The Each day Present has been on the air for nearly 30 years had its politically-focused format since 1999. The Comedy Central’s satirical information program has gone via lots of shakeups throughout that point, together with Jon Stewart hosing for 16 years, leaving for almost a decade, after which coming again in 2024 to host on a part-time foundation, which continues to be taking place on the 2025 TV schedule. On an attention-grabbing behind-the-scenes be aware, I realized from The Each day Present head author about why the collection needed to change the best way it does callback jokes.
On the finish of my current dialog with Amira, which additionally included him sharing his idea on why it’s so onerous to put in writing a great Donald Trump joke, I introduced up how lots of people lately are watching The Each day Present in segments on web sites/apps like YouTube and TikTok, moderately than viewing full episodes both on broadcast TV or with a Paramount+ subscription. As such, I used to be curious if this on-line recognition factored into writing sure parts of the present, and Amira introduced up the way it’s required callback jokes to be modified, beginning off with the next:
For instance you made a joke on the prime of the present and then you definitely name it again later within the episode. We used to not fear about if that callback was in a unique act of the present since you’re watching the entire present. You may perceive that that was a reference to the primary act of the present.
Dan Amira began engaged on The Each day Present in 2014, and it’s not as if YouTube and social media wasn’t outstanding again then. Nevertheless, it wasn’t as simple to comply with together with the present on-line outdoors of perusing the Comedy Central web site. So it was all of the extra essential to look at full episodes once they aired on linear, and that meant it’d be simple sufficient to comply with together with a callback joke to the primary act after a business break.
However now that watching solely parts of The Each day Present is extra standard than ever, Dan Amira knowledgeable me that it’s turn out to be essential to shelve multi-segment callback jokes with a purpose to not confuse on-line viewers. As he defined:
Now we’re like, you possibly can’t actually do like a cross act callback as a result of the best way that these items is cut up up on social media, YouTube, Twitter, no matter, it is by no means the entire present. It is a section and a section and a section, and one section may go viral. When you have a callback, on this section that calls again to a factor that is not a part of it, you may be like, “I do not even know what you are speaking about proper now.’
It hadn’t occurred to me earlier than this interview how The Each day Present’s callback jokes had wanted to be tweaked in response to the altering instances. It’s one factor to throw again to a joke throughout the identical section that had been informed simply minutes earlier, however revisiting that joke inside a separate section will simply come off as random to an individual who’s pulled up a clip on-line. I didn’t understand I missed this earlier than Dan Amira talked about it, however I perceive why the callback joke scale-back wanted to occur, and it actually doesn’t detract from my total enjoyment of the collection that’s existed because the mid-2000s.
The Each day Present airs Mondays via Thursdays at 11 p.m. ET, with Jon Stewart internet hosting on Mondays and a weekly rotating lineup of the correspondents dealing with the remainder of the nights. Stewart is sticking round till the top of 2025, and it stays to be seen if he’ll re-up his deal as soon as once more in 2026, or if a brand new everlasting host for The Each day Present will lastly be chosen.