Was Jon Stewart joking about embracing the lab leak theory or was he serious?

Slate

Conservatives are taking a victory lap and celebrating on Twitter after the former Daily Show host seemingly embraced the lab leak theory on Stephen Colbert's Late Show return Monday to a full audience. Everybody from Ted Cruz to Tom Cotton to Meghan McCain to Lauren Boebert spent Tuesday tweeting positively about Stewart's rant. Meanwhile, longtime fans of Stewart and The Daily Show were immediately calling Stewart's views "a bit." "So what does Jon Stewart believe?" asks Matthew Dessem. "It’s incongruous, to say the least, to see the onetime scourge of the Bush administration pushing the same ideas as Mike Pompeo unless it’s some kind of a joke, and some Stewart fans on Twitter have indeed concluded he was doing a bit. It’s true that Stewart’s appearance is a stand-up-style riff, but it feels more like jokes about airline food—where the audience is meant to understand that the comedian may be exaggerating but sincerely believes airline food is terrible—than it does a Colbert Report–style joke, where the comedian puts forward a comically stupid argument for something they don’t agree with. In the Bush years, Stewart’s comedy often leaned on jokes in which he pointed out that Republicans were not just telling lies but obvious, stupid lies. Unless he’s doing an extremely subtle parody of himself, that’s the mode he was operating in when Colbert allowed that there was a 'chance' the lab leak theory had some basis in fact...After a commercial break, Stewart returned for a segment that suggested he perhaps went further with his theories than CBS was willing to put on the air. Colbert offers Stewart, seated in the guest chair, the option to 'go on,' and then there’s an abrupt cut to Stewart, now standing, sitting back down again while asking Colbert, 'Can I say this about science?' as though he had been told that whatever he’d just said was not going to air. As with Stewart’s jokes, if the editing is a bit, it’s an extremely subtle one, and not the kind of thing The Late Show usually gets up to. Stewart followed that up with a series of jokes about scientific arrogance, jokes that were both entirely compatible with his earlier statements about the lab leak theory and gave no indication he was being insincere about any of it."

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• Jon Stewart's Wuhan Lab rant adds to his string of post-Daily Show disappointments: "Here’s a guy I’ve always respected and admired and looked up to for decades, but goddamn, he has been proven to be disappointing on more than a few occasions," says Dustin Rowles. "The Wyatt Cenac situation? Super disappointing, even moreso because he’s never really resolved it. The fact that he was something of an a**hole behind the scenes of The Daily Show? Disappointing! Jon Stewart’s dated, irrelevant, tone-deaf movie Irresistible? A major bummer! And then on Monday night, Jon Stewart appeared on Stephen Colbert (with his Wuhan Lab rant).... I realize that I’m a day late on this, but that’s because I didn’t actually watch the clip yesterday. I read a lot of headlines like, 'Jon Stewart goes all-in on the lab leak theory,' and I just assumed it was a joke, that Jon Stewart must have been playing a Colbert Report-like character, and that this was all for laughs. I did not consider for a moment that Jon Stewart had actually lost his goddamn mind. And maybe it was a joke? But I really, really don’t think so....Needless to say, this was hugely disappointing. Does this mean Jon Stewart is canceled? It does not. What it does mean, however, is that I have lost a lot of faith and trust in Jon Stewart..."
• Stewart's rant provides an important lesson about celebrities: "You shouldn’t get your political opinions from them, or your scientific opinions either," says Paul Waldman, adding that, yes, Stewart "has every right to go on as many talk shows as he wants and explain his coronavirus theories. But his attack on expertise reminds us why expertise is so important. The world is full of amateurs who think they’ve stumbled across some piece of information or logical connection that the people who know a lot more about the subject at hand have missed. There are a thousand unpublished manuscripts titled 'Einstein Was Wrong About Relativity' stored on the home computers of people with no formal training in physics."