Rieder: Intriguing pick to succeed Jon Stewart

Talk about big shoes to fill.

Comedy Central on Monday announced its pick to succeed Jon Stewart later this year at the helm of The Daily Show. It's Trevor Noah, a 31-year-old South African comedian who is something less than a household name in the U.S.

It's a bold, intriguing choice for a job whose incumbent has played a key role in our political conversation and who has emerged as a major force in media criticism.

Sure, The Daily Show is an entertainment show, not a journalism outlet, as Stewart is fond of reminding us. But during his inspired reign, it has played a far broader role in American culture than merely a venue for laughs. Stewart has excelled at cutting through the nonsense and the doubletalk of too much of our politics, getting close to the bone in a way that has too often eluded traditional journalism. This is a rare case where the choice of a host of an entertainment program has ramifications for society as a whole. That's how important Stewart's role has become.

In discussing the selection of Noah with The New York Times, which broke the story, Comedy Central President Michele Ganeless said something really smart: "You don't hope to find the next Jon Stewart — there is no next Jon Stewart. So, our goal was to find someone who brings something really exciting and new and different."

That's so true. Stewart is a distinctive personality with a distinctive style. While he inherited the position from Craig Kilborn in 1998, Stewart largely invented his job description. Kilborn's focus was more on pop culture. Under Stewart, the show became far more serious, defined by Stewart's wicked intelligence and penchant for skewering the hypocrisy of politicians and the vagaries of the media. Not to mention his world-class smirk.

So, replacing him is not like selecting a new network news anchor, where the parameters of the gig are largely established. There is no Stewart clone, and looking for someone very similar would be, as Uma Thurman says in Pulp Fiction, "an exercise in futility." So "new and different" is definitely the way to go.

Like all things new and different, there is, of course, an element of risk. It's not like there's a huge track record to go on in the U.S. (Noah does have a massive international following.) Noah has appeared just three times as a correspondent on The Daily Show. But in those segments, and in other appearances, there are signs that suggest he will be a good fit.

Take the brilliant bit in one of his standup specials on the American obsession with sports, particularly with statistics. He does a dead-on impression of an overcaffeinated ESPN type rattling off number after number at a frenetic pace, then contrasts it with an economics reporter basically revealing he doesn't know anything about anything. Wouldn't it be nice, Noah suggests, to reverse the roles.

He was also terrific in his first Daily Show appearance with Stewart, in which he talked about how his African friends feared he would contract Ebola if he came to the United States, and in which he flummoxes Stewart in a game of Spot the Africa.

There's clearly a powerful intelligence at work here, plus an outsider's perspective that should help shed light on the foibles of America.

In an interview with the Associated Press on Monday, Noah suggested that he planned to keep The Daily Show timely, topical and relevant.

"When you are honest in your comedy, you have to acknowledge the world that you're in," he said. "Through a comedic voice you're talking about what needs to be talked about, whether it's race relations or politics or anything that's happening on a global or an American scale."

Stewart, for his part, said he was so excited about his successor that he might rejoin the show as a correspondent to be part of the fun.

Now that would be a win-win.