Who Should Be The Next Daily Show Host? No One.

When Trevor Noah announced he was leaving The Daily Show after 8 years, I was shocked and saddened. My interest in the late night talk show format piqued a couple years after I graduated college in 2014. Episodes of The Daily Show, Late Night with Seth Meyers, and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver provided a daily salve to the batsh1t craziness of the Trump presidency following his election to the Oval Office.

By the time Noah announced his departure in 2022, he had become a regular part of my life: girlfriends, apartments, jobs all came and went during my 20’s, but Trevor was always there. Sure, he was funny and entertaining, but he was also informative and insightful. His background gave him a distinct frame of reference and allowed him to provide thoughtful observations on the sociopolitical events of the day. (If you haven’t read his autobiography, which is a collection of vignettes detailing his childhood in South Africa, I highly recommend it. It’s hilarious and heartwarming.) If there’s ever been a poster boy for the value of diversity, it should be a picture of Noah: a mixed race kid raised in apartheid South Africa hosting one of the most popular and successful political commentary shows in American television.

And that diversity is one of my favorite parts of what transpired after Noah’s departure. Loss can bring opportunities for change and growth. And rather than selecting a new host to take over the program as Noah did for Jon Stewart, Comedy Central brought in a rotating cast of guests to run it for one week at a time.

When Kal Penn and Hasan Minhaj sat behind the desk of the Daily Show, I felt something that I never had before. Like me, Penn was the son of an engineer and did speech & debate in high school. Minhaj grew up in Davis, a town only two hours away from me in San Jose, a place where a couple dozen of my friends went to school, and where I attended my first-ever college parties. I saw two men who looked like me speaking truth to power, calling out influential bad actors and flawed systems, and pushing for concrete improvements in different areas of society for an entire week.

As a person from the South Asian diaspora, I grew up almost never seeing someone with my skin color on television; and when I did, it was almost always as a racist trope or caricature lampooning my culture: think Apu from the Simpsons or Rajesh Ramayan Koothrappali from the Big Bang Theory (because how hysterical is it that every Indian has an incredibly difficult to pronounce name). I can bet every colored person in America — Indian, Asian, Latino, Black — can recall a time they were mocked in school using some burlesque distortion from Hollywood. And while it’s been nice to see progress in how non-European/American characters are being portrayed as more than just a narrow token minority – from Simu Liu and Kumail Nanjiani starring in Marvel movies, to a full ensemble cast for award-winners such as Crazy Rich Asians – there still remains significant room for improvement.

And this might be where people who have never had to deal with complications from the melanin in their skin might not understand. It’s not just that they looked like me; it’s that they shared so much of my culture, upbringing, and experiences. To see two guys who were probably made fun of for bringing the “funny-smelling” food for lunch, who may have been chastised by their parents for favoring sports over academics, who had to navigate what it meant fitting in as first-generation children to immigrants from a culture vastly different from the western world: at 30 years old, that was the first time I’d seen my identity represented on a stage like that. It was powerful, it was inspiring, and it was two weeks of pride I’ll never forget.

I know firsthand the power that diverse leadership can bring. While I have never hosted a television series with an audience as expansive as The Daily Show, I was in charge of my own sort of show when I joined Teach For America after graduating college. The majority of my 8th graders, over 90% of whom were Latinx and whose parents primarily spoke Spanish, had never had a teacher who was young, who was male, who was a person of color, or who was of Asian descent, let alone all four. And my students were not alone in that paucity: as of 2015, only 3.3% of Asian young adults with bachelor’s degrees were teachers.

Because of the challenges that I faced growing up, I was better able to relate and empathize with my kids. For example, my first language was Hindi, and my mom recalls how in preschool I would punch and bite other kids because they wouldn’t let me on the swings since I could not communicate with them in English. Although I did eventually master the language, I felt another culture shock when I graduated from a small private school in 8th grade to attend a large, plurality white public high school, and then again four years later when I left the relative sanctity of the Bay Area to go to college on the East Coast. I know what it feels like to not fit in, and I tried to do my best to ensure my kids would never feel ostracized or mocked because of their culture.

The importance of representation is not some fictional, pollyannish, kumbaya type belief either. There have been studies on the quantifiable impact diverse teachers have on educational outcomes, especially in marginalized communities. From the Brookings Institute, “Minority students perform better on standardized tests, demonstrate improved attendance, and are suspended less frequently (which may suggest either different degrees of behavior or different treatment, or both) when they have at least one same-race teacher.”

And it is for this reason that I hope the Daily Show continues to push the forefront of what it means to be a diverse and innovative media company. I would love for all of my friends to be able to experience the joy and happiness I felt watching Kal Penn and Hasan Minhaj behind the desk. But it’s more than that. It’s the knowledge that is shared when you interact with people from different backgrounds. Hearing the perspectives of Chelsea Handler and Desi Lydic on how various issues and legal rulings in the United States affected their lives as women, or listening to John Leguizamo pontificate on the inclusion of Latin stories and writers in journalism, forced me to consider viewpoints I would never even think to think of.

It is why I hope the Daily Show does not select a permanent host, and instead continues the more difficult work of rotating their anchors and customizing their topics to those hosts’ unique experiences. Is it way harder? Yes. Will it be more rewarding for the viewers of the show? I believe so. Every new host expanded my horizons thanks to their unique collection of experiences, and that is why if I could vote for a permanent host of the Daily Show, I would vote for no one. Give me them all.