I still think Craig Kilborn was better than Jon Stewart hosting The Daily Show. I wish they’d asked him to come back.
That was never gonna happen:
Which, in my opinion, is just as well.
The problem for me with Kilborn is that he was trying to pull off a performance act as a high-privilege smarmy, clueless, bumptious white guy. Jordan Klepper has the same problem. Stephen Colbert was able to pull off his own performance act as a high-privilege
sanctimonious, clueless, bumptious white guy. There were a couple of differences. Colbert is extremely talented and was able to give his audience the impression that he was putting one over on the very type of person he was purporting to be. Klepper and Kilborn are simply not at that level. They pretend to be unserious but they come across as if they really are serious, within a context where they're supposed to bring the audience along for the joke.
The other difference is that sanctimony and smarminess are not the same thing. (Sure, they both indicate a sense of unearned superiority, but they can co-exist in the same person. Josh Hawley is the perfect example.) It's probably harder to pull off the pretense of being smarmy compared to pretense of being sanctimonious, at least on advertising-driven TV, where a certain amount of the smarmy is common and longstanding. There was a reason that SCTV's send-up of late night,
The Sammy Maudlin Show, hit its target so well.
And Kilborn was followed by Stewart, who was an amped-up version of himself, though not as amped-up as he is now. The
Crossfire confrontation was what made Stewart. That wasn't an act. TDS ended up with a different audience as a result.
What also bugs me is the current TDS open. It's essentially imitating a political rally, with an energy level that knocks me back. Maybe that reflects the times we are in, but I think it gets Stewart even more fired-up than he already is.
About Colbert: In my days as a cybersecurity person, I would attend the RSA Conference in San Francisco every year. The conference organizers liked to close with a keynote from someone in the entertainment world, to end a rather intense week on a lighter note. I usually skipped keynotes. Keynotes during the week came to feature high-level tech executives who were largely divorced from the day-to-day reality of the field. The end-of-the-week keynotes usually had little interest for me. But in 2013, that keynote featured Stephen Colbert. I went. He started out with his usual act, having some jokey Q-and-A with the audience. Then someone in the audience asked him about Edward Snowden, who had been charged after leaking classified NSA documents. At first, Colbert stayed in character. But, little by little over the next few minutes, he dropped character, almost imperceptibly, to have a serious monologue about the tensions of having classified documents in a free society and whether Snowden did the right thing. At the time, Colbert seemed to doubt that Snowden was in the right, but he admitted that he was unsure of the facts in the case. That was something his
Colbert Report character wouldn't have done. Watching him drop his character like that, in a way that caused one to thing, "hey, he's being serious and thoughtful here!", was an amazing thing to see.
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