Jon Stewart Runs Long—and Hot—Smashing a Daily Show Record in the Process

Just 24 hours after Last Week Tonight aired its longest episode ever, The Daily Show set its own run-time record—with Jon Stewart delivering the lengthiest monologue of his late-night career.

Stewart’s record-breaking opening segment on Monday night ran a full 28 minutes before the show took its first commercial break, eclipsing his previous high-water mark of 24 minutes, set this past March during a fiery takedown of Donald Trump’s “heel turn” on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. 

Monday’s episode went even further—and darker—spurred by the same cascade of headlines that helped stretch John Oliver’s show to 49 minutes the night before: rising tensions between Israel and Iran, right-wing calls to deploy the U.S. military in American cities, and a presidential parade that Stewart described as “a military museum getting its steps in.”

The monologue opened with a small dose of levity as Stewart riffed on Donald Trump’s birthday military spectacle, exposing the parade as less shock and awe, and more squeak and wobble. But it soon grew darker as he dissected the Trump Administration’s mixed messaging on Israel’s strikes on Iran, skewered the GOP’s domestic “civil war” rhetoric, and called out the numbing cycle of mass shootings that have become routine in American life.

The segment became so sprawling—and so emotionally charged—that Stewart paused halfway through for a self-declared “intermission,” pulling out a lunchbox and taking a swig from a mini liquor bottle before turning to the weekend’s deadly shootings of two Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses, and the inevitable assigning of political blame.

“I don’t care whose team he was on,” the host said of the suspect. “I don’t give a f*ck. What blows my mind is our resignation in the aftermath of this nonsense.”

The segment ended with Stewart furiously listing dozens of mass shootings from the last 25 years, contrasting America’s aggressive, sweeping response to acts of violence committed by foreigners or immigrants with its apathy and inaction when similar or worse violence is committed by Americans against fellow Americans:

“Why is it when a foreigner or someone that shouldn’t be here kills one of us, we’re going to put $150 billion into border security, we’re going to militarize our cities, we’re going to spend trillions of dollars to bomb and destabilize countries overseas, ban people from random countries from ever f*cking visiting here, we’re going to take our shoes off at the airport forever,” he asked. “But when we do it to ourselves—nothing.”

While The Daily Show is officially scheduled to end at 11:35pm, on nights Stewart hosts, that seems more like a suggestion than a rule. Monday night, he kept the show running as long as it took to say what he needed to say—which turned out to be a lot.

Watch the full segment at the top of this post.