Has Jon Stewart made any real difference?

Jon Stewart ended his 16-year tenure as host of The Daily Show this week . Photo / AP

Just three months after David Letterman exited with the sort of glowing acclaim reserved only for saints and showbiz types, Jon Stewart ended his 16-year tenure as host of The Daily Show this week with great fanfare and we'll-never-see-his-like-again tributes. Well, at least in the left-leaning media in America and on Twitter accounts everywhere.

In New Zealand, his final outing screened last night - at midnight. Which seems about right. Local television programmers never really got the joke, or at least didn't know what to do with a show that was often more politics than comedy.

If memory serves, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart's first network appearance here was when free-to-air C4 began screening an international version of the show in 2006, seven years into the Stewart era and six years into the Bush presidency. New Zealand got the full daily The Daily Show (and only on pay TV) when Sky launched its Comedy Central channel in 2009.

And even then it was a short-lived delight. The clowns at Comedy Central made Stewart disappear like a black-site detainee after only a couple of years. Then, weirdly, he and his show made a surprise reappearance on Comedy Central in May last year. Good on CC for bringing him back.

However all this schedule shilly-shallying has meant that for much of the past decade, I (and I'm sure plenty of other New Zealand fans) have known Stewart and his show better through short clips posted on YouTube, news sites and blogs than from actually sitting down and watching the great man do his thing four nights a week on the box.

And actually, as I reminded myself on Wednesday with his third-to-last show, that really was the way I preferred him and his ground-breaking blend of commentary and comedy, in short bites doing big, big takedowns of some of the biggest douchebags in American political life.

Every Stewart fan has their favourite segments and preferred victims (my favoured douches: George W, Sarah Palin and the entire staff of Fox news). The two roastings I remember best were of Glenn Beck in 2010 using a blackboard, and the deserved shaming of CNBC's finance reporter Jim Cramer after the 2008 financial crisis.

He really told them! But has Stewart made any real difference in his 16 years? In the lead up to the end he said he didn't. And perhaps he is right, issue by issue, douchebag by douchebag he didn't change the world.

But in comedy terms, or at least in political comment terms, Stewart did change the world: he used humour to consistently and witheringly show up the American political process for the hollow, shameless, horrifying and lying wind-bag it is.

He also carried on a conversation about politics with parts of America (and elsewhere), which had largely written off DC. And in doing so he spawned a new genre, the new leader of which is the often-terrific John Oliver, a graduate of The Daily Show.

So here's where that leaves us: Stewart's The Daily Show was often brilliant and sometimes meaningful. I didn't always laugh, but I almost always agreed that he'd cut through the bullshit and told it like it really was.

I think it best to leave the last word to Donald Trump, a man whose hair is destined never to adorn the head of a President of the United States.

The Donald recently tweeted "While Jon Stewart is a joke, not very bright and totally overrated, some losers and haters will miss him and his dumb clown humor. Too bad!"

While Jon Stewart is a joke, not very bright and totally overrated, some losers and haters will miss him and his dumb clown humor. Too bad!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2015

- TimeOut