Everything old was new again on The Daily Show Monday night, as Jon Stewart spent his final episode of 2025 drawing parallels between the Trump administration’s current posture toward Venezuela and the Bush administration’s run-up to the Iraq War, highlighting how familiar some of the rhetoric has begun to sound.
“It’s 2005 all over again,” Stewart said, after running through the déjà-vu arguments about intervention and “weapons of mass destruction.”
That line became the setup for the night’s headline moment, as former Daily Show correspondent Rob Corddry emerged from a cloud of smoke dressed like Marty McFly from Back to the Future. “Jon? Jon?” he called. “I just time-traveled here from 2005 into the present because I need to warn you: the war in Iraq is a disaster! We cannot, Jon, make that mistake ever again in the future.”
Stewart gently reminded him that the past had already happened. “Yeah, we know. We’re in the future. We lived through that already.” Corddry froze as the realization sank in: “Oh… [bleep]! Oh my god, you’re right. Well, it would have made a lot more sense to go to the past, huh. Stupid idiot!”
The rest of the bit played off the time-travel conceit as Corddry asked Stewart for updates on his favorite people. “How is my comedy idol, Bill Cosby, doing? America’s dad.” Stewart didn’t sugarcoat it: “Not great.” Corddry moved on. “Okay… how about my favorite actor Kevin Spacey?” Stewart again: “Not great.”
The Hot Tub Time Machine star then shifted to reality TV. “How about my favorite reality show, The Apprentice?” After Stewart told him the show isn’t on the air anymore, Corddry exclaimed, “What has happened to this place? It’s a dystopia!”
Corddry joined The Daily Show in 2002 and quickly became one of the show’s defining correspondents of the era, filing field pieces that parodied cable news bravado and the political certainty of of George W. Bush’s two terms in office. He the show in 2006.
As part of Monday night’s time-travel bit, he commended his former boss on his 26-year uninterrupted run behind The Daily Show desk, pretending not to know that Stewart left the show in 2015 only to return last year.
“I always figured you’d get antsy and leave to host a less popular version of this very show on a prestigious but little-watched competitor,” Corddry said, as Stewart dryly replied of his run hosting The Problem With Jon Stewart on Apple TV+, “It was not viewed by many, but at least it was more expensive to make.”
Watch Stewart’s monologue, complete with Corddry’s return (at the 18-minute mark) at the top of this post.
