Jon Stewart Only Works Mondays, and Mondays Are Still Winning The Daily Show

Jon Stewart hosts The Daily Show one night a week, on Mondays, and the rest of the week is handled by the show's correspondents in rotation. This arrangement has always struck me as the ideal job. You show up once, say something sharp, and go home while everybody else does the dishes.

So I went to the show's YouTube channel to see how the week was going, because the view counts are the closest thing television has to an honest witness. A man will tell you he watches the news for the analysis. His browser history says he watched a cat fall off a table.

Stewart's newest segment, on what he calls AI's dubious promise of a better future, has passed 4.2 million views in about a day. That's the biggest number on the page by a mile. The show's other recent hits are mostly about the same subject or close to it: a segment on AI leaders signing a self-policing pact is near 3 million, and an interview about witnessing AI's risks from the inside is around 1.6 million.

Meanwhile, Michael Kosta's latest headlines segment and a Jordan Klepper field piece are each sitting around 1.4 million, which is a perfectly fine number for any human being who isn't Jon Stewart. Being compared to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show is like being compared to the sun on a sunny day. Everybody notices the sun.

The take here is simple. Monday is still the show. And the subject Stewart keeps coming back to, the robots and the people selling them, is the one audiences can't stop clicking on, probably because they're worried the robots are the ones doing the clicking.

The correspondents should take heart. Mondays come only once a week. They have the other three nights, and the patience of a nation that, as far as I can tell, has nothing better to do.