Comedian Hasan Minhaj is reportedly the leading candidate being considered to replace Trevor Noah on The Daily Show after his 2022 exit.
Variety reports the months-long search for Noah’s replacement could be coming to an end, according to three sources close to the matter.
However, sources say it’s not a done deal just yet. A deal has not yet been finalized, so there is no guarantee that Minhaj will ultimately nab the position.
Minhaj recently expressed his interest in the role, telling Variety‘s Awards Circuit podcast in May, “I’m definitely open to the conversation. It’s also a family conversation now. It’s a very different conversation than when I first got hired at the show when I was 29.”
“My life is in a very different place. And so that’s a bigger life/family convo. It changes a lot of things,” Minhaj, who is a father of two children, explained. “It’s an all-encompassing, all-consuming thing. And other people have to live with the consequences of what I say. And I just want to make sure everybody, if that were to ever come to fruition, ‘Hey, are we all on board with this?’”
Minhaj is already closely connected to the show, having worked on it as a correspondent from 2014 to 2018. He recently returned earlier this year to fill in as a guest host after Noah’s departure.
Daily Show experience aside, the comedian already has plenty of political commentary on his resume. He hosted six seasons of Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj on Netflix, in which he offered comedic, nuanced coverage on specific topics across culture and politics.
Noah announced his exit from the show in September 2022, seven years after he took over the program during Jon Stewart’s departure.
According to Noah, filling Stewart’s shoes was no easy feat.
“I will say the first two years were horrible — and it was horrible because I had taken over one of America’s most beloved institutions,” he told Variety in 2020. “And even though Jon Stewart had passed over the reins to me, it was essentially a year of people telling me I shouldn’t be doing the job and I was unworthy of being in that seat. And I continued to believe that.”
It is unclear who else is in the running for the job, but Chelsea Handler, Kal Penn, and Sarah Silverman, among others, also guest hosted the show after Noah’s departure.