So fine then. Go. Say goodnight, Jon Stewart, and let’s have a look at the new guy. What’s his name? Trevor Noah. Who? Okay, he’s black, a 32-year-old comedian from South Africa, a sharp cultural operator in his own country (apparently) but a sweet naïf in this one. Hell of a gamble, Comedy Central. I salute you. And at first, yes, it was pleasant to see young Trevor smiling away and deeply dimpling in the Stewart seat, the seat that had lately grown gray hairs. He was fresh and he was sleek. The show’s format—the monologue delivered to the camera, then the segments with the correspondents, then the interview—was unchanged, and the writing hadn’t suffered appreciably since the handover. The idea seemed to be that Noah, while coyly advertising his outsider status (“Black Friday—or, as we call it back in Africa, Friday”), would simply and smoothly channel the geist of The Daily Show.

And he was handling it, bless him, handling the material, distributing rays of easy charm. The Trump gags sounded good in that clipped, musical South African accent, and they even had a new global vibe: Trump as “the perfect African president.” And that little TV blandishment that Stewart could never quite get comfortable with, the “We’ll be right back” at the end of a segment? It tripped off Noah’s tongue. His body language was relaxed; where the old guy had hunched over his desk, with satirical voltage crawling hairily out of his wrist-holes, the kid sat back and rode it. Triumph. Come to my arms, my beaming boy!

Slowly, though, it began to sink in: the dimension of our loss. Jon Stewart was gone—our sanity, our balance. This had of course been the 10‑ton irony of his career: In nuking the news-givers, petarding the pundit class, he became one of them—became, in fact, the pundit/news-giver for a generation of viewers. As far back as 1969, Renata Adler described “that natural creator of discontinuous, lunatic constituencies, the media.” In 1976, Paddy Chayefsky’s Network raised this perception to the level of prophecy, with a rained-on, mad-as-hell Howard Beale heralding the age of the crank with a microphone, the Great Splintering and the end of the singular, authoritative, Cronkitic voice. In 1994, the British show The Day Today, a fake news program, parodied with surreal brutality the style of the news, the noise of the news, news itself as a production. TV news should have been impossible after The Day Today, but naturally it wasn’t.

Reverence for the news, however, news-idolatry, was eroding steadily—to the point where, by 1999 and the start of Stewart’s tenure on The Daily Show, the only type of news one could take seriously was the fundamentally unserious. And so satire, which appears to be hocking loogies from the margins but in fact takes its bearings from a higher authority, came blushingly to occupy the middle. There was Jon Stewart on CNN’s Crossfire in 2004, smack in the moral center, sitting like a barbed lotus between the blah on the right (Tucker Carlson) and the blah on the left (Paul Begala), destroying them both with divine satirical perspective and insisting all the while that he was just a comedian.