Apple TV+
It seems oddly fitting that the second season of Apple TV+’s The Problem with Jon Stewart premiered the week of Yom Kippur. Because the host spent his first episode back after an extended break atoning for his—and by extension, the rest of the comedy community’s—history of making jokes at the expense of trans people.
The episode, titled The War Over Gender, opens with a classic Daily Show-esque montage of conservative commentators melting down over a new emoji of a pregnant man. But just minutes in, Jon Stewart offers up some self-reflection.
“We are in a new dawn of gender and sex complexity, where those who don’t fit in a simple binary are meant to be seen with humanity,” he says. “It wasn’t always like this, people. As recently as, let’s say, the 1990s, early 2000s, people were making shitty, reductive jokes about the subject.”