The rally’s achievements in comedy and civility were hard to quantify, but the event certainly helped boost the show’s ratings. In October 2010, The Daily Show beat Letterman’s and Leno’s shows among the coveted 18-to-49-year-old viewers, the first time any late-night show other than those two network giants had won a month in more than a decade. The Rally also demonstrated Stewart’s ability to deploy Daily Show fans on behalf of a cause. At the end of the year, he would spend some of that capital on behalf of some real heroes.
South Park and The Daily Show built Comedy Central. With Jon, you have the highest-income audience, the most dedicated audience—and they’re young guys, and nobody else can find young guys. The young guys have fled TV and they’re playing video games. But The Daily Show became a magnet for advertisers and really the calling card of the network. Then we had Colbert come on, and Tosh come on, and Key and Peele, and Chappelle in the middle of all that.
But The Daily Show was the constant, was the bedrock, was the award winner, was the cultural touchstone, where every politician ultimately wanted to be. You cannot overstate its importance, particularly in that time. It’s still important now, but in the years of 2000 to 2010, you cannot overstate the importance of The Daily Show to Comedy Central.
The company had a great relationship with Jon, but he didn’t hesitate to say what he thought internally, either. Once there was a South Park episode about the prophet Muhammad. We had a really hard debate in the office about what to do because we were nervous. I was getting calls from Homeland Security and NYPD, saying, “Don’t do this.” We didn’t run the full episode the way they wanted to, and Jon really took us to task on his show for not being brave.
At the same time, The Daily Show itself was becoming a target of increased scrutiny. Over the years it had been knocked for being too white and too male in its roster of correspondents and writers. The criticism peaked in a story published by the feminist website Jezebel and headlined THE DAILY SHOW’S WOMAN PROBLEM. It quoted former female staffers to build a case that the show was “a boys’ club where women’s contributions are often ignored and dismissed,” and implied that the first female correspondent hired in seven years got a tryout because she was a hottie. Olivia Munn had made her Daily Show debut three weeks before the story appeared, delivering part of her first report as Senior Asian Correspondent in fluent Vietnamese.
The Daily Show, these rooms are full of women who make the show go every day. The executive producers, the producers, you don’t see them on the camera so they don’t exist. That’s offensive as shit, to erase them and say they don’t exist, and that they’re not important, and that they don’t make this workplace.
I was walking to work down through Riverside Park, and that’s when I started thinking about, “If I could write a letter back to Jezebel, what would I write?” Then I came in and talked to Jo Miller, and that’s when we started putting the letter together. Thirty-one Daily Show women ended up signing it, and we put it on the show’s website.
We must admit it is entertaining to be the subjects of such a vivid and dramatic narrative. However, while rampant sexism at a well-respected show makes for a great story, we want to make something very clear: the place you may have read about is not our office.
The Daily Show isn’t a place where women quietly suffer on the sidelines as barely tolerated tokens. On the contrary: just like the men here, we’re indispensable. We generate a significant portion of the show’s creative content and the fact is, it wouldn’t be the show that you love without us.
I’ve never, ever personally felt that my gender impeded my progress along the way. And the unsung hero of The Daily Show is Jen Flanz. She is an inspiration to every girl who’s come up at the show. She’s the superhero, rock star, best friend, big sister, prom queen of The Daily Show, and I think after Jon, she was the second most important in shaping the spirit of the show and what it felt like to work there.
I just could not have been more angry. I sit in a room and throw out jokes with these guys every day, work on the visuals of the show. We have women on set with writer credits. Women field producers, women correspondents.
Is the late-night industry saturated with white men? Sure, yes, but that’s because they all grew up watching shows and wanting to be in this for a long time. I didn’t grow up watching late night. I didn’t care, and maybe that’s more on society than on women.
I don’t think The Daily Show hates women at all. I think the show loves women, and it wasn’t doing anything different than any other show. Well, I will say that after the Jezebel article came out, I got on the show a lot more, so I am grateful about that. It was a good wakeup call.
Within the shitstorm were some real nuggets. The Jezebel story articulated a very clear problem we had. But it wasn’t because I didn’t think women are funny. It was ignorance, more or less. Ignorance of a system that was designed to perpetuate a particular sense of humor and individual. Ignorance of what it took to actively subvert that system. Ignorance of what the value of that would be. The triple crown of ignorance. They didn’t know we were in the process of changing those things, and we probably didn’t change them fast enough.
The nerve that story struck was that it delved into the worst kind of criticism of the show, which is, “We know something about Jon Stewart’s character that you don’t. He’s pretending to be something that he’s not.” That struck me as lazy. And I thought it was an implied criticism of Olivia Munn that was not fair, either, that we hadn’t hired more women until we found someone hot. We hired her because we thought she was funny.
But the larger premise that we didn’t do enough to find women writers and performers, that was justified.
The fact is, when it comes to hiring writers, the show has had blind submissions for years. I know because I developed it, in about 2009 as head writer. And we’ve continued it, with adaptations, having chiefly to do with expanding the applicant pool. And for all the ink about how terribly skewed the writers’ room supposedly was, under Jon we had the most even male-female split in late night. I’m not going to say the show has become a perfect place for women, but it certainly is a good place for women to work.
The Daily Show is one of the hardest shows to execute well in the history of shows, because it requires a hybrid human being—take gender out of it—who eats, drinks, and breathes not just the news, but politics and history, that is funny and can write, and then can translate that funny into the tone and the voice of Jon. And there were just not a lot of people who gave two fucks about politics and who wanted to write. So when you ask yourself, “Why does The Daily Show not reflect the world at large?” it’s like, the world at large doesn’t like this shit! Why do you think our fucking country’s falling apart?
Jon underwent a bona fide evolution on some things over the years, with diversity being prime among them. It was something that he came to believe in deeply by the third quarter of his run, and by the fourth quarter, he’d put in place more mechanisms to make it happen. Especially on camera, he just came to see that having this diversity of people allows us to say a whole lot of things that we couldn’t get at before, and once you get out of that defensive clutch from people telling you, “You’re doing it wrong,” and open up, instead, to what the possibilities might be if you look at it a different way, it could be really liberating, creatively juicing.
I’d always looked at the metrics of hiring people wrong. They were about, “This guy can write nonsense jokes. This guy writes great one-liners.” The metrics weren’t about life experience, things that make the show healthy and fuller.
In the old days, when we were looking for correspondents, you would call a casting agent and say, “Who do you have?” And they would send you the same thirty improv people that they all sent everywhere, and a lot of them were really good, but they all tended to be of the same ilk. So we had to learn how to expand. That’s probably one of the things we learned much deeper into the run, which was you have to be active in finding interesting talent outside of the general pipeline.
Daily Show producers became more aggressive in expanding the pool of applicants, circulating word to friends and colleagues to encourage a more diverse set of choices, but they also pushed agents for a wider list of possible correspondents and writers.
In the meantime, though, the show broke out of its routines in another provocative way, and this time it didn’t just make headlines—it helped pass a law. The issue was health care for firefighters and other first responders who had become sick after working at Ground Zero in the days after the attack on the World Trade Center. It brought together several of The Daily Show’s major themes—the fecklessness of politicians, the misguided media focus on petty squabbles instead of policy impact, the twisted uses of “patriotism.”
The Zadroga bill, which would pay for 9/11 first responder medical treatment, was stalled by partisan maneuvering. Senate Republicans filibustered the bill—even as they passed a tax cut for the wealthy. So in mid-December, Stewart decided to become an overt advocate, something he’d avoided doing for eleven years.
In 2001, the first responders were told, “No, the air is safe.” Sure, why not? Why wouldn’t it be safe—you’re taking a thousand different chemicals and you’re burning it at a high flame, and inhaling it, freebasing it?
In 2010 we had gotten wind of the fact that those guys had gone down to DC and almost been thrown out of Congress. That’s originally what got our dander up. So it’s on our radar and we’re following a story line.
Congress was going to leave for Christmas, and [Mitch] McConnell had a friend who had retired from the Senate. Was it Judd Gregg? Yeah. And McConnell gave a crazy, emotional, literally tearful speech. His friend is leaving, and it’s Christmas, I want to get out of here, and he’s utterly ignoring these sick guys or treating them like a distraction, with the backdrop of the Republicans having waved the bloody flag many times.
I assembled a list, going back to 2001, of congressmen who voted against Zadroga after praising the 9/11 responders. It was a long list.
Lowitt and those guys in the video room, they’re all on lockdown, looking for video that makes the connections. The point of the show is always, let’s make connections. So what are our connections? “McConnell is superemotional. At the same time they’re being really cold to the firefighters.” Okay. Well, have the Republicans ever shown emotion about 9/11 previously, having nothing to do with these guys? Cut to all the speeches of the Republicans in tears.
It was one of those issues where normally we would come up with the workaround, the funny conceit. But with certain situations you just feel like you run out of fun to be had, and the most powerful thing to do would be to just go right at it. Doing a panel with the first responders, it felt like an unusual thing for us to do. I called up John Feal and was like, “Can you get me guys?”
For eight years we’d been walking the halls of Congress fighting for Zadroga. Now it was about a week before the deadline and the bill was in trouble. Out of nowhere I get a call from Beth Shorr, Jon’s assistant. I was a fan of the show, but I didn’t know him at all. Jon got on the phone—he was eating a sandwich or something—and he’s like, “Hey, John, you’re going to come on my show tomorrow. We’re going to make fun of Republicans, and we’re going to get the bill passed.” I was like, “Holy shit, Jon Stewart’s calling me!”
I had to be in DC the next day. I had a meeting with Nancy Pelosi. So that whole day before I left for DC, I worked with Beth and I vetted four guys. A nonuniformed cop, a firefighter, a construction worker, a city transportation department guy. Yeah, it’s probably the best thing I never did, going on that show.
Those four guys were eloquent, real, angry, and still had a great sense of humor. They were human, and that’s what the situation needed, their humanity. I think they felt relieved to be able to have their say. Those guys were tired, man. They were tired of fighting this.
Thank god Denis Leary was away shooting something, because my original idea was to have the firefighters on with Leary as the character from Rescue Me. And in the middle of it I was going to say to Leary, “Hey, dude, you know you’re not actually a fireman, right?” That was because I was nervous, because we’d never done something like that, and I thought, “Okay, what can I do to inject humor into this?” Denis would’ve been funny, but it would’ve been the wrong tone.
I was in the green room beforehand, with Kenny Specht and John Devlin, who’s just passed away, and Ken George and Chris Bowman, basically just to say, “Good to see you guys. On the show, we just want you to talk from the heart.” Because sometimes people come on and they think, “Oh, okay, he’s going to want us to be funny.”
And I was ranting to them about, “These fucking congressmen, they just want to go home, they’re talking about how nostalgic they are for Christmas and they can’t bear another day away from Tennessee or Arizona…” And Kenny Specht said, “Oh, you know we always thought it was an honor to work on the holidays, to protect people’s families.”
And I told him, “Say that. That’s how we’re ending.”
Stewart set the stage with a furious introduction entitled “Worst Responders” that castigated the Senate for misplaced priorities and Fox News for being beaten on the story by Al Jazeera. Then he introduced Specht, Devlin, Bowman, and George for a nine-minute conversation that was by turns painful and enraging. And highly effective.
Here’s what happened. The New York Daily News had been like a dog with a bone on this issue for ten years. That kept the New York delegation’s feet to the fire. They don’t want to get beaten up by their hometown newspaper. And the first responders had made dozens of trips to DC. But it never became a national issue, even though there are first responders in the program from all fifty states. On the Senate side, Kirsten and Chuck Schumer had been working hard on Zadroga. On the House side, you had Carolyn Maloney, Jerry Nadler, and Peter King. But we’re in late December and Republicans filibuster the bill. Jon Stewart did his show, and the next day Shep Smith, on Fox, goes nuts: “Jon Stewart is right! No one’s covering this. It is shameful! This is a national thing.”
Then Fox decides to give it the full Fox treatment. That put an enormous amount of pressure on the Republicans. And so they caved. We don’t get there without the Daily News. We don’t get there without all the hard work of Kirsten and the responders themselves. If you take one piece out of the Jenga puzzle, the whole thing falls down. But it doesn’t happen unless The Daily Show flips the switch. And the important thing is Jon didn’t just shame Congress, he shamed the media. Really important thing. The impact was massive.
The problem would have been if the segment just made everybody go, “Yeah, I was thinking that, too.” Which is fine. But for that feeling to effect something, it has to be because it’s so weightless. Maybe this is a better analogy: It’s Patrick Swayze in Ghost. Generally, The Daily Show, we’re just in the subway, yelling at dead people. But if you really focus it just the right way, at the proper time, you can move a can, as long as that can is sort of near the edge of something. That’s all that Zadroga was.
Kind of remarkable when you think about it. A show that can make you laugh that hard, and at the same time discuss political and social issues on a friendly level, an intellectual level, and on a level where it actually makes a difference. Kind of crazy.
The show didn’t seek out places to do good, but this was a particular time where people were getting fucked for doing what was right for the city and for the country. So we very happily said, “Hey, America, listen up.”
It worked. Six days after the panel of first responders appeared on The Daily Show, Congress hastily approved $4.3 billion to cover the cost of medical care for those sickened by the World Trade Center’s toxic fumes and dust—with one devilish catch: The funding would expire in 2015.