After 16 years, host of America's The Daily Show (and one time star alongside Adam Sandler in Big Daddy) Jon Stewart is stepping down this week, with his last show on Thursday.
In America, it's reported that more young people get their news from Jon's satirical news show that any other news channel and, while over here Comedy Central curbed our viewing of the show (pulling the best bits from the week into one weekly show to be found on a channel we don't have, at a time when we're in the pub), that doesn't mean Jon's wisdom has passed us by. Here's some of the most important moments from his career.
PS Comedy Central are kind of mean about the clips we can show in this country so this is actually the best you can watch in this country.
When Malala Yousafzai told us how important education is
This was less Jon teaching us stuff and more Malala Yousafzai imparting her wisdom. Oh man, when *she *was like: 'It's an honour for me to be here' and then he was all like: 'It's an honour for me to have you,' and we were all like: 'IT'S AN HONOUR TO BE ALLOWED TO WATCH THIS ON THE INTERNET' it was all too much. Then she said: 'We don't learn the importance of anything until it is snatched from our hands. The terrorists don't want women to get education because then the women would become more powerful.'
When Jon predicted that we wouldn't do 'jack shit' to end racism and violence
You all saw this. It was everyone's Facebook walls like a month ago. And for good reason too. After Dylann Roof shot nine black people at a church in South Carolina last month, Jon ditched any pretence of trying to make light of the situation and spoke straight to camera; 'I have nothing but sadness that we have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other and the nexus of a just gaping racial wound that will not heal, yet we pretend doesn’t exist. And I’m confident, though, that by acknowledging it, by staring into that and seeing it for what it is, we still won’t do jack shit. Yeah. That’s us.' And he was right. Since then three African American women have died in police custody, a teenage girl was agressively detained by a police officer and two women died at the hands of a lone gunman in a shooting in a cinema. In fact, in 2015 alone, there's been 207 mass shootings in the US.
The time he comforted America after 9/11
We're slightly too young to remember this when it happened (our parents probably shielded us from a lot of what was going on at the time, thank goodness) but watching it now is almost just as important as it was then. 'Are you OK?' He asks. He chokes up then tells us why 9/11 means he 'grieves' but he doesn't 'despair'. 'Any fool can blow something up. Any fool can destroy. But to see these guys, these firefighters and these policemen and people from all over the country, literally with buckets, rebuilding… that’s extraordinary.'
That time he took the Caitlyn Jenner debate to a new place
What started out as a look at how accepting the media were generally being towards Caitlyn Jenner's transition (except for Fox News but whatever), swiftly turned into a look at how quickly the media decided to *treat *Caitlyn Jenner like a woman. 'She looks better than I do' screeched female news anchors across the nation. 'Caitlyn,' Jon says, 'When you were a man we could talk about your athleticism, your business accumen… Now you're a woman, your looks are really the only thing we care about.' 'Is she hotter than Kim Kardashian?' One pundit wonders. 'Because we want to give a woman a compliment, we just need to make sure another woman gets taken down a notch in the process,' Jon responds.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.