I don’t remember the show we did on the tenth at all. We had come back from a two-week break, so I would assume I had a pretty good tan going. But it was as unremarkable a show as you could possibly imagine. There is no significance other than the fact that we didn’t know what was about to happen.
I was friends with the guys from the band They Might Be Giants, who had done some music for us. On Monday, September 10, they had a record release party for their new album, which was dropping on the eleventh. So, the night of the tenth, I was out pretty late at a party down at the Bowery Ballroom. The next thing you know, you’re taking a cab home and it’s 4:30 in the morning and you just had a steak. That’s what happens when you’re thirty and single.
I was getting into work at the regular time the next morning. I’d stopped at the café that was right across the street from the studio. The woman working there, a Middle Eastern woman, is listening to the radio, and says, “A plane crashed into the World Trade Center.” At the time, you’re just like, “Oh, shit, that’s really weird.”
We were living on West Eleventh Street. I heard the first plane hit while I was in bed. It felt like a bomb. It rattled the place pretty good. I flipped on the TV.
I woke up with a girl I was seeing. And I was on my way to the shrink. I lived on Forty-Second, the very west end, on Twelfth Avenue, the building on the left. After years I’d been finally able to get a nice apartment. I had a view to the south of lower Manhattan. We’d turned on the TV and the girl I was with said, “Oh my God, look at the Twin Towers.” And one of them was smoking. Then the second tower was hit, and it was like I had a stroke.
I didn’t go to see my shrink.
I lived two blocks from the studio, I didn’t have to work until 9:30, so I was getting ready at 9:08, and I remember listening to Howard Stern talking about kissing Pam Anderson. And then he announced that a small plane hit the World Trade Center. They talked about that for a second, then they went back to theorizing if Howard could do Pam Anderson or not. And it wasn’t until I got into work, where we had a TV monitor, downstairs, where a lot of the PAs [production assistants] sat, that I saw this smoke coming from the World Trade Center. Then we watched a lot of it from Ben’s office.
I’m in my office, writers are slowly gathering. This is 9:30. The morning writers’ meeting starts at 9:30. We’re watching a kind of locked-off shot of the smoke coming out of both the towers, on the big screen, in my office. There was no banner underneath the news before this.
I do remember standing there with Adam Chodikoff, and I think maybe D.J., watching the towers collapse, and I just broke down in tears and started crying hysterically.
When one of the towers came down, I was with Ben, and Ben started crying. I thought that was very emotionally impressive, because most people were just too stunned to access their grief that quickly.
These dudes were on my train coming out of the World Trade covered in dust. It was a mess. There was something very safe about us all being together at The Daily Show.
Jon was there. I believe Jon was there. I’m trying to think. Yeah. I think Jon was in the office that day.
I did not go to the office. We had helped Tracey’s brother, Chris, move into the city the previous weekend. He lived about three blocks from us, so we went to go get Chris. We were out on the street when we saw the tower collapse. That’s when just everything started spinning.
Jo Honig, who was a field producer then, came in covered in the dust. She lived down by Chambers Street and rode her bike to work. She had Fred, her dog, with her, and he was covered in soot. I was sobbing.
Ben announced there weren’t going to be any shows, and D.J., my writing partner, said, “Well, Chris and I can stay and finish up ‘We Love Showbiz,’” which was this Entertainment Tonight parody. And I snapped at D.J., saying, “No fucking way are we going to do that.”
I had just moved back from LA and started work the previous week. My first show guest was going to be Tracey Ullman, on September 11. When I got into the office that morning I contacted her publicist, to say, “Hey, just letting you know, we are cancelling the show for tonight.” And they said, “Oh, Tracey got out of New York. She started driving cross-country. She’s long gone.”
I went to a liquor store that was open early and stocked up. My apartment was the smallest one-bedroom, a fourth-floor walk-up, and about a dozen, dozen and a half people from the show came.
I had just gotten a DVD of The Big Lebowski, and I announced that I wanted to watch something that hearkened back to a gentler war, the 1990 Gulf War. We would stop it every twenty minutes or so and turn on the news to see if anything else had blown up. Yeah, I really spent 9/11 getting drunk, in my apartment, with a lot of my coworkers.
Can I tell you the craziest thing? Tracey and I were walking that afternoon of 9/11, or it might have been the next day, in just the quiet of it. We didn’t really know where we were going, just walking, and we walked by a building and there was a little street mouse, I don’t even think it was a rat, a little street mouse. All of a sudden a dude—I guess it was the super in the building, we hadn’t seen him—fucking clubbed it right in front of us. I remember us just both bursting into tears, and we just kind of like… I just remember us bursting into tears on a constant basis, as everybody was. The smell is the thing that I’ll never forget, just that was…
I try not to remember, to be honest with you. I mean, I’m still not good at it, like I still can’t particularly talk about certain things, and I just can’t do it, you know.
At the time I was part of a Marine Corps reserve unit, MTU 17. The only Marine Corps reserve unit stationed in Manhattan. The next morning, September 12, we went down to Ground Zero and started moving rubble by hand. We didn’t know how many people were under the rubble. Twelve hours on, twelve hours off, for six days. It was no longer search and rescue, it was search and recovery at that point.
It was a few days, I think, before we gathered to talk about how the fuck we were going to move on.
I’m talking to Ben and Stew, and the writers, just trying to figure it out. “Do we even have a show? Is there a show to do here, or do we just… do we tap-dance?” I thought it was going to go variety show.
I’d quit a job at 60 Minutes to work at The Daily Show, and I couldn’t have been there more than ten days before 9/11 happened. There was actually a question whether the format should be changed to be a parody of a morning show, and I thought, “What the fuck have I done?”
I remember Stephen and I sitting with Jon those days after, trying to figure out what to do, what to write, and how to even put on any show. It all just seemed… so irrelevant and small.
There was a creative meeting before we went back on air where Stephen Colbert, and Steve Carell, and Jon, and Madeleine, and some others were all in Madeleine’s office and we had looked at the board that we had programmed for what segments were going to be on, before 9/11. Everybody uses those colored cardboard things with the pushpins. It’ll be eight thousand years from now and that’s how late-night shows will be programmed. Anyway, we looked at the board and we just realized this didn’t make sense to us anymore.
We were all so numb. I remember Stephen Colbert said, “I am legitimately asking if a pie in the face is still funny. I’m asking because I don’t know.” He was not joking.
Our first instinct was, “Let’s write a bunch of things that are so light and silly. Anything contiguous to the attack, we just can’t touch.”
Graydon Carter had gone on about the death of irony and all this other crap. I remember I worked on a piece with Carell, which was a Crocodile Hunter parody, where he was in a safari outfit at the desk. We just weren’t talking about the big smoking elephant in the room. It was just a terrifying time to write comedy. Not the worst problem to have in New York, but still, it was a very strange time to try to be funny.
I remember Madeleine said, “I don’t even know if we have a show anymore.”
Jon knew we still had a show. He said, “This now is more important than ever.” On that Thursday, when we came back to work, he came around to everyone’s office and talked: “What should we do?” He wanted to make sure everyone was on board. He didn’t want to go back on the air and be a dick.
Comedians process our emotions through this peculiar refinery of whatever puns you could come up with that day. You remove that, and it’s as though there’s a narcotic on the digestive system. You’re blocked, it’s building up, and you don’t know what to do.
I knew that for me, personally, I would have to express… I would have to use the process that I’ve used to process pain, and discontent, and happiness, and everything else, but in a way that was somewhat anathema to how I would normally approach it. It just had to be direct and I was going to have to do it without my crutches.
It’s very hard for me to write without knowing, “Okay, I’m going to get to perform it now.” I generally can’t take myself to a place without knowing what the finish line is. It has to be timed right, because otherwise I will lose my inertia. If I don’t time it right it’ll be there and then it’ll be gone, and I’ll fuck it up, I’ll ruin it by overwriting it.
That day, September 20, when we were doing our first show after 9/11, was basically me in my office just pacing and jotting stuff down.
Nobody really knew what Jon was going to say.
I wrote the 9/11 monologue on a paper plate. I ate a lot of pizza, so my office had a lot of paper plates in it, from a pizza place. Not the Chinet kind, either. The shitty paper kind.
On September 20, 2001, Stewart spoke directly into the camera for nearly nine minutes, tears welling in his eyes, tapping the anchor desk hard with a plastic pen when he needed to pause and compose himself, the studio audience silent except for several brief moments of nervous laughter.
Jon Stewart: Good evening, and uh, welcome to The Daily Show. Uh, we are back. Uh, this is our first show since the tragedy in New York City and uh, uh, there’s no other way to start this show other than to ask you at home the question that we asked the audience here tonight, and that we’ve asked everybody that we know here in New York since September 11, and that is, “Are you okay?” And that we pray that you are and that your family is…
I know we’re late. I’m sure we’re getting in right under the wire before the cast of Survivor offers their insight into what to do in these situations. They said to get back to work, and there were no jobs available for a man in the fetal position under his desk crying. Which I gladly would have taken. So I come back here and—tonight’s show is not obviously a regular show…
A lot of folks have asked me, “What are you going to do when you get back? What are you going to say? I mean, geez, what a terrible thing to have to do.” I don’t see it as a burden at all. I see it as a privilege. I see it as a privilege and everyone here does see it that way.
The show in general, we feel like is a privilege. Just even, even the idea that we can sit in the back of the country and make wisecracks, which is really what we do. We sit in the back and we—we throw spitballs, and uh—but never forgetting the fact that is a luxury in this country that it—that allows us to do that. This is a country that allows for open satire, and I know that sounds basic and it sounds as though it goes without saying—but that’s really what this whole situation is about. It’s the difference between closed and open. It’s the difference between free and and and and burdened and we don’t take that for granted here by any stretch of the imagination. And our show has changed. I don’t—I don’t doubt that. What it’s become, I don’t know. “Subliminable” is not a punch line anymore. One day it will become that again, and, and Lord willing, it will become that again because that means we have ridden out the storm.
But the main reason that, that I wanted to speak tonight is, is not to tell you what the show is going to be. Not to tell you about all the incredibly brave people that are here in New York and in Washington and around the country. Uh, but but we’ve had an unenduring pain here—an unendurable pain. And I just—I wanted to tell you why I grieve, but why I don’t despair… [tears up] I’m sorry. Luckily we can edit this…
And the reason I don’t despair is because this attack happened. It’s not a dream. But the aftermath of it, the recovery, is a dream realized. And that is Martin Luther King’s dream. Whatever barriers we’ve put up are gone even if it’s just momentary. And we’re judging people by not the color of their skin but the content of their character. And you know, all this talk about, “These guys are criminal masterminds. They’ve—they’ve gotten together and their extraordinary guile… and their wit and their skill.” It’s a lie. Any fool can blow something up. Any fool can destroy. But to see these guys, these firefighters, these policemen and people from all over the country, literally, with buckets, rebuilding. That, that—that is—that’s extraordinary. That’s why we’ve already won. It’s light. It’s democracy. We’ve already won. They can’t shut that down. They live in chaos and chaos… it can’t sustain itself. It never could. It’s too easy and it’s too unsatisfying.
The view from my apartment was the World Trade Center, and now it’s gone. And 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.
So we’re going to take a break and I’m going to stop slobbering on myself and on the desk and, uh, we’re going to get back to this. It’s gonna be fun and funny and it’s going to be the same as it was and I thank you. We’ll be right back.
I do remember thinking, “Fuck, dude, that’s pretty heavy for a comedy show.”
Yeah. I wrote that. Every word of it. I had crying in parentheses and everything: “Really give them the waterworks here, Jon. I think they’re going to fall for it.”
I remember being a little surprised just because—the first time you see somebody that you know, who’s an adult, crying over something, is a revelation. The one thing I remember is him talking about how the view from his apartment was of the World Trade Center, and now that that’s gone, the view from his apartment was the Statue of Liberty. And thinking, “I have to believe you, but that’s pretty convenient.” Then thinking, “Pretty fancy view you got, Mr. Jon Stewart.” And I remember, also, feeling bad that I questioned whether or not that was true.
I remember so well Jon’s first show back after September 11 and how much that meant to me at the time. I was a junior at NYU and watched it in my dorm room near Union Square. That episode didn’t make anything okay at all, but at least someone was saying the type of thing I wanted the president or the mayor to say.
I remember Jon bringing his dog out at the end, and it being like a really silly thing to do but a really beautiful way to say there’s a whole other world of existence that has nothing to do with this political violence.
I think the end of it was just me holding up our dog, Monkey. And then we all kind of looked at each other like, “Now what?”
Afterward I had to walk away from the desk, and I went into the back room and I just bawled. I was just… I was done. It had been an incredibly emotional experience. We all knew people who had been down there and had lost people. It was just the act of getting it out, but it’s not like that was the healing, that was just the… it honestly felt like that was, “Great, I’ve now vomited it up, but I’m still nauseous, and exhausted.” That first show was not a statement of what we were going to do. It was a necessary draining of an abscess to even become ambulatory.
We didn’t do another show until September 24, I think. The challenge over the next few weeks was to acknowledge what had happened and do it in a way that didn’t seem insensitive. How do you fight something so powerfully scary?
There was a great piece Lauren Weedman did, which was “New York City’s Back in Business.” It was Lauren saying, “Here are the ways that New York City is luring back tourists.” One of them was, “Now New York City offers personal piggyback rides across Central Park by some of New York’s biggest celebrities.” And you widen out, and Lauren is sitting piggyback on top of Paul Rudd, and Paul Rudd turns to the screen and says, “No fatties!” and he keeps running her across.
I think the studio audience laughed over my line, because a couple of days later I was walking down the street and a woman said, “Hey, can I get a ride on your back through Central Park?” laughing. I was surprised she knew the bit, and I laughed and said—continuing with the bit—“No fatties!” And I realized, oh, that was not the right thing to say. She looked at me with the biggest fuck-you look. I don’t think she had heard that part on the show.
Slowly we found our way, and that is 100 percent attributable to the leadership and the moral fiber of Jon. I think also our own expectation, and the audience’s, about what comedy meant changed—to the point where we would eventually do seven minutes on Abu Ghraib.
You know you’re not going to get big, hearty belly laughs about Abu Ghraib, but that was okay. As long as you could point out an irony and make it so it’s not too clappy. That’s a shorthand for, “Well, you made a point,” and the audience claps its approval. But you’re not funny, and ultimately the goal is to make it funny.
Oddly enough, the thing that snapped us out of it were the anthrax attacks. Somehow, that just made it funny. I don’t know why, but as soon as we started getting hit by anthrax it was like, “Oh, okay. Let’s embrace this. Let’s embrace the fear that we all feel now.” It was sort of like when I was in my drinking days, when shit would go wrong, and I’d be feeling lousy about life, I would have to steer into it. So that meant Tom Waits and booze at three in the morning, sitting alone until “The Piano Has Been Drinking” is fucking hilarious, because you’re so pathetic. The combination of the grief, the sadness, the uncertainty, coupled with somebody’s sending anthrax to all these reporters… “Okay, it’s gone to a level of farce, and farce I can deal with.” So we turned into it.
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] The media, of course, must walk a fine line covering this story. With more we turn to Steve Carell in the Daily Show news center. Steve?
Steve Carell: [standing in front of a bank of TV monitors] Jon, this is in many ways an unprecedented situation for us.
[A blue band with white letters—the “crawl,” or “chyron” in TV lingo—scrolls across the screen, at Carell’s waist level]
Crawl: MAJORITY LEADER DASCHLE RECEIVES LETTER CONTAINING ANTHRAX.
Steve Carell: On the one hand, we must alert the country to the latest events.
Crawl: AL QAEDA VOWS NEW ATTACKS.
Steve Carell: And on the other hand, we musn’t cause undue alarm.
Crawl: FBI WARNS SOMETHING BAD TO HAPPEN SOMEWHERE SOMETIME.
Steve Carell: Scaremongering isn’t the way to go.
Crawl: WHITE POWDER FOUND ON DONUT IN ST. LOUIS.
Steve Carell: So far the media has in fact shown restraint.
Crawl: STORMS BATTER NEW ENGLAND—LINK TO TERRORISM STILL UNDETERMINED.
Steve Carell: And I must stress this—there is absolutely no need to panic.
Crawl: [picking up speed as it moves left to right] CIA: THAT GUY SITTING ACROSS FROM YOU ON THE BUS LOOKS A LITTLE SHIFTY.
Steve Carell: Patience, diligence, and above all, responsibility.
Crawl: A FRIEND OF THIS GUY I KNOW CONFIRMS HIS GIRLFRIEND TOLD HIM “THEY’RE PLANNING SOMETHING IN A MALL OR SOMETHING.”
Steve Carell: Jon, we have a job to do here, but we also need perspective.
Crawl: [accelerating] OH, F—! WHAT WAS THAT SOUND? SERIOUSLY, DID YOU HEAR A SOUND?
Steve Carell: And in keeping that perspective—
Crawl: “THE HORROR, THE HORROR”—KURTZ. POLL: 91% OF AMERICANS “WANT MOMMY.”
Steve Carell: Okay, that was—no, no, no, that was unacceptable. Jon, would you excuse me for a minute? [walks out of frame]
Crawl: CHICKEN LITTLE: “THE SKY IS FALLING! THE SKY IS FALLING!” OH GOD, OH GOD.
[Carell confronts technician typing the crawl, beats him up as screen goes snowy]
Jon Stewart: We’re having some technical difficulties with the crawl.
Ah, Steve Carell is back!
Steve Carell: Sorry about that, Jon. As I was saying, we journalists have to make sure that our worst instincts are curbed in the sake of national interest.
Crawl: EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE JUST WONDERFUL WITH LOLLIPOPS AND RAINBOWS AND HAPPY FEELINGS FOR EVERYONE.
Steve Carell: It’s a unique challenge, but one I think the greatest free press in the world can easily attain.
Crawl: BUNNIES ARE CUTE, CUDDLY, AND COMFORTING.
Steve Carell: Jon?
Before that the show was just silly; we didn’t know what we were doing. And then the networks, bless their soul, steered into fear, and that was a great motivator for us. That was a gift. Now we can just make fun of them. That’s when the tickers came out.
More and more, the show didn’t just react to daily events, but dug around inside them. The guest list—which had been heavy on movie-promoting actors like Jenny McCarthy and Jason Biggs—now regularly included people who could analyze the war and its fallout, from diplomats (Richard Holbrooke) to civil rights experts (Nadine Strossen) to, eventually, former marines (Anthony Swofford). And the shift toward media criticism picked up speed, in running segments like “Operation Enduring Coverage” and “Operation Self-Congratulation.”
What was starting to happen was, post-9/11 and post–Bush/Gore, which is when The Daily Show gets good, the media is different now. The media took a turn to lunacy. One of our favorites was you’ve got the reporter saying something serious and then one of the crawls below him was BEYONCÉ COINS THE TERM “BOOTYLICIOUS” FOR $14 MILLION. Meanwhile the reporter is talking about health care reform or Afghan refugees.
It was “We’re all going to die!” twenty-four hours a day. The networks are built for 9/11. A twenty-four-hour news network with that kind of reach and that kind of manpower is really only built for one thing, and that is catastrophe on an inhuman scale. They performed admirably. Unfortunately, they don’t really know when to turn that off, and so, in their mind, “Hey, everybody’s watching us, but if we stop this they might not. How are we going to keep this up? I know, let’s just keep a running ticker tape at the bottom of the thing.”
Though we did have an anthrax scare at the show and the whole building had to clear out. We had to bring in a biohazard team. Beth Shorr, my assistant, ended up in a Silkwood shower in some kind of decontamination unit. We had to switch procedures with the mail. By the way, it turned out not to be anthrax.
Yeah, we taped that day. We didn’t tape, the terrorists win. And it was one of the secondary anthrax moments. Because we were on basic cable, it took a little time for them to get to us.
One bright spot as 2001 neared an end was The Daily Show’s first two Emmy Award nominations, for best comedy show and best comedy writing.
Because of 9/11 they postponed the Emmys that year, and then they rescheduled it for November, and then Jon just said, “The heck with it, we’re going to party here,” so none of us were in LA for the awards. Comedy Central got us part of a bar on Fifty-Fourth Street. I think it was Iguana. We had one TV to watch it on. We had to watch the Emmys with subtitles. Wayne Brady was giving out the Emmy, and at one point the subtitle said, in parentheses, “Gibberish.” Then we saw, “and the award goes to the gang at The Daily Show,” in subtitles. None of us actually heard it announced. The show’s first Emmy.
Right after that, a former writer ran in with his head bleeding because he’d gotten into a fight in the bar across the street. So, it was crazy, actually.
In Washington, the political response to 9/11 was escalating rapidly and ominously. First came the rush to pass the Patriot Act, whose name was a flimsy euphemism for increased government wiretapping and surveillance. Then neoconservatives pushed to turn the Global War on Terror into an actual shooting war. There were plenty of openings for humor along the way—when Bush, for instance, apologized for the negative connotations of calling the impending offensive a “crusade.” But as the politically motivated fearmongering grew, The Daily Show started to shed its apprehension about criticizing how the White House was exploiting the raw aftermath of the terrorist attacks.
The thought occurred to me on 9/11—and it’s a terrible thought, but I can guarantee you 90 percent of the United States had this thought at some point: “Wow, this really fucks up my day.”
But the second thought I had was that our government’s response is going to be really fucked up and they are going to do something awful. This is going to give them an excuse to do something really awful. And I’m never right. But it unfolded like a great tragedy.
I did not know anybody who died there, okay? So, obviously that is a certain filter. My reaction was mostly in terms of what the government was going to do in the name of the people who died—and it was wrong. And that’s a lot of what The Daily Show became about for the next few years. Comedy was the correct response.