But who will take on the mantle? Stephen Colbert, the other well-known satirist of the era, appears to have abdicated from satire and will now host the mainstream, broadly comedic The Tonight Show; John Oliver, Stewart's understudy at The Daily Show, broadcasts one night a week and is not positioned for daily political commentary. Jimmy Fallon, the current king of late-night TV, is not strictly a political animal and places his emphasis on comedy.
"There doesn't appear to be any heir to fill the vacuum - unless Trevor Noah can pull it off," says one network executive. "If he can't, there's no one." But Noah, Stewart's successor at The Daily Show, is a relative newcomer to US TV. He's already said he'll move away from Stewart's obsession with Fox News.
Sophia McClennen, professor of international affairs and comparative literature at Penn State University and essayist on the role of satire in the political discourse, predicts that, without the insider tone Colbert and Stewart were able to project, any effort by Noah to emulate their satirical commentary is liable to come off as uncaring or mocking.
"I'm afraid we're going to lose the much-needed voice to say what's going on with Donald Trump? I'm not sure how funny that's going to be coming from someone from another country. Satire doesn't work coming from an outsider, so how's he going to make fun of our political follies?"
Part of the answer may be that political satire is already on the move. Colbert and Stewart represented the excesses of the Bush era and its aftermath, so the tail end of the Obama Administration and its successor may require a new focus and lighter touch that reflects a changing political landscape and the way in which Americans consume media information.
With TV viewership in decline, patterns of news consumption have already shifted. "Now you've got the Gawkers, the BuzzFeeds," Noah recently told the US Television Critics Association. "The way people are drawing their news is soundbites and headlines, and click-bait links has changed everything."
The biggest challenge, he said, will be looking through "a bigger lens as opposed to just going after one source - which was historically Fox News".
That suggests entrenched, and self-serving, political positions staked out by the media are looking increasing dated and irrelevant even as actual political partisanship shows no sign of diminishing. Noah's job, predicts McClennen, will be to speak to "a global millennial generation".
"It's not about the Gen-Xers any more. Noah, who speaks seven languages, is going to want to build a sense of youth and of young people interested in politics across the globe. We're going to see a completely different demographic and that's clearly what [Daily Show producer] Comedy Central are hoping for."
That global perspective, then, would be more relevant than domestic politics.
McClennen suggests "citizen satire" that Colbert and Stewart championed on TV may be misplaced.
"The place to look is Twitter, and to a lesser extent Tumblr. You have satirical Twitter accounts with perhaps 250,000 followers that have become extremely powerful. So there's hope that millennials, who (thanks to Colbert and Stewart) understand politics through satire, are actually taking it on."
Who might fill satirical shoes?
John Oliver
Oliver is offering a different kind of insider-outsiderness that looks at issues - Fifa, net neutrality, the environmental cost of fast fashion - that while educational have little to do with the hypocrisy found in daily political life. "Until he gets off his arse and puts his show on every night, he'll have no more impact than Bill Maher," said one executive.
Seth Meyers
The wild card in the pack is Meyers, former host of Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update and currently struggling to make an impact with a traditional talkshow format in the late-night slot after Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show.
- Observer
