was a new look to try on for size. To just throw away the armor of a character. That was the part of the unknown for me. Can I do the job? Just be funny as myself?”

Well, the audience is laughing. Lydic has found a voice that works to deliver the news, examine the issues, and land the jokes—basically the charter of TDS since early on in Stewart’s first tour.

“It makes no sense at all that I would feel comfortable doing this, but for some reason I do,” Lydic says. “My goal every time I sit at the desk is to just be present, just be in the moment. That’s my little mantra before going out there.” And it’s working. She says, “So far I’ve been able to just enjoy every moment of it.”

Some of the credit goes to Jon Stewart, Lydic says.  When he reassumed the chief anchor job, along with an executive producer title on the show, Stewart gave the rest of the on-air team some advice Lydic found especially persuasive.

“It’s about not abandoning your humanity and your empathy,” Lydic summarizes Stewart’s message. “Don’t put pressure on yourself to be ‘The Resistance,’ to say the perfect thing, to respond to every story. But to just go out there and try to make the funniest and smartest shows you can. And don’t abandon your humanity.”

The repetition may have something to do with the state of play in the country, where news of enormous consequence is pouring out of Washington.

“People ask me how we’re going to cover Trump 2.0,” Lydic says. “I say: We don’t even know what we’re going to cover tonight. It’s so volatile.” The show went through the endless churn of the Trump news cycle for four years in the last decade. “But it certainly seems to be moving at a faster pace now.”

The mandate can’t be to jump on every late-breaking story, Lydic says, because under Trump they tend to happen every evening, like a sudden, violent thunderstorm. Those storms have often blown up when a show’s script is all but finished, compelling a decision to postpone the hot news a day, or to try to recreate a new show on the fly.

At some point, Lydic says, the decision has to come down to one realization: “At the end of the day we are not the actual news. We are a comedy show.”

Of course, TDS has often been cited as a primary news source for a generation of viewers. Including Desi Lydic, who acknowledges she was more a fan of The Daily Show’s reports than she was a news junkie in her 20’s.

The Obama movement got her attention, she says, but she grew up “in a very Republican household, a pretty traditional Republican upbringing in Kentucky.”

It is safe to say TDS is not a traditional Republican-leaning show. Lydic says that circumstance has convinced her of one thing. “It really shows how much I appreciate coming from an unconditionally loving family that they will watch me every night. It is my goal to try to move the needle. We have good conversations.”

And so of course, we come to the inevitable, the woman question. It is to late night what the whale was to Ahab. It’s big and unmanageable and an obsession. And every time it surfaces it sinks back down again.

Lydic says she “totally understands” why it comes up every time a woman begins to make a mark as a late-night host. Why so few? Why do they tend not to last?

Lydic has one strong feeling about it. “I refuse to come up with an excuse for it,” she says. But her honest reaction to the questions: “I don’t know.”

Desi Lydic hosts The Daily Show this Tuesday through Thursday at 11 p.m, ET/PT on Comedy Central. Episodes are available to stream next day on Paramount+

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