This December will mark one year since Trevor Noah exited The Daily Show, and we still have no idea who will take over hosting duties from him permanently. There’s been no shortage of candidates thrown out though, including Hasan Minhaj, who was reported to be the frontrunner for the job in early August. However, following the controversy surrounding the comedian’s stand-up material, word’s come in that The Daily Show is back to widening its search for a host.
In case you missed it, Minhaj caught heat recently from a New Yorker article that shared he embellished details in his personal life for his routines. As reported by Variety, Paramount Global is now “considering a wider array of candidates” to take over The Daily Show, although it’s unclear if this is directly in response to the new details about Minhaj that have come to light or if that’s just coincidental timing. It was also noted that Minhaj, who was a correspondent on the Comedy Central series during Jon Stewart’s tenure and guest-hosted the show for a week in March, is not out of the mix entirely for succeeding Noah on The Daily Show, it’s just now there’s a renewed effort with looking at other people.
To be fair, shortly after Hasan Minhaj was said to be in contention for sitting behind the news desk on a permanent basis, it was reported that fellow guest host Kal Penn was also in the running. So it’s not like the powers-that-be at The Daily Show and Paramount Global ever settled on Minhaj, but now it appears that he’s lost his frontrunner status. Still, one would imagine he has a leg up on much of the competition given that after he left The Daily Show in 2018, he hosted Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj on Netflix.
The Daily Show has been on hiatus since May 1 because of the writers strike, with correspondent Dulcé Sloan being the final in a line of guest hosts that launched with Leslie Jones in mid-January, though Sloan only hosted the one night. The Daily Show is now set to resume airing on Monday, October 16, and a new group of guest hosts to keep this ship running. However, the plan is now for the new permanent host to be ready to go by sometime in 2024, ahead of the presidential election.
Prior to the writers strike, people like current Daily Show correspondents/contributors Michael Kosta, Ronny Chieng and Lewis Black, as well as Charlemagne The God, Michelle Wolf as Desus Nice, were lined up to guest host The Daily Show, but it hasn’t been revealed whether any of them will be slotted back in once the show starts up again. We’ll let you know if that ends ups being the case, as well as what new guests hosts are brought in and, of course, who ultimately succeeds Trevor Noah, whether it’s Hasan Minhaj or someone else.
Until then, keep track of other upcoming programming with the 2023 TV schedule, and stream past episodes of The Daily Show with a Paramount+ subscription.
