The vibes were off from the very beginning of The Daily Show‘s Indecision 2024: Nothing We Can Do About It Now, but Jon Stewart and his correspondents did their very best to lift the mood.
Heading into Jon Stewart‘s Daily Show election special, Indecision 2024: Nothing We Can Do About It Now, no one precisely knew that Republican candidate and convicted felon Donald Trump would decisively win the Presidential election by dawn. Still, anxiety loomed in the air. Around 10 PM, guests filed into the The Daily Show Studio in on 11th avenue for the live event. Even then, projections indicated that there would be no miraculous blue wave, that the tide was turning against Kamala Harris, and that history was perilously close to repeating itself.
Once inside the studio, the audience sat mostly in silence, doomscrolling on their phones, waiting for Stewart and his Daily Show correspondents to inject some levity, laughs, and most importantly, hope, into the room. As the margins grew wider and the red mirage began to crystalize into a red wave, some audience members were able to retain their sense of nauseous optimism. “[I’m] nervous as can be,” said Brandy, an assistant public defender born in West Virginia who now lives and votes in Houston, Texas. She was at the taping with her husband, Ryan, a patent lawyer. Both of them voted for Harris; they had just found out Texas was projected to go to Donald Trump. “We knew Texas would go right, but we live in Houston, and Harris County goes blue,” she said, proudly.
And just like that, the crowd was instructed by a stage manager to turn our phones off for the duration of the program, untethering the anxious audience from Steve Kornacki‘s khakis and his excruciating election updates for the next 90 minutes. Forcibly offline, we sat and politely chuckled at the warmup comic who did his best to lift the mood of an increasingly tense studio audience. After what felt like a small eternity, Stewart finally emerged, smiling and enthusiastic. A palpable sense of relief washed over the audience.
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The laughs, at this point, were few and far between. For those who chose to spend their evening in person with Stewart and the Daily Show crew, he had another message—a sermon, really—after the cameras had wrapped. “You’re going to leave here, and you’re going to look at your phones, and you’re going to go home, and you’re going to have that weird feeling where your knees feel wobbly. And you’re like, do I have hypoglycemia?” said Stewart. “But you don’t. You just have a temporary anxiety, and paralysis that comes from disappointment, and just a soupçon of despair.”
Yet somehow, he managed to end on an optimistic note: “It will pass, and we will be back digging ditches for democracy once again—in the way that we’ve always had to do.” As Stewart showed on election night, the show must go on, and so too, must the country.
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