He's back!

I watched The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Monday night. (Or as it will be known until the writers strike is settled, A Daily Show).

Stewart was his usual funny self, joking about growing a solidarity unibrow to compete with the other hirsute late-night hosts. He seemed perfectly at ease, even without his writers. (I don't know exactly how this works. Does that mean everything he said was just improvised on the spot?)

In fact, it seemed pretty much like any other episode of The Daily Show. If you showed me two episodes and told me one had writers and the other didn't, I doubt I would have been able to tell you which one was which.

Stewart said the toughest part of being off the air was not covering the presidential campaign. He made a few jokes about Iowa and New Hampshire. "Cold white people have had their say in Iowa. Tomorrow is New Hampshire, where colder white people will have their say." There was an extended segement where he riffed about the issues in the strike. It was funny, but it went on a little too long, and made me wonder what he's going to talk about tonight.

His guest was Ron Seeber, a professor of labor relations at Cornell University, who admitted that he had gotten some criticism for agreeing to appear on the show while the writers were on strike.

Stewart asked him about the Writers Guild making separate deals with certain talk-show hosts. He asked a clearly startled Seeber whether he thought anti-Semitism was involved. "The whole reason I got into this business is because I thought we controlled it."

On Friday, HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher returns. But according to this story in the Hollywood Reporter, Maher won't be delivering a monologue or offering his New Rules. Instead, drawing on his background doing standup comedy, he'll go into the crowd and talk with audience members for his opening segment. Maher will have his regular roundtable discussion with guests and satellite interviews.

The daily news

Now here's one of those stories that would be funny if it weren't so sad.

An article by Verne Gay in the Long Island newspaper Newsday quotes twentysomethings who are feeling adrift because the writers' strike has cut them off from their main source of news: "The Daily Show" with Jon Stewart, which is airing repeats. "What Walter Cronkite was to their parents and grandparents, Comedy Central's Jon Stewart is to them."

A 25-year-old radio station disc jockey named Drew Applebaum admits to being "slightly lost." Applebaum says, "I've been going as far as listening to NPR on my way home." (Oh the horor, the horror. He makes it sound like punishment!) Applebaum depended on the show, and the equally popular "Colbert Report," for some of the shtick he does on his own morning-drive show.

And 19-year-old Dennis McElhone, who's studying to be a history teacher, says, "I'd rather see a comedic spin compared to a left or right spin" on some political story. "And watching them find the humor in world issues makes them a little more straightforward than trying to figure what every other [anchor] is thinking."

Then there's this statistic: Four years ago, when the Washington, D.C.-based Pew Center for the People and the Press studied how people got their news about politics, it found that 21 percent of those between the ages 18 and 29 learned most everything they knew about the political races from "The Daily Show." Only the category of cable news - everything on MSNBC, CNN and Fox News - outranked just this one single show.

Scott Keeter, director of Survey Research for The Pew Center, which has studied these viewers' habits, insists in the article that the influence of these shows has overstated. The twentysomethings quoted about their viewing habits, are "news omnivores," who feed their news diet from many sources.

Jeff Greenfield, the senior political correspondent for CBS News, says that programs like "The Daily Show" don't necessarily get their young audiences interested in the political process. "The heart and soul of these shows is to treat politics as a fundamentally dishonest enterprise [where] politicians are fools, liars and mountebanks. Stewart's stuff is extremely funny and pointed, but that's not likely to get people stimulated to go out and vote."

Ok, listen up people. There's nothing wrong with getting a good chuckle out of "The Daily Show." I enjoy it, and Jon Stewart is great at using humor to make some very valid points about politics. But as much as I love Jon Stewart, I think he'd be the first to admit that he's no Walter Cronkite.

Stewart and Colbert are not journalists. They're comedians, entertainers. Their primary purpose is to make you laugh, not to inform you about what's going on in your community, your state, your country or your world. If they do, that's great. But I have to admit I'm a little concerned about a generation that considers them their main source of news.

I hope Drew is enjoying NPR enough to consider listening even after the writers' strike ends. I'm sure he's finding it informative and at times, even funny. Who knows, maybe he'll even contribute a few bucks when the next pledge drive rolls around.

Update: The New York Times reports that Stewart and Colbert will return to their shows on Jan. 7, without writers. The article says that the two hosts will have to improvise their monologues, and booking guests may be difficult because some entertainers and presidential candidates won't cross a picket line.

All Jon Stewart all the time

For you "Daily Show" fans, here are two pieces of good news.

First, according to a report at Broadcasting & Cable, host Jon Stewart has extended his contract until Dec. 31, 2010, which, the article says, coincides with the end of David Letterman's contract at CBS. Of course, that's fueling speculation that the affable Stewart could one day take over from Letterman.

The article also discusses what else might be in store for the late-night television landscape: "With Jay Leno not expected to hang up his microphone if and when Conan O'Brien supplants him on The Tonight Show, rampant speculation about a potential late-night game of musical chairs has been ongoing for months."

And the Los Angeles Times reports that Comedy Central owner Viacom is putting 13,000 video clips of The Daily Show online - every minute of the show since its inception in 1999.

The article goes on to say that the database "is searchable by both date and topic, making it a potential bonanza for students of American pop culture. If you want to see what host Jon Stewart has had to say about former First Lady Barbara Bush or ill-fated Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro, you can find the clips and put them in context by seeing what else was featured on the same day."

I like Stewart, and while I'm not a daily watcher of "The Daily Show" I think he'd be a worthy successsor to Letterman. And I am intrigued by what he might do with an hourlong show.