As you may know, Comedy Central is running every Daily Show since the day Jon Stewart began in a 42-day marathon over on this site. It started this morning and at the moment, Jon (at about age 6) is chatting with John Tesh about his new album. It's 1999 over on that webpage and coming up is a segment about Pat Buchanan throwing his hat in the presidential ring. Same speech as Donald Trump but with better hair and less bragging about how rich he is.
When I heard about this, I wondered for about fifteen seconds if I should try to capture all that video. Then I realized that, first of all, the software I have that captures streaming video records about two hours at a time and then must be reactivated. Since I'm not going to go rushing to my computer every two hours for the next month and a half, that kills that thought.
And Stewart has hosted just shy of 2000 episodes. Even if I had them all, when would I ever watch them? I could perhaps average two a day. That would take 2.7 years. And how many gigabytes would that be? Ye Gods.
Still, I hope they have plans for all those episodes. I'd love to see them set up a website where you could pay a small membership fee and watch 'em at your leisure, preferably with a good search engine so you could search for "colbert nazi retirement village" or "sharpton guest no-show" or other great moments.
Or better still, how about running two hours a night on Comedy Central? I'm thinking three old episodes of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and one Colbert Report. Even as dated as some would be, I bet they'd outdraw most of what's on that network, especially those roasts where the roasters seem to really not like the roastee.
I'm not happy about Jon Stewart going away but I'd be really unhappy if all those great episodes went away. Somehow, I don't think Comedy Central — or someone — will let that happen.