“The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart leaned heavily into satire on Thursday night while commenting on fellow late-night show host Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension.
On Wednesday, ABC said it was pulling “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” off the air “indefinitely” after Kimmel commented on Charlie Kirk’s death in an episode that aired Monday.
“I don’t know who this Johnny Drimmel Live ABC character is. But the point is, our great administration has laid out very clear rules on free speech,” Stewart said in his opening monologue on Thursday.
Stewart usually hosts “The Daily Show” on Mondays, but the program said in an X post on Thursday that he would also be doing that day’s episode.
Thursday’s episode opened with a voiceover calling the program the “all-new, government-approved Daily Show, with your patriotically obedient host, Jon Stewart.”
“We have another fun, hilarious, administration-compliant show,” Stewart said while pretending to shush the audience when they laughed.
In his monologue, Stewart praised President Donald Trump sarcastically, calling him “our great leader” and a “perfectly tinted Trump.”
Stewart also commented on Trump’s state visit to the UK, during which a reporter had asked the president about Kimmel’s suspension.
“How dare you, sir! What outfit are you with, sir, the Antifa Herald Tribune?” Stewart said, referencing a left-wing group that Trump designated on Wednesday as a “major terrorist organization.”
“There’s a very reasonable explanation for what befell this scallywag, Kimbal,” he continued, intentionally mispelling Kimmel’s name.
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The show then cut to a clip of Trump’s response, where he told the reporter that Kimmel was removed because “he had bad ratings more than anything else.”
“Now, some naysayers may argue that this administration’s speech concerns are merely a cynical ploy, a thin gruel of a ruse, a smokescreen to obscure an unprecedented consolidation of power and unitary intimidation, principleless and coldly antithetical to any experiment in a constitutional republic governance,” Stewart said.
“Some people would say that. Not me, though, I think it’s great,” he added.
Representatives for Stewart and Kimmel did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Stewart isn’t the only late-night host who has weighed in on Kimmel.
“The Late Show” host Stephen Colbert said in his opening monologue on Thursday night that Kimmel’s removal was a “blatant assault on the freedom of speech.”
Colbert also criticized Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr in his monologue. Carr wrote in an X post on Wednesday that broadcasters need to push back on “programming that they determine falls short of community values.”
“Well, you know what my community values are, buster? Freedom of speech. Or as Alexander Hamilton called it, ‘Hakuna Matata,'” Colbert said.
