Memo to The Daily Show: Let Josh Johnson Host Already

This is the way it used to go: A producer from one of the late-night shows would hear positive buzz about a hot young comic, they’d check them out at a club in New York or L.A., and, if impressed, that would result in a booking.

Maybe, after several appearances (or, in the case of some transcendent talent like David Letterman, one appearance), the comic would be identified as host material, which could result in some kind of “holding deal,” tying the talent to a network until a slot opened up.

And the rest would be history—sometimes.

Like just about everything else late night in the current era, that particular ride-to-glory saga is considerably altered. Potential hosts pop up in all sorts of ways.

Lilly Singh was a popular YouTuber. Jimmy Kimmel hosted The Man Show. NBC’s two current late-night hosts came up on Saturday Night Live. (It doesn’t hurt that SNL honcho Lorne Michaels also produces The Tonight Show and Late Night.) 

One consistent avenue of opportunity in recent years has come from landing a spot as a “correspondent” on The Daily Show. The list of hosts who have emerged from that launching pad, starting in the Jon Stewart era, is eye-poppingly impressive.

Stephen Colbert started there. Samantha Bee started there. John Oliver started there. Trevor Noah started there. Roy Wood Jr started there.

And with Stewart now back one night a week, a roster of regular hosts has arisen from the current correspondent ranks, with Desi Lydic, Michael Kosta, Ronny Chieng, and Jordan Klepper each taking turns holding the host seat for rest-of-the-week assignments after Stewart’s Monday star-turns.

Which brings us to Josh Johnson. A longtime writer for The Daily Show, he officially joined the show’s on-air team a year ago February, but he may be better known for his own standup, which has garnered him an avid online fan base.

A week ago, Johnson was the subject of a flattering profile in The New York Times.  Among other details of his rising career, the piece noted that he’d quickly accumulated 2.6 million followers across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. (As of this writing, that count is now well above 4 million.)

To further underscore Johnson’s burgeoning fame, he has booked what looks like a relentless tour over the rest of this year, with stops everywhere from Milwaukee to Baltimore to Newark, and truly well beyond. (He will be in London, Paris, Dublin, Brussels, Antwerp, Berlin, and Amsterdam over the summer.) 

Somehow, during that jet-set and sold-out tour, Johnson continues squeezing in time to compose original comedy sets and release them online every Tuesday night.

Like his extended take this past Tuesday on Trump’s tariff policy, which winds through schoolyard confrontations,  how dinners with happy families don’t make sense but yet compare to homogeneity in other countries, and a metaphor about a bully taking over an airplane. Somehow it all comes back to Trump manipulating the market.

This looks like (and is) a tour de force, except Johnson does something like it every Tuesday.

And it doesn’t interfere with his day job. That same Tuesday night, Johnson was doing his correspondent thing on TDS, “reporting” on Trump being a powerful god when dealing with China, but a sad little boy who shouldn’t be forced to deal with powerhouse El Salvador. 

Just about the only thing not yet on Johnson’s bulging comic resume: hosting a late-night show—or even sub-hosting on The Daily Show.

Significantly, Johnson says in the Times piece that he would be “very, very excited” by a chance to work behind TDS desk.

The powers that be at Comedy Central and The Daily Show would be wise to jump on the opportunity before someone else does.  Not only is Josh Johnson a formidable talent, he’s got some serious momentum at the moment. 

Consider this: Johnson’s Tuesday night standup sets regularly draw between 1 and 2 million YouTube views weekly. That’s comparable to the number of views a Daily Show monologue sees on non-Jon Stewart nights—and that’s on his own, without the benefit of the show’s 30 million YouTube followers.

Is he the perfect fit for The Daily Show? Perhaps not.

In the parlance of comedy writers and producers, late night is dependent on what they call “hard jokes.” These are the typical, carefully crafted set-up/punchline jokes that make up the monologues of late-night shows. Hard jokes are meant to elicit hard laughs.

Like this from Chieng, the TDS host this week, about the Maryland father whom the Trump Administration shipped to El Salvador, after claiming, without proof, that he is a gang leader and terrorist:

“He’s been in America for 14 years and hasn’t done any terrorism. So maybe Trump is right. Maybe immigrants really are lazy.”

Rimshot.

Josh Johnson doesn’t specialize in hard jokes. His standup style is extended narrative humor, which is a fancy way of saying funny storytelling. He takes a topic out of the news or out of his personal daily experience, and weaves anecdote-centric tales.

Jokes emerge organically, from his take on a contemporaneous event—the trial of rapper Young Thug or Kendrick Lamar’s half-time show—or just asides that Johnson inserts. Mostly they are built step-by-step with elaborate digressions that lead to callbacks and eventual revisits to the premise.

Would Josh Johnson be able to deliver typical late-night zingers?  Of course he could. It just would be radically different from what he does on the standup stage.

But humor is humor. And it’s not like storytelling humor is a new invention.

You might even compare Johnson’s work to Mark Twain’s idiosyncratic live storytelling, as resurrected by Hal Holbrook.

Would Mark Twain be a great late-night host? For the late show at the Bijou Theater on Main Street in 1900, for sure.

But hey it’s Mark Twain, why wouldn’t he kill now? Wouldn’t it be worth it to give the old guy a shot?

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