WATCH: Jon Stewart fondly slams Chris Christie over New Jersey's special election

Jon Stewart had a New Jersey Moment on The Daily Show on Wednesday night. You may not know it from his fancy suits and "bourgeois pronunciations," Stewart says, but at heart he's just a "simple Jersey boy." After waxing poetic about the Garden State, Stewart gets down to politics: Gov. Chris Christie's (R) big decision on how to handle replacing the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.).

Stewart starts out by noting that Christie had three options: Name an interim senator to fill out the rest of Lautenberg's term, have voters elect a new senator in already scheduled November 2013 elections — when Christie is up for re-election — or spend millions on a special election earlier this fall. He then expresses confidence that Christie won't choose option three, because in 2009, he ruled out holding a costly special election if, hypothetically, Sen. Lautenberg died.

Of course, Christie opted for the third option, scheduling a special election three weeks before his own re-election bid — a race he's expected to easily win. What's more, the conventional wisdom is that he did this so he wouldn't appear on the same ballot as presumptive Democratic Senate nominee Cory Booker. In other words, Stewart says, he's wasting at least $12 million in taxpayer dollars in a "self-serving, corrupt abuse of power."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

That's outrageous and irresponsible, Stewart charges — then adds: "I miss New Jersey so much!" There's also an extended pizza joke thrown in. Watch above.