The saga of Comedy Central’s apparently endless quest to find a new host for The Daily Show—something it’s presumably been attempting to do for more than a year at this point, after Trevor Noah announced he was departing the position back in September of 2022—has reportedly hit another snag. This is per TVLine, which highlighted a report from Puck’s Matt Belloni this week that states that Hasan Minhaj has been told he’s formally out of contention for the gig.
This is all sourced anonymously, so we have to take it with an artery-damaging grain of salt. But Belloni’s report states that Minhaj had been extremely close to being announced for the job—as it, all but told he was getting it—before a New Yorker report in September blew the whole thing up, accusing Minhaj of embellishing multiple facts about his life for the purposes of his stand-up specials. (Which speaks, presumably, to the weird position that The Daily Show holds as a comedy-focused news program; you want the setups on a show like that to be pretty factual/credible, even as the punchlines get patently absurd.)
The timing of all this does make a certain amount of sense, since The Daily Show just announced a brand new slate of guest hosts in the wake of the writer’s strike ending instead of, say, finally settling on a permanent host. (As we’ve noted before, Roy Wood Jr. is still right there, and has said he’d still take the job if offered, but Comedy Central has supposedly gone “back to square one” in their hunt; god save whichever poor exec has been tasked with seeing what Jon Stewart is up to, now that he’s out of a job at Apple…) There was at least some assumption that Minhaj was still at least in the running, but, if this latest report is to be believed, he’s now been told he’s straight-up not getting the job.
