John Oliver had many qualities to recommend him for the job as Daily Show host: an outsider’s curiosity about America, a distinctive writing voice, a performing fluency that enabled him to swing from screwball chimney sweep to indignant lecturer. He had also recently starred in one of The Daily Show’s greatest field pieces, three segments that combined facts, fury, and embarrassing interviews to craft a devastating—yet funny—essay on the insanity of American gun politics.
I had seen John Howard, the former Australian prime minister, on Fareed Zakaria, talking about an op-ed he’d written in the New York Times, about what he’d done to ban guns in the wake of the Port Arthur massacre, and I realized, “Oh, he sees this as a good legacy. He’s spectacularly arrogant, as most politicians are, and concerned about what their legacy will be. Clearly he wants to talk about this, so he might speak to us.” Howard was coming to Dallas. We had a chance to meet him there just for a one-on-one interview.
This was right after the shootings in Sandy Hook and the gun control legislation was collapsing in Congress. We were just going to explore the gun control idea in a sit-down interview with Howard, until Jon says, “Yeah, but you’ve got to see the consequences. You can’t just talk about it in theory, you have to see it. There’s a power in that.”
And especially when we started uncovering the idea that some politicians had voted for this within Howard’s Conservative Party and gone down for it, that was when Jon’s ears went up and he went, “What are they doing now? Would they talk? Okay, you’re going to need to go and speak to them.”
The team on that field piece starts reaching out to people in Australia. Brennan Shroff, the producer, and Asaf Kastner, who was the lead researcher on that, and then Tim Greenberg, who was overseeing the department. They’re making calls and saying, “So yeah, where is this guy Rob Borbidge, who voted for gun control and lost his office, now? Is he happy to talk about it? Yes, he is. Okay. So we got him. Okay so now what we would want is a farmer who was against the ban at the time and now sees the value.” Then it becomes something much bigger, and then you realize, “Oh, there’s no way this is one piece, so it’ll be two or three.”
And then next thing you know you’re on a flight to the other side of the world.
We were there in Australia six days, I think, and shot every day. The first day was shooting with John Howard. He was not thrilled. He’s a humorless, arrogant politician, so he had no trust in what the point of view of the piece was going to be, and I had no interest in reassuring him. I didn’t particularly like him in any other way other than that he did this one remarkable piece of legislation.
On the American side, we wanted to speak to a smart, articulate, Second Amendment guy.
Philip Van Cleave, President, Virginia Citizens Defense League: [The Australian gun ban] stopped one thing! That could also be a statistical anomaly.
John Oliver: Yeah—it was just their mass shootings disappeared.
Philip Van Cleave: But there were so few of them! Whoop-de-doo!
John Oliver: Whoop-de-doo?
Philip Van Cleave: Yes. Their shootings were rare anyhow.
John Oliver: In the eighteen years before the Port Arthur shootings, there were thirteen mass shootings [in Australia]. Almost one a year.
Philip Van Cleave: I was unaware they had that many.
John Oliver: Whoop-de-doo.
In his defense, Philip Van Cleave is at least intellectually consistent, so when you take him by the hand and you follow his logic down to, “Then we should have no drug laws whatsoever,” he will own that. I find that much more admirable than I find the kind of snakey politicking of Jim Manley. I found him much more loathsome in that piece.
Jim Manley had been Senator Harry Reid’s top guy. We weren’t expecting much out of Manley. But there was a moment in that interview that felt like the culmination of all the things I’ve learnt on The Daily Show. I asked him, “What makes a politician successful?” and he says, “Getting reelected.” At that point, from all the eight years beforehand, it’s like time slows down in your head and you think, “I’ve got you.” So then you say, “So, success would not be getting legislation passed?” And then Manley says, “Well, okay, if I were to rerun the tape…” And then he is right on the hook.
Sometimes, filming field pieces, it’s hard not to lose your temper as a human being. I did, actually, with Jim Manley. I was just getting angry, which is not funny for anyone to watch. Instead, it’s going to be funny watching Manley try and say, “No, this is a good thing we’re doing. We’ll do gun control one crumb at a time.”
And the interesting thing with that piece was, if that is the view of anyone in favor of gun legislation—that you need to do it one crumb at a time—then you’re absolutely playing into the paranoia that the government is coming to take your guns gradually. Whereas what Howard and [Deputy Prime Minister] Tim Fischer did in Australia was say, “Well, this is it. We’re doing it once, we’re not coming back.” It’s a much bolder move, and it worked.
Who was the person jumping around in the kangaroo suit during the Australian part of the piece, when I’m on walkabout? That’s our fixer. We told him, “There’s a suit in the back of the car. Get in it and hop around.”
I knew Oliver was going to kill it, hosting when I was away making Rosewater.
He always had a lot more confidence in me than I had. The summer is usually very, very quiet. So my main concern was for those sporadic moments where people are really looking for Jon, moments of real pain, if one of those major tragedies happened. I had no authority to talk. Then it happened, because of Trayvon Martin. I could really feel it in the warm-up with the audience that night. People were waiting to hear what Jon Stewart specifically had to say, and so I really put myself through the wringer with that show, and I think it worked out in the end. Less well than Jon would have done. But I don’t think it was a shameful attempt.
John Oliver: [at anchor desk] We have Senior Black Correspondent Larry Wilmore with us. Larry, let’s talk about race.
Larry Wilmore: [across from Oliver] Fuck you, Oliver.
John Oliver: Whoa! Larry! That’s how you have a conversation about race?
Larry Wilmore: That’s how everyone has a conversation about race… White people tend to look at race relations through rose-colored glasses. And black people resent the use of the word “colored” in that last sentence.
John Oliver: But hold on—couldn’t it be that white people are more optimistic?
Larry Wilmore: Optimistic. Is that British for “delusional”?
The real outrage of the Trayvon Martin case is that an adult shot and killed a child and there were no consequences. Look, we don’t know for sure what made George Zimmerman shoot an unarmed teenager. Maybe it was the racism in his head. Maybe it was the laws in his state. But it was definitely the gun in his hand.
John Oliver: So we should be having a conversation about guns?
Larry Wilmore: Fuck you, Oliver. Sorry, that’s generally how these conversations start.
When Oliver hosted, we got so much on the show as writers. It felt like he trusted us, a lot, to do this stuff. And as talented and serious a guy as he was, he played on the Daily Show soccer team with us.
It was tremendous fun with Oliver as host. I knew it would work, but not as well as it did. We had no way of foreseeing the amazing bunch of stories we got that summer.
Carlos Danger! It was not a quiet summer at all.
After quitting Congress in disgrace in 2011, Anthony Weiner had receded from public view, mostly. As he prepared a political comeback, though, part of his image rehabilitation effort was cooperating with a cover story for the New York Times Magazine, in which Stewart was quoted saying that his old friend’s offenses were hardly world-class crimes and that Weiner seemed to deserve a second chance.
Through the spring and early summer of 2013, New York City voters seemed to agree: Weiner was at the top of the polls in the race for the Democratic mayoral nomination. Then, in July, new lurid online chats and photos surfaced, including some that occurred after Weiner had resigned from Congress and supposedly sworn off sexting strangers. To make it worse, or at least more ridiculous, Weiner had chosen “Carlos Danger” as his social media pseudonym. At the time, Stewart was overseas shooting Rosewater, so Oliver gleefully did the Daily Show honors.
Jon had taken some heat for not going in hard enough on Anthony Weiner the first time around, in 2011, because they’d been friends. It was probably easier for me to do jokes about Weiner, because there was no personal connective tissue between me and that story. So I could just enjoy it as a child.
John Oliver: [at anchor desk, next to high school photo of Jew-fro’d Weiner entitled, WELCOME BACK, COCKER] He did it again! Although this time there are some awesome developments. He called himself—[ bad B-Western Spanish accent]—Carlos Danger! Anthony Weiner’s alter ego is a Bolivian action hero–slash–porn star.
By the way, fun fact: “The campaign trail” is what Anthony Weiner calls that line of hair from his belly button to his pubes. [disturbing photo of pasty-white belly with scraggly north–south line of hair]
Weiner, though, kept campaigning well into the fall, even as the embarrassments erased his standing in the polls. Shortly after Stewart returned to The Daily Show, the infamous mayoral candidate got into a shouting match with a Brooklyn Jewish pastry shop patron.
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] Now look, Weiner’s alienating some voters, but not his base! It’s not like he’s going into a kosher bakery on the high holy days of Rosh Hashanah and yelling at a guy in a yarmulke. [pause; holds finger to fake earpiece] Really? We have that tape as well?
Jewish Guy: [in video clip, at pastry counter, confronting Weiner] “Your behavior is deviant. It’s not normal behavior.”
Anthony Weiner: [mouth stuffed with pastry, shouting and pointing a finger in Jewish guy’s face] “And you’re perfect? You’re gonna judge me?”
Jewish Guy: “I’m not running for office.”
Anthony Weiner: “You know who judges me? You know who judges me?”
Jon Stewart: The voters of New York City? Everything that Weiner does just looks bad now. There’s no reason for it! For God’s sake, what are you yelling at this guy for? It’s not like he insulted your wife! [holds finger to fake earpiece] Oh, really? Roll that tape.
Jewish Guy: [as Weiner walks away] “You’re a real scumbag, Anthony. Married to an Arab.”
Jon Stewart: Oh. Well, then, yeah. Fuck that guy. I didn’t know that. Now, of course, this does raise an interesting possibility. What if everything Anthony Weiner’s done actually makes sense if you look at it in a larger context? What if there is, for each of these incidents, one piece of information that makes each incident okay? Like, what if at the West Indian parade, he just didn’t realize that his microphone had been set to “Jamaican accent Autotune”? Now you may say, “All right, fine. But what about that text message he sent to his nonwife lady where he said he wanted to, quote, ‘fuck you so hard your tits almost hit you in the face’?” [long pause; shrugs] Maybe she had something on her face and he tried to get her attention by going like—[ pantomimes wiping off nose with his hand]—but then he thought, “Oh, I know what could get that off!”
Nah, he’s just a guy with self-control issues who never should have run for mayor.
I mean, you know, Jon was more of a dick to me than he needed to be.
I’m sure.
I once asked Jon about Anthony. Jon feels—I’m trying to find the right words—burned by Anthony quite personally. Because when Anthony seemed to be putting things back together, Jon spoke on the record in that New York Times Magazine story about Anthony and Huma, and Jon was very gracious. Then more sexting stuff came out when Anthony was running for mayor. I think Jon feels like you don’t ask someone to do that and then—you know, don’t get me involved in your bullshit if you’re still involved.
My ambivalence about Anthony had been replaced by a genuine sense of, “Wow, you just don’t give a fuck. This really is just about your ambition.” He had called me after he resigned from Congress and asked me, “What do you think I should do with my life?” I told him, “I would disappear into the world of helping the people you said you wanted to help—no longer in the political arena, but in the real world.” He says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ll think about that.”
But he didn’t do it.
On other fronts, Stewart’s return was joyful: He got back just in time to see The Colbert Report win a long-overdue first Emmy as Outstanding Variety Series—breaking The Daily Show’s ten-year streak. The rest of the fall and winter was a blur, though. Stewart was editing Rosewater while hosting The Daily Show, and the exhaustion showed. Dark circles ringed his eyes; his voice grew scratchy; some nights, even Stewart’s hair looked tired. He hadn’t told Comedy Central yet, but he was growing certain that he’d be leaving The Daily Show at the end of his current contract.
In 2013, Jon had ended up signing just a short two-year extension. And it was crystal-clear that there were only two scenarios. He was going to leave at the end of his contract, or he was going to consider staying through the 2016 election. We would have loved for him to stay till the election. But he was not signing a long-term contract.
Shit bothered me too much, and there wasn’t enough efficacy out of it anymore, catharsis-wise, to be worth that. Originally, it was really thrilling to have this platform, and I never took that platform for granted. But at a certain point you begin to feel like, well, now I’m just yelling the same shit. The cautionary tale for all comics is Lenny Bruce in the basement of the Hungry I with the court case transcript, onstage going, “This is what the judge said, you believe this shit?” You’re always trying to tell yourself, I want to get out before I’m holding the litigation in my hand and yelling at the audience, “Where are you going? I’m getting to the good part where I get cross-examined!”
Stewart cared about the creative legacy of the show and he also wanted the changeover to be as smooth as possible, for the job security of current staffers and so that his successor wouldn’t face the hostile reception that greeted Stewart when he replaced Kilborn. And he thought he’d found the perfect solution.
I remember Jon saying before he left to direct the movie, he said, “We’ll talk when I get back about what you need to do next.” And that was just horrible. That is horrifying to hear. You think, “Oh, am I being fired?”
I knew I was going to be on my way out when I got back. And I knew Oliver couldn’t just return to just being what he was.
I don’t understand how the network let somebody take over the show without an agreement in principle. How do you not anticipate that it might be great? How shortsighted is it to let a guy stand in and not have him signed to a contract in the first place? I was talking to John the whole time, so I knew what they were saying to him, and I knew what they were saying to me. I think we were both a little stunned by the whole thing.
I guess they just didn’t care. That’s the only thing you can take away. There is nothing that would suggest that they cared.
I don’t think that’s true. Not having John Oliver signed was a giant oversight on everybody’s part, including The Daily Show. Day in and day out, The Daily Show was responsible for these people. But Jon Stewart had a very long-standing tradition of never getting in the way of any of his talent. So if somebody gets an opportunity, he lets them go. With all due respect to Jon Stewart, those are decisions that are not necessarily run past Comedy Central.
I’m not sure what The Daily Show was supposed to have done there. We weren’t in charge of signing Oliver up to a hosting deal in case this thing took off. We didn’t have the authority. At the time, I was focused on the movie, but Doug is right that I never said, “Hey, before Oliver hosts, what about signing him to a deal just in case somebody tries to poach him?” But that’s relatively standard operating procedure in the business.
After Oliver’s smash stand-in run, he and Stewart proposed that the arrangement be made more permanent, with Oliver taking over each summer.
They were not willing to make John a reasonable deal, in terms of money. The HBO stuff came after all that other stuff had been exhausted with Comedy Central. So one day Oliver came into my office. And it was tearing him up a little bit, you know. He’s an incredibly loyal fella. He felt like this place was his home, he loved the show, this is what he wanted to do.
There was no part of me that wanted to leave that show, other than a tiny part in my head which knew I had to. There was no part in me, and so I was clinging on to that thing. It ended up with Jon having to be kind of a momma bird pushing me out of the nest because I was so comfortable there. I was so happy. I felt I owed Jon everything.
I said to him, “If you want to tell me what’s being thrown around, and you want my advice, I’m happy to give it.” He sat down and he said, “Well, you know, I’m being offered this at Showtime, and… and then there’s really only this one that I’ve been thinking about.” It was HBO once a week, and as soon as he said that I was like, “Okay. Well, let’s think about this for a second. Yes, and take me with you.”
He said you would be insane not to take that.
After John Oliver’s first night as substitute host, it was clear that he could do this. But Jon Stewart’s plans weren’t clear. We offered Oliver a half-hour weekly show and so did HBO, and they wanted to pay him about twice as much as we did.
As much as I like them at Comedy Central, and I don’t want to cast aspersions on their abilities because they’ve been very good to me over the years—they’re my friends—but let’s face it. What they didn’t do was prepare for succession. Probably over two or three million dollars they let John Oliver slip through their fingers.
Should we have paid the money? I don’t know. And it would have changed things for Jon Stewart. Now there would have been somebody who we’ve designated as the Conan O’Brien to his Jay Leno. There was no timetable for Jon’s departure at that point. After the difficulty of the 2012 negotiations, it got a little different. We have a great long relationship with Jon, but everybody got a little more guarded.
Shortsighted? You’d certainly be within your rights to say that. But that was the decision. And John Oliver chose one offer over the other.
My last day at The Daily Show was just brutal. I’m English. I’m dead inside. I don’t have any echoes of feelings. What I have might be from ancestors centuries ago.
The sendoff for Oliver… all day we just pretended that he was going to be in a regular chat, and we made him write it. And gave him notes and made him go rewrite his last fucking chat, and work on it all day long.
But it wasn’t just a chat. It was an entire act one. It was a headline and chat and it was a perfectly executed prank. There was this whole charade in the morning meeting of “What about this queen thing?” And then I’d throw some ideas out there and it was “Okay, can you slam a headline and a chat together?” So we did it, and then we rewrote it. It was a fast, hard rewrite.
Every time he’d leave the writers’ room we’d all burst out laughing, because we knew that during taping Jon was going to interrupt it in the middle and say farewell to Oliver.
During the taping, Jon was trying to make a nice joke out of the whole thing. I just couldn’t handle it. I was in absolute pieces. I was kind of holding it together until he could see I was getting sad. I don’t know if you can even hear it on the show, but Jon kind of said, “Are you okay?” And I just fell apart. Because that is basically reflective of my entire relationship with him taking care of me, making sure I was okay the whole time. That was when I cried.
Oliver wasn’t the only one to move on before Stewart quit. Yet even those who left because they were burned out, or to seek new challenges, did so with some regret.
Look, I was there fifteen years when I left, and I told you the thing I’m most proud of is I put two espresso machines in a fucking staff kitchen. I wrote a lot of jokes for that show and I gave my fucking youth to that guy, and probably two hours’ worth of decent standup. Guess what? I made that fucking choice. Nobody forced me to do it, and he treated everybody fairly. There’s plenty of people that have worked at that show over the years that could tell you things about Jon Stewart they don’t like. They’ll tell you he’s a dick, he’s a tyrant, he’s mean. All of those things to me are coming from people who have very little perspective on reality and also very little perspective on how much value they provided to that place.
And at the end of it all, not only was it an incredible place to work, but we weren’t making schlock. We were making something really good.
The Daily Show changed television, particularly because it advanced the late-night monologue into the post-broadcast-network era. Jon Stewart’s own talent aside, and whatever specific comedy bits they did or arguments they made, the big important thing it showed was that there was a place where you could be successful doing comedy that had a strong point of view. Before The Daily Show, you can’t overestimate how strongly ingrained was the idea that satire is what closes on Saturday night, that you could not be too strong or specific in a point of view. The change in the medium and the business and the growth of cable and smaller audiences influenced content, but The Daily Show pointed the way forward.