Joe Rogan praised how “balanced” Jon Stewart is for critiquing both the right and the left, calling the late-night host “one of the most important pieces to unify everybody.”
On the Friday episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Rogan sat down with The Daily Show correspondent Michael Kosta, with whom he gushed about Stewart.
“He’s never abandoned being a real comic, which is what got him to the dance in the first place,” Rogan said. “He’s always had those instincts and he’s the very best at holding a line and making something even more preposterous just with a facial expression,” he went on, before harping on his primary compliment, that Stewart was great at “pointing out these f---ing unbelievably ridiculous, in-your-face hypocrisies that we see every day—from both sides!”
Rogan added a tepid disclaimer to his lavish praise, calling Stewart “a solid guy” even though “I don’t always agree with him.” But that’s just fine, he added, since “I don’t always agree with everybody, I don’t even agree with me!” More importantly, he said, Stewart is “reasonable, he gets the whole big picture.”
One recent point of note that saw Stewart and Rogan on the same page was the public response to Tony Hinchcliffe’s jokes at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in October. Rogan was one of Hinchcliffe’s fiercest defenders in the aftermath, though he admitted he’d advised the comedian not to tell the joke about Puerto Rico being a “floating island of garbage.”
While the comments were widely condemned as racist by people on opposing ends of the political spectrum, Stewart also defended Hinchcliffe, telling Daily Show viewers, “I find that guy very funny.” Stewart also echoed a lot of Rogan’s points about Joe Biden’s age upon his return to The Daily Show last February, roasting both Biden and Donald Trump and equating them based on their ages, calling them “similarly challenged.”
Stewarts’ comparison between the candidates didn’t go down smoothly for some viewers, with commentator Keith Olbermann taking to X to call the host a “bothsidesist fraud” for “bashing Biden.”
Rogan, on the other hand, sees that effort to mock both sides as a plus.
“The Daily Show, especially under the tutelage of Jon Stewart, when he’s running the helm, it’s so balanced at pointing out ridiculous s--t all over the place, which I think is so important,” Rogan continued Friday, “It’s so smart.”
“I’m so happy he’s back at The Daily Show and I’m so happy he makes fun of everything, and I’m so happy he still makes d--- jokes,” he added. “It’s fun, it’s like The Daily Show seems like The Daily Show again."
