The Daily Show with Trevor Noah Begins Tonight (Sans Authors)
The next iteration of The Daily Show starts this evening as Trevor Noah takes over the chair made famous by Jon Stewart.
While political junkies and comedy fans wait to see how Noah will do (Salon has grave doubts), those in the book business want to know how (or if) he will cover authors.
The opening line-up does not look good for the book world.
An actor, a musician, the CEO of a dating app, and Chris Christie, one of the few GOP candidates who has not written a book, fill the first week.
Based on an interview in Rolling Stone, Noah says week one will set the table for the show: “The first episode will be a reintroduction of the show, but you can’t just go off one … you’re building a relationship. So what we’re doing is dividing the first week into a four-part miniseries that will set the tone for what we hope the show will be.”
However, it generally takes hosts a while to establish their style. As we wrote earlier, it was several years before Jon Stewart began featuring serious authors on The Daily Show.
Meanwhile, there are authors on network late Nnght TV. Junot Díaz appears this week on Late Night With Seth Meyers while Elizabeth Gilbert comes on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.
While neither host fully takes up the slack left in the wake of Stewart’s focus on authors (or Colbert’s on the Colbert Report), at least there is a bookish presence on TV to remind readers, and maybe even Noah, that books fuel fascinating conversations.
Last week Colbert interviewed Malala Yousafzai, author of I Am Malala, (Hachette/Little, Brown) and subject of the documentary, He Named Me Malala, which opens on Oct. 2.
This may be the first time in history that a Nobel laureate has been challenged to do card tricks.