Josh Johnson Has Become the Funniest Guy on the Internet. That Is Not a Joke

I don’t feel any burden. Like you said, I am one of two Black correspondents, but we also have a team behind the scenes that’s one of the most diverse teams in late night. We have a sense of who we’re speaking to and about when we talk about a story. I never feel like, “Oh, jeez, I’m going to have to talk about this” or something. I more feel like these are real opportunities.

News commentary and political satire define so much of the media climate now. Is The Daily Show still relevant?

A lot of the political commentary that exists is derivative of The Daily Show, because The Daily Show was this transformative piece of satire for how to engage with politics. The Daily Show ends up getting digested on every medium, which I think is indicative of something that’s still relevant. I also think that taking things like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok very seriously is an opportunity.

In what way?

For me, sometimes when I even pitch something, I’m informed by the general sentiments coming off of social as much as I am by what’s being written in the news. As long as there’s politics, there’ll be political satire, and as long as there’s political satire, I think the people doing it at the highest level will have a place with the people consuming it.

But I don’t know if political humor is moving the needle in the way it once did. There’s so much noise now.

Well, there’s a lot of noise, but also, I guess I’m interested in what your definition of moving the needle is.

I started watching The Daily Show religiously around 2004, when I started college. Later, when Trevor Noah took over the desk, the show no longer felt like appointment viewing. Part of it was Trevor’s style. He didn’t feel as nimble as Jon. Another part, the larger part I think, had to do with the technologies that were changing how we consumed media and connected with one another.

That makes sense. Sometimes I think it’s easy to conflate relevance with impact, but if something isn’t impacting you in the way that it used to, it may also mean that the individuals themselves are making a change in how they consume media.

And comedy itself has changed—with social media, streaming. Are there new rules for comedy?

There’s a great book by Kliph Nesteroff called Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars, and it talks about cancel culture before it had a name. People point to Carlin getting arrested for the seven dirty words and stuff like that, but the further you go back in history, the more restraints comedians had. We’re talking decades before Carlin. There were people that were arrested for alluding to sex—which was something that people were having.

Yes. Even back then, people had sex.

If anything, Carlin, Lenny Bruce, some of those were the last people to actually feel the consequences of doing comedy for an audience who wanted it.