It took about 25 years, but Fox News finally loves Jon Stewart. All he had to do was fully embrace the theory that COVID-19 escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China.
On Wednesday afternoon, the hosts of The Five rushed to Stewart’s defense after he faced some mild pushback for endorsing the so-called lab leak theory as the most plausible explanation on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert earlier this week.
“I think the big revelation here is that Jon Stewart watches Fox News!” the channel’s resident comedy expert, Greg Gutfeld, declared. “Because this is exactly what we’ve been saying at this table for a while. And it makes sense, he’s now in our age group, where the wisdom kicks in,” he added of the 58-year-old former Daily Show host before seeming to accuse Stewart, “or his writer,” of stealing his jokes about the Wuhan lab.
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During the interview in question, Colbert was clearly taken aback by Stewart’s dedication to what has mostly existed up to this point as a right-wing conspiracy theory, at one point asking his friend, “And how long have you worked for Sen. Ron Johnson?”
To Gutfeld and the rest of the Fox panel, this was just further evidence that Colbert lives in a “bubble,” adding, “Anybody that was shocked by this reveals the ignorance of the actual topic.”
And later, Dagen McDowell argued that the Colbert appearance is the moment Stewart “reclaims comedy” after it has been “held hostage by thin-skinned liberals.”
“There is nothing funnier than a comic ridiculing, knocking the stuffing out of a sour, arrogant, self-important blowhard,” she said. “Joan Rivers did it, Don Rickles did it, and there is no bigger sour, arrogant, self-important blowhard than Stephen Colbert. And Jon Stewart did it right in front of him, basically threw it in his face, and I ate it up.”
