Comedy Central's New Assmaster

COURTESY COMEDY CENTRAL Stewart's 'Daily Show' predecessor, Craig Kilborn, will take over CBS's 'Late Late Show' duties from that old guy.

Police interrogators must've found the past three weeks of Comedy Central's 11 p.m. slot useful. If you strapped me into a chair, pried my eyes open, and showed me nothing but alternating Stephen Colbert and Beth Littleford specials, you'd have me whimpering that Saddam hid all of his chemical weapons in my closet, and sure, you can bomb there right now.

Finally, the repeats have ended. Craig Kilborn has packed up for CBS, where he'll take over the Late Late Show from Tom Snyder and try to out-gangle Conan O'Brien in the battle of the red-haired guys. Jon Stewart's in charge now. Or, more accurately, he's not. The Daily Show's extremely tight structure, coupled with its reliance on correspondents like Colbert and Littleford, means that Stewart functions more as the Black Lion than as the whole Voltron.

Stewart, for his part, goes about Forming The Head competently enough, given that he has to fit into a preset formula. The structure of the show has hardly changed, and so the bits that Kilborn took with him, like "What Did We Learn Today" and "A Moment For Us" are conspicuous by their absences. Stewart handled the excision of "Moment" with "A Hastily Thrown Together Editorial," a bit that fulfilled the same function as Colin Quinn's inaugural "Weekend Update" on Saturday Night Live. Basically, the old guy is gone, and here's the new guy. Deal with it. Stewart's version went for a stepfather-taking-over-a-dysfunctional-family metaphor which, although disjointed, still wasn't as dopey as Quinn's "I'm Colin; can I get you your coffee today?" On the other hand, the replacement for "What Did We Learn," a recap of the show in the to-be-continued style of the old '60s Batman series, all but screamed "insert Craig here."

In fact, Kilborn seems to have left a sticky residue over the rest of the show as well. The writers obviously still have his personality in mind for the news segments--parts
of last Monday's Clinton coverage would have been much more effective if they had come from Kilborn's upbeat callow-youth voice than Stewart's drier, more laid-back style. This comparative mellowness served him worst during Colbert's interactive live-remote bit, during which Stewart chuckled to himself incessantly. It was horrible--he'd become some kind of mini-Leno.

That said, Stewart's much better than Kilborn in the land of the interview. Little Craig always seemed like he'd sooner stab his guests than talk to them--"Five Questions" was the ultimate example of this kind of hostility, funny though it was. Stewart's interviewing is much more open. His inaugural interview with Michael J. Fox was an enjoyable joust, and Fox actually wound up interviewing Stewart for a few seconds.

Of course, Stewart's easier style has its pitfalls here, too. It's comparatively well and good when he's making nice with Michael J. Fox, but I'd like to think he'd keep a spare gut-sword hidden under the desk for when someone like Daphne Zuniga comes to town.

At the moment The Daily Show has a case of split personality. It was built around Kilborn's obnoxiousness, and Colbert and Co. roam the country in his spirit, looking for Midwesterners to feel superior to.

On the one hand, Beth Littleford asks wizened former munchkins if they "got some" on the set of the Wizard of Oz. On the other hand, there's Jon Stewart. The promotional spots for the new Daily establish an effective non-Craig personality for him: he's a likable, hapless doof who'd miss the last helicopter out of Saigon and, um, get shot or have all his skin stripped off. Until that persona comes through in the show's writing, though, another of those spots' portrayals of Stewart will be more accurate: an innocent man, trapped in a gigantic asshole.

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