Late-night comedy needs to get over Jon Stewart

I miss Jon Stewart — particularly every time I try to watch a late-night comic not named Jon Stewart.

Jon Stewart was truly special. It's not often that a talented person finds the instrument that is just perfect for him. You see this sometimes with kids. You have a child who has an obvious gift for music, and first she tries the piano, and she's good, but there's something missing. She tries the guitar — same thing. And then she tries the cello for the first time and it just works. You know she was born to be a cellist.

That's what it was like for Stewart and the "fake news" format. Stewart is funny. He's good at stand-up. He's a skillful performer. But he was born to be a fake news show host. His improv background made him a fantastic interviewer. He eviscerated Jim Cramer. He stumped Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf by asking who would win an election in Pakistan between Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush. But Stewart was most at home sitting behind his desk and making fun of the news, such as when he destroyed poor Wolf Blitzer for filling airtime when no one knew anything about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

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Not everybody was born to host a fake news show, of course. But evidently, many comics on TV seem to think that the way to replicate Stewart's success is to imitate him.

There's Trevor Noah, who took over the Daily Show from Stewart several months ago, and has still yet to attain a small fraction of the cultural relevance that Stewart had. Noah is a talented comic. But that doesn't mean he's right for the format. After Trump said that it would have been "a beautiful thing" if someone with a gun had stopped the Orlando shooter, Noah did a bit calling Trump "One deranged f---." A late-night comic hurled an insult at Donald Trump! Wow, can you believe it?

There's ex-Daily Show-er Samantha Bee, who stands up in front of a news screen like a CNN anchor and insults non-progressive liberals, and then shows clips of interviews misleadingly edited to paint her guests as doofuses. Sound familiar at all? Maybe because it's exactly what we've seen on the Daily Show for the past 15 years.

There's also Daily Show alum Larry Wilmore, who... sits at a desk like a news anchor and cracks jokes about the news. There's HBO's John Oliver who, refreshingly, sits at a desk like a news anchor and cracks jokes about the news, except in 20-minute segments instead of two-minute segments. John Oliver is really good at this. But maybe, just maybe, late-night comedians could do with more than just one style of comedy.

And then there's the sad case of Stephen Colbert. Colbert is an impossible man to dislike. He seems like a genuinely wonderful person, and he's enormously talented. We all wanted him to succeed as the host of the Late Show. We all wanted him to come into his own as his real self hosting a late-night comedy show, instead of playing a character on TV.

So who is the real Stephen Colbert? It turns out the real Stephen Colbert is... Jon Stewart.

Think I'm exaggerating? Hey, look, there's Stephen Colbert on his show. Sitting at a desk. Going over the news. Showing clips and then cracking jokes about them. Hey, did you know Donald Trump is, like, almost a Nazi? Hilarious!

This isn't what the Late Show is supposed to be. David Letterman, but also Johnny Carson and Jay Leno, did a bit of political mockery, of course, but that was never the focus, and they didn't traffic in the whole "fake news anchor" schtick. But now that Jon Stewart invented that style of comedy, and has had such success with it, everyone is aping it.

Here's a recommendation, Stephen: Ban politics from your show. Not because I don't like your politics, but because it makes you boring. It's the only thing that will make you find a type of comedy that fits both your style and the format of the actual show you're on, as opposed to the one you used to have.

And it's not just the merry band of Daily Show alums who are copying their old boss. The disease is spreading.

Here's how Seth Meyers explained Hillary Clinton's email scandal:

It starts with the classic: a fast-chop clip of news shows because, ha-ha, cable TV has a short attention span and is dumb (unlike late-night comedy, which is for intellectuals). Then the condescending routine of "I'm going to explain this complex thing to you but I'm going to crack a joke every 30 seconds because I think otherwise you're going to fall asleep." And of course, it's always from a liberal perspective. Hillary's scandal is kind of bad because she failed to follow some rules, not really bad because she endangered national security. It's fine and predictable for late-night comics to be progressive, but it only adds to that old "Where have I seen this 5,000 times before?" feeling.

Look, we get it. The format worked so great for Stewart that you feel like you should do it, too. It also gives a sense of being more than just about laughs, and gives you a laugh-friendly way to talk about serious topics. But enough is enough.

In some ways, this devolution of late-night comedy is part of a much broader phenomenon: the growing importance of politics to our identity. As more and more parents say they would be upset at their child marrying someone from a different party, politics is becoming more and more central to how we see the world, and comics are trying to respond to that. Since outright political advocacy is still a bit too risqué for late-night TV, the news parody format gives you an opportunity to talk about politics and signal to a would-be hip audience that you're hip.

But this isn't about politics. It's about something much more serious than that, which is comedy. The format has become tired, and you're not Jon Stewart. And you know what? That's fine. You were meant to do something else, to be someone else. Be original. Crack jokes that don't require splicing together clips of cable news shows. Trust me, you can do it.