Punch the Macaque arrived on our screens small, solemn, and unmistakably alone, and within hours the internet had adopted him, projected onto him, and wept politely into its sleeves. His loneliness became a communal pastime; his struggle, a shared moral exercise in empathy conducted via comment sections and donation links. Then, just as the crowd settled into its virtue, Jon Stewart wandered in with remarks better left unspoken.

The viewers, having already elected tenderness, had no appetite for laughter at the expense of a creature newly acquainted with how precarious comfort can be—and so the joke curdled, and the backlash followed Jon Stewart right on its heels.

On his The Daily Show, Jon Stewart was commenting on Donald Trump's tariff decisions when the conversation took an ungainly detour. Enter Punch, the small and solemn macaque, summoned as metaphor, mascot, or momentary comfort animal. One might reasonably ask what a baby monkey has to do with taxes, trade, or fiscal brinkmanship. The answer, alas, was not much. Yet this absence of relevance did not prevent Stewart from taking a sharp swing at the animal, as if the fault lay with Punch for failing to illuminate global economics. 

"Clearly there is something wrong with that fu----- monkey," Jon Stewart said.

 The joke, having missed its mark, lingered awkwardly, while the monkey, blameless and bewildered, was left holding the punchline, and audiences their daggers.

Stewart did not stop at name-calling Punch, the monkey who has since been promoted, by a Spotify playlist, no less, into the very embodiment of yearning and, rather inconveniently, a global sweetheart. He went on to suggest that Punch’s exile from his tribe was less tragedy than wisdom. The joke, having misplaced both its heart and its manners, curdled mid-air, leaving the live audience, who had moments earlier laughed obligingly, in a shared state of disbelief.

Somewhere between the punchline and the pause, in a surprising twist, money cleared its throat.

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Stewart’s mockery did not start the circus; it merely joined one already in motion, where Punch’s loneliness had been alternately treated as entertainment and investment, thanks to an offer by Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan Tate.

With his exasperated hand gestures and a rapid succession of unfortunate word choices, it became clear that Jon Stewart on The Daily Show was attempting, though with remarkable clumsiness, to land a joke about Punch. And as per his post on X, that is exactly what Tristan Tate, Andrew Tate's younger brother, is not doing. In the wake of Punch’s viral ascension from lonely macaque to global fixation, the Tate brothers offered a clean, unambiguous sum of $250,000 to buy the monkey outright.

There has been no further movement in the Tate brothers’ peculiar bid to purchase Punch the monkey, an offer that now sits parked on the same unfortunate street as Jon Stewart’s ill-judged joke. Different intentions, perhaps, but a shared lack of tact, each reducing the animal’s quiet distress to either spectacle or transaction.

In the end, Punch needed neither a punchline nor a price tag, but something more priceless: love.

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What is your take on Joe Stewarts comment on Punch? Let us know in the comments.