by Lisa Rogak
As he pondered the offer, however, the network pulled a fast one and instead took the offer to Jimmy Kimmel, who pounced on it. At the time, Kimmel had just launched his own talk show on ABC, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, after serving as cohost of Win Ben Stein’s Money and The Man Show, which aired on Comedy Central in the late 1990s.
Amazingly, despite the accolades and his now iconic status, Stewart still came in second. However, this time he didn’t seem to mind. The truth was that as his star continued to rise, Stewart retreated further inward whenever he was away from the studio. He was gracious with fans whenever approached, offering up an autograph and sometimes a joke, but otherwise he went into deep retreat whenever he wasn’t at the studio. Indeed, one reporter called him “a high-functioning hermit.”
In the early 2000s when it seemed the rest of the country was attached to their computers and the era of smartphone ubiquity was just around the corner, Stewart still didn’t have an e-mail address, at home or at the studio. “Don’t you find that people contact you way more?” he responded when someone asked the reason why. Indeed, he is rarely seen on the Manhattan celebrity circuit, only emerging to make the obligatory appearance at the annual awards shows where he’s been nominated. Stewart is a content homebody, and once he found a kindred spirit in Tracey—whom he married in 2000—he had little reason to stray from his favorite activities away from work: doing the daily Times crossword puzzle, watching TV, and taking the dogs—he had added another pit bull named Monkey to the household—to the park.
“I was a fan of The Little Rascals and Petey was a pit, so maybe that was inherent,” said Stewart. “If you go to the store and buy the generic ‘dog,’ that’s the dog. That little block head and that little dog body, and so energetic and playful. They’re meaty and muscular and fun.”
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And then an interesting thing began to happen. Word on the street and at many college campuses was that many young people who never watched network news were watching The Daily Show regularly and considering it their primary source of news, particularly when it came to the 2004 presidential election season.
“I’m not watching the evening news to figure it out, that’s for sure,” Joe Harper, a twenty-one-year-old college student, commented in early 2004. Instead, he relied on Dennis Miller, Bill Maher, and The Daily Show to get his information. “I trust these guys,” he added. “Their stuff is funnier, but it’s also truer.”
Harper was in good company. A 2004 survey released by the Pew Research Center revealed that fully one-fifth of Americans aged 18 to 29 said they relied on not only The Daily Show for their main source of news about the presidential candidates but Saturday Night Live as well.
Comedian Miller weighed in. “I don’t think kids even vaguely connect to guys like [Peter] Jennings and Dan Rather,” he said. “If you’re an eighteen-year-old, who are you going to trust to give you the facts? Dan Rather in that epaulet jacket where he’s just about to go fly-fishing after the show, or are you going to listen to Jon Stewart? Of course, you’re going to listen to Jon.”
“It sounds a little bit apocryphal to me, but we do repackage the news, so I suppose that we are a valid source as long as people can understand when we’re goofing and when we mean it,” said Colbert. “I think you have to have some handle on what’s happening in the world to get our jokes, because we only do the most cursory explanation of what the issue is in order to set up our punch lines. We don’t talk in depth about any stories. I suppose you could watch our show and sort of get a sense of what’s going on in the world, but you’d also be missing half of our jokes.”
“I find it hard to believe,” said Stewart. “I enjoy the show as much as the next guy, but we don’t actually give any news. If you haven’t seen the news, you probably won’t know much about what we’re talking about. We’re a cable channel. I mean, we’re beyond Spanish people playing soccer on the dial, we’re near a naked talk show. My guess is if you found your way to us, you’re a relatively savvy consumer of information.”
“Different outlets have been saying that for a while or claiming studies [demonstrate] the show’s influence on the public,” said writer J. R. Havlan. “We don’t sit around thinking about it. We don’t come in and say, ‘How are we going to affect the media landscape? Are we going to increase the number of kids who get their news from The Daily Show?’ There’s no insidious plan.”
If anything, the show teaches viewers to think and dissect the news that’s presented to them, regardless of the medium. “The show provides people a lesson in skepticism,” said Havlan. “That’s the biggest service. I mean, we’re not even interpreting things, I think it’s more truthful than that. Network news—not just cable—has to be constantly questioned, and our show is uniquely positioned to do that.”
For his part, Stewart discounted the studies and surveys. “I’d be awfully surprised given the magnitude of media available,” he said. “Younger people are far more inundated with information than we ever were. We’re suffocating in information.”
And when it came to deciding which stories to cover—after all, with a twenty-four-hour news cycle, there are always plenty of stories out there that just beg to be satirized—there are additional issues to tackle, among them responsibility to the story and the culture. “We try to cover stories that are interesting to people and, more importantly, relevant,” said Karlin. “I think we’d be a lot more into finding something that’s inherently funny and quirky, but then we[’d] have to educate the audience a lot more. Instead, we’d rather talk about what’s on people’s minds or what’s particularly absurd of this moment or of this time.
“We try not to measure the reaction to the show as much as our own internal barometer,” he added. “I don’t want to take the temperature of how people are receiving it, because I think that would affect how we’re producing it. When we see something we find absurd or interesting, we try and write jokes about it or come up with something interesting to say about it.”
As the ratings continued to climb, politicians began to notice that an appearance on the show could boost their visibility with a younger demographic virtually overnight. Though some might shudder at the idea of being interviewed or featured in a story on The Daily Show, others embraced the opportunity.
“Politicians love him and they respect him because he is a very intelligent guy,” said Neil Rosen, entertainment critic at the New York Times. “But I also think they do the show because they understand that it is a very smart audience that is watching. They are also an audience who votes. And as soon as you walk onto that set as a politician you have adopted [Stewart’s] credibility.”
However, that comes with a caveat: for the most part, the politicians who flocked to the guest chair opposite Stewart were Democratic. Republicans started to complain, but Stewart maintained that he never hesitated to lash out at hypocrisy in the Democratic Party when the opportunity presented itself. He also thought that politicians made for more sparkling conversation than actors, musicians, or authors in many cases.
“I just think politicians are more interesting to talk to,” he said. “Not that I’m not fascinated with the exact date a movie is coming out, but in general, I think it’s slightly more interesting probably to talk to somebody who does something completely different from what I do.”
At the same time, given the tone of the show as well as the format, if they weren’t promoting a book or movie the majority of people who agreed to go on the show did so to make a specific point. “People don’t typically come on our show unless they’re disgruntled,” Stewart said. “Then they come on the show to express their disgruntlement. We are the last stop of the disgruntled.”
For this reason, they also made easy targets, though Stewart maintained that he always tried to resist the lazy joke. “The show is not a megaphone,” he said. “You can’t end every joke with ‘Let’s bomb the motherfuckers,’ even though that’s how I feel. But I take some pleasure in just ridiculing al Qaeda. When we got the
Kandahar tape”—the video released in December 2001 in which Osama bin Laden confessed to being the mastermind of the September 11 terrorist attacks—“our first instinct was to … lay down fart noises,… because he hates to be laughed at.”
Little was sacred when considered for their crosshairs, and even Comedy Central basically left the show alone. One of Viacom’s top brass actually referred to the show as “the latchkey kid.” One of the few hard-and-fast rules they ran into was that “dildo” couldn’t be mentioned in a show four times; but three was okay.
“Humor is such a subjectively weird genre,” Stewart said. “One man’s meat is another man’s poison, it’s so hard to say this is what’s allowed, but this isn’t. So we vacillate. Some days our heels are planted firmly in the ground and we’re ready to fight, and other days we’re washing our hands thirty times because we think we have anthrax.”
All the while he was determined not to cater to the lowest common denominator. It just wasn’t his way. “There’s a certain school of comedy that mistakes edge for the obnoxious. I find that the best comedy, the most edgy stuff, is rooted in a way of thinking about something that other people haven’t come to yet. To me, that’s edgy.”
Surprisingly, advertisers didn’t mind when they fell victim to Stewart’s criticism. “If the show is going to go after an advertiser, we call the advertiser with a heads-up, but we tell him, ‘If Jon is making fun of you, it’s a plus,’” said Larry Divney, president of Comedy Central in 2002. “It means you’re being talked about!”
Besides, the exposure could be worth it. Three years after Stewart took the helm, seven hundred thousand people were watching the show each night; Kilborn had barely half the viewership. In January 2005, The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn morphed into The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson after Kilborn decided not to renew his contract and left the program.
For his part, Stewart’s role as host and executive producer meant he was tired all the time, especially due to his habit of micromanaging every last detail, not only of the show but also of the employees. “He asks about every tiny detail of things that are important in your life,” said Smithberg, “and he isn’t feigning. He knows the eating habits of everyone, and he knows when all the camera guys are pooping.”
And then came September 11, 2001. Perhaps Stewart’s finest moment came in a moment of horror and poignancy and great uncertainty for the future of The Daily Show.
It had seemed like just another Tuesday morning. He and Tracey had recently celebrated their first wedding anniversary, and he was getting ready to head uptown from their Soho apartment to the studio to start working on that night’s show when he heard a thundering crash.
Then he looked out the window and saw one of the World Trade Center towers on fire. Twenty minutes later, they grabbed the cat carriers and a few belongings, and evacuated their apartment, heading uptown.
And then a horrible thought occurred to him:
How could he be funny at a time like this? And how could the show possibly continue?
“Everyone was so scared and on tenterhooks,” said Brian Farnham, editor-in-chief of Time Out New York. “How could you be funny about something that was so terrifying? Jon Stewart and The Daily Show were one of the first shows to say, ‘You know you can make fun of anything if you do it the right way.’”
“It was a fragile time for everything,” Stewart acknowledged. “People talk about the Holocaust as the greatest inhumane times. But my guess is that even at Auschwitz people were telling jokes. It’s human nature to find light in darkness somehow.”
During the first week after the terrorist attacks, the networks and many cable channels pulled their regularly scheduled programming to focus on airing news updates and live broadcasts from Ground Zero. On September 17, David Letterman was the first of the late-night talk shows to return to the air. The Daily Show went back on the air on September 20, and Stewart began the show without the music, without the roaming cameras, and without the wildly cheering audience.
It was one of the best monologues of his life, which he delivered in a stilted yet straightforward manner without his typical slightly ramped-up tone. Throughout the almost nine-minute talk, Stewart occasionally had to pause to regain his composure. The funny man was nowhere in sight. “They said to get back to work, and there were no jobs available for a man in the fetal position,” he said. “We sit in the back and we throw spitballs—never forgetting the fact that it is a luxury in this country that allows us to do that.
“The view from my apartment was the World Trade Center. Now it’s gone. They attacked it. This symbol of American ingenuity and strength and labor and imagination and commerce and it is gone. But you know what the view is now? The Statue of Liberty. The view from the south of Manhattan is now the Statue of Liberty. You can’t beat that.”
He’s said that he only watched the segment once, and that he vowed never to watch it again, it was too painful.
Over the nine days that the Show didn’t air, a quarter of viewers passed up the reruns and switched to channels that offered more hospitable comfort-food kinds of shows, like Nick at Nite. But after the new shows resumed, not only did regular viewers return but new ones watched as well, in part because Stewart was intent on serving as a teacher of sorts, to teach viewers about certain elements of this strange new fragile world while still conveying it through the lens of humor.
And his image and influence changed from that point on.
CHAPTER 8
“OUR ENTIRE DAY is focused on taking the un-fun we have and turning it into fun when it gets on the air,” said Stewart. “Because we function, actually, very similarly probably to a news show in that we have sort of an editorial meeting in the morning. It’s a really structured day. We actually do have a very good time doing it, but it’s sort of relentless, and the structure of our day is a lot more rigid, I think, than people would imagine.”
Looking at a day in the life at The Daily Show reveals that putting together each program is a never-ending process. The first bit of work starts around 7 A.M. when a team of producers settles in and starts to review TiVo’ed videos and news stories from the day before for potential images, sound bites, and stories that would make good fodder for that evening’s show. They also thumb through all three of the local New York papers—the Post is “our paper of record” according to one writer—for ideas and obscure and entertaining news stories as well. In addition, several television sets broadcast live feeds from all of the morning news shows from ABC, NBC, CBS, and cable networks like CNN and Fox News.
The writers start to wander in shortly before 9 A.M. when they gather in the writers’ lounge for a meeting that is known around the studio as “our morning cup of sadness.” That first hour is basically spent cracking jokes about the major news stories from the previous day while munching on bagels from H&H, a long-established New York bakery. It’s during that crucial hour when the first nuggets start to emerge. “We get specific about what angles we’ll be taking and we’ve all agreed to,” said writer J. R. Havlan. “We’re joking around from nine to ten, and those jokes frequently end up on the show.”
The team then breaks up to start writing that night’s show. Here, the joking out loud basically ceases as the writers focus on the task at hand. They are able to crank out a first draft of that night’s show in about ninety minutes. “We know exactly what we need to get done at any period of time,” said writer Jason Ross. “We’ve seen the videos and we know there are four good sound bites for the story. It’s pretty laid out for you.”
Producer Rory Albanese, for one, marvels at the writers’ speed. “They’re really fast and real good about it,” he said, adding that, as is the case with anything, practice enhances both skill and speed. “You get better at it. It’s a muscle and you work it out. It gets stronger.”
“You get good at knowing what you need to attack,” Havlan added.
Around 11:30, producers and research staff start to gather the scripts from the
writers so they can begin to do their work, from selecting news clips to run alongside Stewart’s comments to locating props—occasionally making them from scratch—to accompany a monologue or sketch.
The next three hours pass in a blur as Stewart and the production team edit and tighten the scripts, further refine the jokes, and offer up suggestions to the research staff. Along the way, the tech staff plans their camera angles and video shifts, altering them with each new script draft that comes in.
The Daily Show writers and producers also have to be careful not to duplicate anything going on at The Colbert Report, which spun off from The Daily Show in 2005. Despite the distinct tone of the two shows, there is bound to be at least some crossover. “The game they’re playing is a slightly different one from us, so we don’t trip on each other that much,” said Stewart. “And let’s put it this way: This ain’t the Serengeti. There’s plenty of food to go around.”
When Ben Karlin was executive producer of both shows, he visited the two studios several times a day to check for any duplication. For example, when the Mark Foley sex scandal first broke in the fall of 2006, in which the Republican congressman from Florida sent explicit notes to a sixteen-year-old male page, Karlin green-lighted stories for both shows.
The Daily Show take: “It’s the Jewish Day of Atonement,” said Stewart. “I don’t know how many days of fasting can get you out of trying to bang sixteen-year-olds. My guess is at least three days. Even after that, probably a month of salads.”
Colbert, on the other hand, said that the media had gotten it all wrong about Foley, explaining that “stud” really stands for “Strong Teenager Using Democracy” in text-message shorthand, and that “horny” is short for “Happy On Reaching New Year’s.”
“Every January first,” he said, “that is the message I send to my buddies at Stephen Colbert’s Youth Camp for Young Studs: ‘I am incredibly horny.’”