10 years into her run at The Daily Show, Desi Lydic is riding high with three Emmy nominations—including two for her short-form series “Foxsplains” in which she tries to wrap her head around MAGA’s most unhinged conspiracy theories.
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, the correspondent-turned-rotating host talks about how the series has granted her more empathy for brainwashed Trump supporters and looks back on processing his second term victory in real-time while hosting The Daily Show.
She talks about wanting to be the show’s “female Stephen Colbert” and how things changed once she dropped her Megyn Kelly-inspired character and started being herself on screen. Lydic also gets into the precarious state of late-night TV, from the “shocking” Colbert cancellation to the fate of Jon Stewart under the new Paramount leadership.
If Lydic is fully herself when she’s in the host chair, she says that “Foxsplains” is “me if I watched an inhumane amount of Fox News.”
In the fast-paced YouTube videos, a wild-eyed Lydic gets a bit too close to the camera as she rants about the latest controversy dominating conservative media.
“It’s the need to control the narrative before you have all the information or ignoring the facts,” she explains. “But you have to get your take out there before someone else does. Everything is driven by fear. It’s amped up. There’s a ton of adrenaline. That’s the energy that we try to capture.”
Most recently, it was the “mental gymnastics” over the Epstein files after the Trump administration did an about face and declared “nothing to see here.”
“That was fun because it was the one where I got to break a little bit in the sense that, even as I am telling people to not pay attention to it, I’m not believing it,” Lydic says. “I was allowed to struggle with that. Like, wait a second, I just cared about this three months ago, why do I not care about this now?”
Each entry in the series begins with Lydic jokingly saying that she’s just finished watching Fox News for some ungodly number of hours in a row. But in reality, she says watching just 45 minutes of the network helps her understand “why people feel this way.”
“Because you have someone telling you, this is what is true, don’t believe your eyeballs, this other thing is what’s actually happening,” she explains. “There’s so much fear driving all of it. And fear is such a powerful motivator. So I totally understand that.”
Lydic says she’ll have Fox News playing in her office and will look up at whatever over-the-top headline is emblazoned across the screen and think, “Oh my God, that’s really happening?!” She then stops and realizes, “Oh, I’m watching Fox News, that’s probably not exactly what’s happening.”
Asked if she has ever heard from the Fox News personalities she parodies, Lydic replies, “The only person that I’ve talked to is Jessica Tarlov, who I adore and think she is so brilliant.” Tarlov, the token liberal voice on Fox’s popular afternoon program The Five, has been breaking through the noise more and more with her voice-of-reason takes on Trump 2.0.
“She’s the only one who will talk to me,” Lydic reveals. “I’m still waiting for everyone else to reach out to me. Jesse Watters, listen, there is an open invitation. Happy to have a conversation.”
Lydic’s fascination with right-wing media runs deep. She grew up in Kentucky and still counts many conservatives among her family members. Her parents are “not necessarily Trumpers by any means, but they have been Republicans their whole lives,” she says. Despite their political leanings, she says they watch every episode of The Daily Show, “whether they agree with it or not.”
“I think it rubs a lot of my family members the wrong way,” Lydic admits. “And sometimes we talk about it and sometimes we intentionally avoid it. But I do think the more you can sit down with people you’re close to, who you have a different perspective from, and just talk some of those things out, you may reach an impasse, but you can generally find some kind of commonality. So my fear is that eventually we all just completely stop talking to one another, and we’re just living in our own silos.”
Lydic joined The Daily Show as one of the first correspondents under host Trevor Noah in the fall of 2015. But when she first auditioned during the initial Jon Stewart era, she fashioned herself as a Megyn Kelly or Gretchen Carlson-type Fox News blonde who could satirize the right the same way Colbert did first on that show and then later on The Colbert Report.
So the news that her comedy hero had been fired from his Late Show perch, presumably for speaking out against Trump, came as a “real shock.”
“As someone who watched him and loved his work—and he, like Jon, was a huge part of why I wanted to be part of the show—it was shocking and disheartening for all of us,” she says. “And we don’t know what the future holds. We’ve been really lucky to have a platform to try to find catharsis and find humor and say what we believe and not be censored in any way. And I really hope we get to continue doing that.”
As for Colbert, Lydic says she’s “very excited” to see what Colbert does in the nine months he still has on the air until The Late Show officially goes away in May 2026. “Watching Colbert is incredible, but watching scorched Earth Colbert is even more exciting,” she says. “I sure as hell will be watching.”
Listen to the episode now and follow The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
