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Ratings data on Tuesday showed that Noah's first outing drew
about the same TV audience as Jon Stewart's farewell in August
after 16 years with the late night Comedy Central show.
However, Noah's premiere on Monday was simulcast across all
Viacom Inc platforms. The audience watching on Comedy Central
was estimated at just over 1 million, Nielsen data showed.
As promised, the South African-born comedian made few changes to
the format of political and pop culture satire and a nightly
interview that was developed by Stewart.
That proved both reassuring and a little disappointing to U.S.
television critics.
Washington Post critic Hank Stuever called Noah's performance a
"seemingly smooth debut."
"I just have to ask: What were we all so afraid of?" he said.
... It’s too early for Noah to crush it, but it’s enough for now
to just utter a sigh of relief. 'The Daily Show' is back with
its essential wit and irreverence intact," Stuever wrote.
Noah, who is little known in the United States, made his
new-ness a running joke in Monday's show, quipping that the
"Daily Show" family "has a new stepdad. And he's black." Since
other celebrities had turned down the host's job, "once again, a
job Americans rejected is now being done by an immigrant."
A joke about Pope Francis and the size of his penis, and a
cocaine joke about dead singer Whitney Houston, did not go over
well with either the studio audience or some TV critics.
Lloyd Grove for the Daily Beast called Noah's debut "crude,
clumsy."
"His material was hit-and-miss, - even the raucously
cheerleading studio audience groaned at times - and he seemed,
at least in his initial outing, to lack his predecessor's
valuable gift for exhuming laughs from the death of a punch
line," he wrote.
At USA Today, Robert Bianco felt Noah's debut was "less than
spectacular" but New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik,
compared it to a new iPhone.
"It was sleeker, fresher and redesigned," Poniewozik said.
"There were tweaks here and there - look, even a new font! But
it still does essentially the same thing."
(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Bill Trott and Alan
Crosby)
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