Comedy Central’s The Daily Show recently celebrated its 30th anniversary, and on Monday, Jordan Klepper and Ronny Chieng sat down on the show’s podcast to look back at the show’s history. At one point, Klepper proved that denial isn’t just a river in Egypt when he claimed the show is “not partisan,” that it just calls “balls and strikes,” and to “put pressure on the bullshit.”
Chieng wondered if Klepper has noticed a shift from the shows early days to its current version, “But, like, when you watch the early versions of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and, you know, maybe three or four seasons in, do you feel that it was as divisive as it feels now? ‘Cause I always feel The Daily Show was always something that called balls and strikes, more or less, you know. And so, do you feel like that, you know, when you watched it as a college kid, did you feel like it was balls and strikes, or do you feel like it was on your team or, you know, what do you feel?”
As Jordan Klepper and Ronny Chieng reflect on 30 years of The Daily Show, he insists the show is like a baseball umpire “I think balls and strikes is a great way of calling it…And I will say when there were like defining cultural moments, I would say like the Iraq War, it… pic.twitter.com/agybh2tXH0— Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) August 4, 2026
In 2025, Chieng and Klepper were the second and third most consistently liberal of The Daily Show’s rotational hosts, behind only Josh Johnson, who had a more limited sample. Nevertheless, Klepper agreed, “Now, I didn’t have a team growing up. And so, I think balls and strikes is a great way of calling it.”
According to Klepper, when The Daily Show obsesses with President Bush and Trump, it is not because of partisanship, but in calling out the BS, “I would say like the Iraq War, it became not partisan, but, like, focused on one big thing. Like when I think of it, now I think of like the Trump era that we are in. And I do think like the ethos of the show is like you call bullshit where it is.”
Klepper then tried to claim that this isn’t confined to Republican presidents:
Read Full Article: https://newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/alex-christy/2026/08/04/klepper-claims-daily-show-not-partisan-calls-balls-and-strikes
