The celebration was brief. Stewart’s we’ve-got-a-show-to-do-tomorrow ethos meant a quick return to the grind. As 2009 began, the new and in some ways exhilarating challenge for The Daily Show was proving the conventional critical wisdom wrong. For eight years The Daily Show’s diet had featured an enormous serving of Bush Administration, with a side order of media, plus Democrats for dessert. Obama’s victory would make Stewart and the show irrelevant—or so went the orthodox analysis.
What it missed was that The Daily Show’s satire wasn’t partisan, in the traditional meaning of the word. It was aimed at whoever held power or was peddling lies. The fact that Democrats were back in the White House certainly didn’t mean there was a shortage of bad guys on the national stage. And, most immediately, the deification of Obama was ripe for deflation.
Tony Blair was my first vote, and that turned out to be a bit of a disaster. There was such excitement with that first Blair victory because it was coming off the back of over a decade of conservative government, Thatcher and then John Major, and it felt like such a hopeful time. And then Blair went along on the invasion of Iraq. There were massive antiwar marches in England. I did march. I did.
That experience helped me to do those Obama Inauguration Day pieces on the Mall in Washington. There was a run, a section of unedited video, right at the moment of Obama’s swearing in. This kind of annoyed people around us. They’re cheering, I’m jumping up and down, saying, “Yes, now will this lead to inevitable disappointment? Of course it will! Does anyone know that yet? Of course not!” And you could feel people around us going, “Can you please just let us have this moment?”
There is something funny about that level of hope, because you know it’s misplaced. Because you just think, “I recognize this hope and I know where this hope ends, and it’s not where you want it to be. The best-case scenario is this hope gets compromised.”
We had prepared a joke for the show on election night, “Obama is accepting a double-decker shit sandwich.” But I don’t think any of us realized quite how big a shit sandwich it was.
The financial crisis had erupted during the late stages of the 2008 presidential campaign. Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy; AIG, the world’s biggest insurance company, was on the brink until bailed out by the feds; the Dow Jones average was in the process of dropping more than 50 percent in less than two years, to a bottom of 6443; and Bush had backed an emergency $700 billion buyout of mortgage-backed securities and other distressed assets. In early 2009, Republicans were vehemently opposing Obama’s stimulus plan—House minority leader John Boehner threw the bill on the ground—even as the damage was rippling through the economy with increasing force. Who was to blame for causing the financial meltdown—and who was really hurt by it—would become one of The Daily Show’s prime topics, and would lead to Stewart’s most famous Daily Show confrontation.
It was March 12, 2009, and the country was freaking the fuck out.
That was the day Jim Cramer came on The Daily Show. But go back and look—that interview happened within five or six days of the very bottom of the biggest crash anybody alive had experienced. It was a disaster, and we didn’t know at the time that it was the bottom—the experience was still free fall. It’s hard to recapture that context and feeling all this time later.
It was a rough time in America. But trying to recall that moment, it’s like trying to watch footage of the Chicago cops beating up hippies in 1968. It’s cute, but you don’t feel like, “Oh, the whole world was falling down.” And that’s how it felt then. It felt like the whole world was falling down.
Emotions were running very high. We were tense at the show, because we’d been preparing this assault for a few days. And we had Cramer nine ways to Sunday.
Do you want to hear the backstory?
We’d done a piece the week before about these CNBC talking heads giving people financial advice, and then shitting on those people for taking their advice. There were a lot of people who’d lost a lot of their fucking money, and a lot of the value of their homes, and these CNBC guys hadn’t lost anything. It was outrageous.
Rick Santelli had gone on a rant about how homeowners who had taken these bad loans shouldn’t get bailed out. It was interesting to see that on a network that has been traditionally soft on the people who designed that system and knew it would fail.
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] Wall Street is mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore! Unless by “it,” you mean the two trillion in their own bailouts. That, they’ll take.
Rick Santelli believes in personal responsibility! Not rewarding the losers for missing all the warning signs. I mean, for God’s sake, the guy works at CNBC! They’re the best of the best! They’re the only business network that has the information and experience that we need! So to all you dumb-ass homeowners out there who let your optimism and bad judgment blind you into accepting money that was offered to you from banks… get cable and educate yourselves!
[Video montage begins]
Jim Cramer: “Bear Stearns is fine! Do not take your money out! Bear Stearns is not in trouble!”
Graphic: BEAR STEARNS WENT UNDER SIX DAYS LATER.
Financial Times Reporter: [in CNBC interview] “I would concur with Charlie. Lehman Brothers is no Bear Stearns. You can’t compare Bear management with Lehman management.”
Graphic: LEHMAN BROTHERS WENT UNDER THREE MONTHS LATER.
Santelli was supposed to come on our show, then he canceled.
The original piece about CNBC was written by Jason Ross and Tim Carvell. Jason was our go-to guy for financial stories, because he’s the only one who really understood them. We did a headline where we showed how CNBC is essentially reporters cozying up to business.
I was almost as outraged as Jon about what was going on, and I could actually answer in a brief way what a credit default swap is. Tim was amazing in the research on those pieces. But it wasn’t exactly difficult to find people with supposedly good reputations saying things on CNBC that only a few months later looked utterly ridiculous. We just happened to exist in a world where nobody was playing the clips from six months ago. And so we started doing it.
Maybe on Wednesday or Thursday we do a piece about Jim Cramer misleading investors, and then on Monday he’d complained that we’d taken him out of context. At first it appeared he was right. So I was writing a response. Because we were always very good about saying we’re wrong when we’re wrong. Then Tim Carvell and Jason Ross came to me and said, “No, we were right.” They said, “We were absolutely right. Let’s show you the context.”
And so we took it in to Jon. And he said, “That’s great.” And Carvell and Ross went off and wrote a new piece, probably with Adam Chodikoff giving them the research support.
Instead of the apology I’d been working on—not an apology, the clarification I’d been working on—that Monday we ended up having an even stronger comeback.
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] Well, we went back to the tape to listen.
Jim Cramer: [in video clip] “Bear Stearns is not in trouble!”
Jon Stewart: Jim Cramer, I apologize. That was out of context. Technically, you were correct. You weren’t suggesting to buy Bear Stearns. That was something that you did five days earlier in your “buy or sell” segment.
Jim Cramer: “I believe in the Bear franchise. At 69 bucks I’m not giving up on the thing.”
Jon Stewart: Of course, while Cramer wasn’t giving up on Bear at 69, eleven days later, the stock market was more comfortable with it at… [pauses, checks notes]… 2! But it’s all sort of equivocal. He’s not saying literally, “I’m asking you to buy Bear Stearns.” For that, you’d have to go back a full seven weeks before the stock completely collapsed.
Jim Cramer: “I’m asking people who are watching this video to buy Bear Stearns.”
And we had another one, and another one. And then Cramer demanded his moment.
So he came on that Thursday. And he’s a smart guy. We were excited, like, “Okay, well, here’s a real clash of the titans.”
It had been on the cover of USA Today: STEWART VERSUS CRAMER. I pitched a joke that Jon used: “People staying in hotels are wondering why it’s on the cover of their free paper.”
That morning, Cramer went on Martha Stewart’s show and there was a cooking segment where he was making light of the interview he was going to have with us that night. She asked Cramer, “Do you want to take out some of your anger on this piece of dough?” So the joke in our opening was “I think that guy has enough experience damaging people’s bread.” Cramer making light of what is really a gigantic fuck-up was the thing that enraged us. So we were going into the interview with that attitude.
Jim Cramer’s work we found genuinely disgusting, especially that online interview where he was talking about fooling people and inflating companies. So we booked him on the show. We all thought Jim Cramer was going to try to defend himself.
Cramer walked on and he immediately went into possum mode, or even like puppy mode. He laid down and exposed his belly and was like, “I’m sorry, I’m wrong, you got me.”
There was a sheepishness there that struck me as very disingenuous. I would also get annoyed at people who write polemics and come on the show and do the same thing. They would tell me, “Oh, you know, Democrats, Republicans, we’re not that far off.”
Really? Because you wrote here that they’re responsible for skullfucking grandmothers, and that’s the title of your book.
As Cramer went down the route of, “Yeah, boy, you’re right, brother. I don’t know. I’m trying, too,” you’re like, “Wait a minute…”
I was sitting at the producers’ desk on the studio floor with Rory Albanese, and I remember I was watching Jon. The normal human reaction when somebody goes, “I’m sorry,” and exposes their belly is to go, “It’s all right. Let’s talk friendly stuff.” Jon just sharpened his claws and went the fuck in on this guy. And I nearly hid under my desk.
That’s why I can’t be Jon Stewart. And that’s what it took. He was genuinely angry on behalf of all the people who had lost a lot of money on Jim Cramer’s shitty advice. And okay, you can’t get mad if you take the advice of a guy on TV and then lose money based on it necessarily, but you can get mad if that guy or his colleagues then calls you stupid for taking that advice.
There was this really devastating, death-blow-type video clip we had of Cramer that Jon went to.
Do you know the term “roll 212”?
That was during the Cramer incident. If you’re in act one, the “roll number” for a piece of tape is 100, 102, 104. It’s all even numbers. After rehearsal, let’s say we need to add another roll, then we’ll have the 101, 103. So this was act two, when Jim Cramer came on.
When Jon is going into that interview, we are his henchmen, his support staff. We are his battalion, and he is our general. Before the Cramer interview, I remember walking down the hallway with Jon with a piece of paper—classic, like Aaron Sorkin–type shit, telling him, “Okay, roll 200 is this…” and talking to him at the desk, making sure that he knows which one to call for. I remember, “Roll 212 is the roll.”
It’s very possible I found that clip out of a competitive spirit. The whole show is such a hive organism. We had ten TiVos running and the whole production department looking for stuff, and Tim Carvell, who’s a bloodhound. So I think I was always trying to go deeper—looking on the web for clips.
Pat King had cut the roll, the you’ve-been-busted-in-a-lie piece of videotape that we’d found online from Cramer’s Internet show at TheStreet.com.
That day was so nuts. I remember we got the roll numbers so late that Chuck didn’t even have them and I had to stand behind letting him know which roll was which during taping.
Oh, the video with Cramer talking about what appeared to be stock manipulation? Yeah. I was stunned. It’s like watching a guy talking about, “So this is how we cheat.” People outside of that system don’t recognize how to an ordinary observer it really looks like gambling and cheating. It looks rigged. And generally there is a dismissive and arrogant attitude from the financial guys: “You don’t understand, this is the fuel that makes the market go… clearly we’re doing God’s work.” And I think ultimately it boils down to, actually, no, pretty much a lot of this is a shell game.
So afterward we go into the edit. Jon wasn’t always in the edit, but he was for this. I think we all wanted to cut something, probably the moment that made Josh hide under his desk and me cover my face with my script. It was the dressing-down of another human being that you rarely see on TV. It was not, “You’re an asshole.” It was, “You’re guilty of this thing.”
So we’re like, “Maybe we should cut that,” and Jon is standing up and going, “No, fuck him, fuck him.” You realized, there is no shading of what happened out there, and it was awesome.
We’d spent a lot of time releasing steam over the CNNs of the world and the Foxes of the world, but very little over the financial analysts. So I think the level of missed opportunity that we felt, and their complicity in all that, was enormous. That’s what gave the interview its foundational power. There was so much emotion around it at that time, not just because of the failing economy, but because of what we thought was the culpability of financial networks.
If there’s anything The Daily Show was an antidote to, it was the culture of just talking on TV without any accountability.
Cramer came on the show, and while not without sin, was forced to absorb an undue amount of radiation. It got uglier than even Jon had planned. That’s the great thing about having a show every night. There’s a lot you can’t do, and there’s a level of finesse we can rarely achieve, but what we get in return is the potential for immediacy. And when that hits, there’s nothing that can compete.
I didn’t want the passion of it to overwhelm what I thought was most interesting about it. Because I thought there was something true and absolutely crucial about the conversation. It continues to persist to this day, a strange arrogance that they really didn’t do anything wrong. It’s just all, “Hey, man, this just kind of got away from us on this one.” There’s no other business that can do that with such impunity. It feels like there were two games being played and continue to be played, and one of them is being financed by the other one, that our larger investments of pensions and things like that are in some way financing this much riskier game, where even if they lose, they don’t lose.
“Roll 212” became this thing, a code for, “Your career is over.”
Not too long after that, Cramer just went back to doing what he’d been doing. It felt similar to election night 2004—there was a sense of, “Maybe we’re helping the country change,” and then it didn’t change. A sense of, the best that we can do is point out stuff that is wrong. We can’t expect to shame these people into getting better.
Jim Cramer had been on Martha Stewart that morning, and he had brought this pie to The Daily Show. I think it was a banana cream pie, although that might not be exactly right. And the interview went terribly, and afterward, in the crew area, the pie was just sitting there.
It could not have stayed there long. I mean, the whole staff would be like, “Yeah, Cramer’s a jerk, but we’re going to eat the pie.”
The fireworks with Cramer were one sign that the show was expanding its reach, looking beyond the standard targets of campaigns and the media to engage issues where politicians and policy were having an impact on ordinary lives. Stewart’s intense criticism of Bush’s misguided wars, for instance, morphed into a stinging, recurring criticism of the Obama Administration’s inability to properly care for the wounded veterans of those wars.
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] Obviously, the big story tonight, the AIG bonuses. We also don’t want to forget the smaller outrages, either. And we won’t, with a new segment called, “That Can’t Be Right.”
You know veterans? The men and women who risk their lives defending our country? When they get injured, you know who foots the bill? You, the taxpayer! I know, it’s incredibly… fair. Completely and totally fair.
So that’s why it struck me as odd when I read that one of the money-saving proposals from the Obama Administration was to remove veterans with private insurance from the VA rolls.
So I guess what the government is saying is, if you still need a little rehab from when you got your leg blown off in Iraq, the government will cover you… unless your wife has a little COBRA from her previous substitute-teaching gig.
I’ve got some other ideas they might want to try out to save a little money: How about sponsored commendations? [graphic of revised Medal of Honor] For your service, I offer you the Frito-Lay Medal of Honor! Or how about this—[ graphic of tombstones and water slides]—the Arlington National Cemetery and Water Park!
What the fuck are you guys thinking!?
The change in presidential administrations coincided with turnover in The Daily Show’s staff and cast. Some of the change was a result of longtimers, ready to do something new, moving on; some of it reflected Stewart’s desire to diversify the talent base for a new political era.
After Obama was elected, it felt like the target changed in a way that was not as much fun. It had been so pure and clear with the Bush Administration. But let’s be frank, most of us had voted for Obama, and in satire, you don’t want to be on the side of power too much. Now, even though there was plenty to criticize, it still felt like we were supporting the guy in power. I’d been at The Daily Show for six years at that point, my wife and I had a baby, which is kind of rough in Manhattan, and I heard about Conan’s Tonight Show starting up in LA.
I had wanted to write for The Daily Show since Lizz Winstead helped create it, and I even have a little note to myself from that time, when I was a PhD student in Medieval Jewish History at Cornell. I spent years teaching. I left academia and I did all kinds of technical jobs—Internet consulting for the government, a series of stupid jobs in real estate development, construction management, IT. I’ve been a waitress full-time in DC. And I just wrote comedy on the Internet for friends, and then helped Lizz with an Off-Broadway show for two years.
Steve Bodow and I had started an improv group together in college, and he reached out to me, in 2009, said, “We have an opening, we’d be very happy if some women applied.” The only way to get more women on the staff is to get more women in the pool, so he did that, and of three hires that year, two were women, Hallie Haglund and me, and Daniel Radosh.
Jo’s sense of humor can be pretty dark. One time in the writers’ meeting, after one of the big shootings, Jo says, “God, why can’t men just get eating disorders like us?”
I was a print journalist, mostly freelance, writing for magazines, and I’d written humorous print stuff. I liked the politics of The Daily Show, both in terms of the fact that it took politics seriously and that it didn’t just caricature politicians. I think David Kamp was the one who once said that SNL ruined political satire the moment that they turned Gerald Ford into the bumbling idiot, because then it was all about big personalities and silly stuff, and nobody ever really wanted to talk about the actual politics of it. Until Jon.
Sometime in 2007, Tim Carvell first told me there was an opening, and I applied for a writing position and didn’t get it. Then, a couple years later, there was another opening, and I finally got in. I started working at the show when I was forty.
Right after I started working at The Daily Show, in 2009, the news broke about Letterman and interns and stuff. The PA system comes on in the Daily Show office and it’s Jon, apologizing to any interns he hasn’t slept with. And I was like, “I love where I work!”
I was an intern at the show during my senior year at Yale. After I graduated they hired me as the receptionist. One of the great things about the show is that anyone can pitch story ideas. That was always Jon’s thing—the best idea wins. It doesn’t matter who it comes from. So I did that, and I did interviews of staff members and wrote little bios on the show’s internal website. Then I was the writers, assistant for a couple of years before I applied to be a writer.
Haglund was one of the numerous staffers who worked their way up through the Daily Show ranks, following in the paths of Jen Flanz and Rory Albanese. They had been central to the creation of The Daily Show’s tight-knit office culture, and now the office “family” returned the favor by helping the two of them navigate a rocky personal and professional stretch.
Jen Flanz is a profoundly important force in the show. I think her elevation from production assistant to supervising producer to co-EP and then EP really reflected an acknowledgment that it’s not all superstar comedy writers who do this. And Jen did it while surviving a lot of other stuff.
Well, actually, it’s funny, a kind of convention story. In 2008, we were in St. Paul and Denver and I just remember being so tired. But every time we had gone on the road I was so tired. After these, though, I just couldn’t bounce back. Then there were other symptoms over the year. My legs were itchy. The doctors were like, “You’re allergic to everything but cotton, wear cotton.” They thought I had lupus. Finally, they’re like, “You have had this for over a year and a half.” Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
And then the doctor says, “You’re well into stage IV. It’s in your bones. You’re going to die.” I was thirty-three.
I had the best life until I was thirty-three, and then things got hard. Me and Jesus. That’s when I got sick, and that’s when my marriage started to…
But the one constant was my family, and my job. I freaking love these people. Even the people I can’t stand, I love. Every other Thursday, I had to go to chemo. I would take off that Thursday, and Elise Terrell and Dave Blog and everybody would split up my duties. Friday I’d come to work totally nauseous, not eating anything, on steroids. Then by Monday morning, back to normal enough, you know?
I remember being in a writers’ meeting about two weeks into having it, or knowing I had it, and somebody making a cancer joke, and then the whole room getting really quiet. I was like, “Guys, come on, it’s fine, I asked you to treat me normally, you know?” From there on, there were cancer jokes for the next few months.
I got my hair cut in a short bob, and all of a sudden it was falling out, but it wasn’t really noticeable for a while. I remembered that Steve Carell had been using this powder called Toppik. It makes your hair look thicker. It’s men’s balding powder, so I bought it, and I’m like, “Okay, I don’t think anybody can tell!”
Jon was amazing, but he used to yell at me: “God, can you please take a day off?” I’m like, “No. What am I going to do, sit at home and think about dying? I want to be here.”
You cannot tell the story of The Daily Show without telling the story of Jen and Rory. They’re both enormously important parts of what made that show go. The personal part… life is weird, is all I can say.
Jen and Rory were having problems before she got sick. They put all that aside. Then, when she was well, that’s when their marriage fell apart.
Rory and I, there was a lot of fun there. But we fought a lot. The breakup didn’t happen in a day. It was not easy, working together as your marriage is falling apart. And having cancer. Yeah. Yeah. But I was like, “I will be damned if you take my job. Take my marriage, go ahead, don’t care.” I mean, I did care. But I had worked way too fucking hard to get where I am in this business.
If I had to give someone of all the years of the show, from day one to now, the MVP award, hands down it’s Jen. She’s fast, she’s quick. She gets the jokes but she’s not necessarily a comedian. She can execute things. She is the guts and the heart and soul.
I used to say to myself, in my head, “I think if I printed TEAM JEN shirts, there would be two people here not wearing them, but I’m not going to do that to him.” I didn’t want to be the one to get really ugly about it.
I don’t think there would be too many TEAM RORY T-shirts sold. I’m not going to lie. I was on my own team for quite some time, as I should have been. Not everyone knows who they are at twenty-five, twenty-six. We were growing up while we worked there.
Rory was the face of the creative side of the show, and Jen was the face of the production side. One was the person saying, “I need ten thousand more” and the other was the person saying, “I can only give you five.” That negotiation happened every day. That was tough. But even when their relationship wasn’t great, it didn’t show up on the show.
I thought it was going to be tough, because it’s marriage and, boy, let’s inflame it with another three hundred things that might happen during the course of the day at work. It started out, “Boy, they own an elephant. And isn’t that a great elephant?” And then eventually the elephant sits on your face.
Yeah, it was definitely ugly, but you know what? You grow. Did I ever think I’d be a single girl, running around the city, in my forties, on Tinder? No, but I am, and I’m enjoying my life. Because I sat home for a year, crying, and then I was like, “I’m not going to be one of these sad, single divorced ladies.”
Our dog, Parker? Rory and I share custody.
Rory was indispensable not just as a writer and producer, but to the spirit of the place. For instance, he created O’Mallahans, the finest Irish Italian Jewish Greek pub in Hell’s Kitchen, from whatever bottles were lying around Rory’s cubicle. It was very nice at the end of a rough show to relax in O’Mallahan’s.
For about three months there was a regular hang in Rory’s cubicle. O’Mallahan’s, I think he called it, and it just started to be Mad Men up in there.
That was a very happy memory for me, telling John Oliver the difference between Scotch whiskey and Irish whiskey.
It was not about Scotch and Irish whiskey. I like single malt whiskey and Hodgman thinks I’m a philistine for not appreciating the art of blended whiskey. And I think you’re taking a number of nice whiskies and then putting them together like a McFlurry and they become less than the sum of their parts.
I remember a very militant Hodgman, who becomes more articulate the drunker he is and even more convinced he’s right. He’d say, “Try this,” and it would be fine. But it’s not as nice as a single malt scotch which tastes like it’s been kind of sucked through peat and fire. That’s like drinking a fireplace.
Hodgman tried, over one increasingly drunk evening, to convince me otherwise, and if anything I’m even more sure of my view of his bland disgusting malts because they vomited out of my mouth later that evening.
Oliver, as we all know and the world knows now, he’s a peasant. He knows nothing. He’s a little child. It’s a fancy accent to our ears, but the people in England, they know he’s garbage.
That is both funny and a fact. Exactly. To American ears, it sounds like the accent of someone who’s upstairs on Downton Abbey. This is a downstairs accent. But Josh is applying class tension that you shouldn’t have as an American.
Josh’s role in the mix of the show was a pretty big deal. That was a transitional time and he had a very different sensibility. He’s an odd, eccentric guy and he’s extremely funny in a very silly way and not necessarily a way that is easily or regularly translatable to The Daily Show. But I will say, the one time in ten that one of his ideas would make it through it would be a fantastic break of rhythm and style and tone.
One thing I learned from Jon Stewart is that the most important thing in creating a show like this is exuding calm. Jon certainly has that ability, and Jimmy Fallon has it. You’re going to put on a show that night and if it works or doesn’t, whatever, you’re doing another show tomorrow night and so big fucking deal.
We certainly needed that calm in 2010, when we didn’t just do the show. We did Earth (The Book). And a trip to DC for the midterms. And a rally for two hundred thousand people.