
It’s hard to imagine a time when The Daily Show and Jon Stewart weren’t synonymous, but 26 years ago this week, Stewart was a newcomer to the Comedy Central series, which had been developed for a very different host: Stewart’s predecessor, Craig Kilborn.
Re-watching the episode today, Stewart (who was no stranger to late night at that point, having hosted The Jon Stewart Show from 1993-95) certainly holds his own, even if the show he’s hosting—much like the suit he wore that day—doesn’t quite seem to fit him just yet.
The episode, which aired January 11th, 1999, largely follows the format established by Kilborn, who left the show at the end of 1998 to host The Late Late Show on CBS. Kilborn’s version of the Daily Show had much less of an emphasis on political comedy than it would under Stewart in time, instead more closely resembling the TV newsmagazine shows of the time.
Still, there are familiar elements.
Stewart’s first episode opens with Headlines, a segment that continues under its correspondent-hosts today. (A series of jokes centered around the impeachment of then-president Bill Clinton over his affair with a White House intern are introduced with a graphics package that dubbed the show’s coverage as “The Final Blow,” a thematic precursor to a graphics package the show is currently using to wrap its coverage of the lead-up to Donald Trump’s inauguration.)
Likewise, as it has from the start, the show ends with a “Moment of Zen,” although the tone of this night’s particular moment feels off, punching down with video of an apparently indigenous person with a large goiter on their neck. (Similarly off when viewed through a modern-day lens is a Beth Littleford celebrity interview segment in which she queries four surviving Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz about “dwarf sex.”)
Aging far better is Stewart’s first on-camera pairing with Stephen Colbert, which sees the future Colbert Report and Late Show host feeling much more fully baked in his role as correspondent than the host does in his, having preceded Stewart at The Daily Show by 18 months.
The most jarring aspect of watching this episode 26 years after the fact is to witness that there was ever a time when Jon Stewart found himself living in the shadow of another Daily Show host.
He addresses it directly several times, first in a “hastily thrown-together editorial” segment in which he levels with the show’s audience. “Let’s just break the pretense,” he jokes. “I know I can never be your real father. I don’t want to be. I just want to sleep with your mother.”
But it’s in his interview segment with then-Spin City star Michael J. Fox where Stewart seems most self-conscious, joking about the height of his chair, and saying of his ill-fitting suit, “I feel like this is my Bar Mitzvah.”
At another point, when Fox asks whether the cup of water on the host’s desks is his, Stewart admits he doesn’t know. “It’s my first day,” he explains, prompting Fox to exclaim,“I’ve been on The Daily Show more than you have!”
Before bidding farewell to his guest, Stewart addressed another elephant in the room: What would become of Craig Kilborn’s signature Daily Show interview bit, “Five Questions.”
“This is the time in the show where we normally do ‘Five Questions,” Stewart explains. “Now, my legal and medical team … has advised me that we need to phase it out, but I don’t want people to go cold turkey, so we have to go slowly. So, tonight, it’s four questions.” (Kilborn ended up taking “Five Questions” to The Late Late Show, which he began hosting two months later.)
It didn’t end up taking long for Stewart to make The Daily Show very much his own as he championed efforts to step up the show’s political coverage in the run up to the 2000 election.
Jon Stewart’s full first episode of The Daily Show is available for viewing below:
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