Desi Lydic on hosting ‘The Daily Show’ and Jon Stewart’s return

Desi Lydic is back hosting The Daily Show, and it’s been a pretty good summer for the first-year anchor. She scored her first Emmy nomination as part of the revolving hosting team for the nightly Comedy Central news/satire series, one of several hosts who share time at the desk: Jon Stewart, Ronny Chieng, Dulce Sloan, Michael Kosta and Jordan Klepper.

However, Lydic tells ABC Audio that unlike The Morning Show, there’s no jockeying for power behind the scenes, even though “it would probably make for a more exciting, dramatic office energy.”

“I think a lot of us are really grateful that we get to pass it off back and forth, because it allows us to see our families and have a little bit of time to decompress in a wild news environment.”

Lydic recalls being really nervous before hosting her first show, and then things went horribly wrong.

“I look into the prompter and the teleprompter was reversed. … It was just this wacky glitch that had never happened in the history of the show since I had been there,” she shares. “And I said, ‘Welcome to The Daily Show, I’m Desi Lydic. We’re going to have to do this all over again, because our prompter is flipped.'”

Lydic says she and the other correspondents were “over the moon” when Jon Stewart returned to the desk, adding, “It feels like dad went out for cigarettes, and he did come back, which rarely happens.”

He also reminded them that it’s a comedy show and that they should “just try to make the smartest, funniest shows every day that you possibly can.”

“That being said, we do, you know, try to adhere to fact-checking, telling the truth, trying to get things right,” she adds.

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