At the time, I was obviously making my mark in such films as Wishful Thinking and Dancing with Architecture, or Dancing About… Oh, no. They ended up calling it something else. Playing by Heart, I think it was.
After The Jon Stewart Show was canceled by Paramount, he was… not burnt on being on TV, but he wanted to kind of wet his feet with film. We had this nice deal with Harvey Weinstein, and Jon was down in Tribeca and he’s getting to kiss Angelina Jolie in films.
Getting fired from Paramount was the real turning point for me. Because I thought that after appearing on Letterman, now I’m a made man. And the Paramount thing, I thought losing it meant I was an unmade man. I realized you still have to make your act better. The goal is to produce, the goal is to make things.
So I spent some time writing and performing on The Larry Sanders Show, and I learned a lot from Garry Shandling.
Garry had the foresight to write about the talk show wars and this very subtle aspect of it, which is, you support a young comedian and slowly the network likes him more than it likes you, and then that younger guy, in ways that he understands and might not understand, slowly pushes you out of your job. Similar to what really happened with [Jay] Leno and Conan [O’Brien] and [Jimmy] Fallon. So there was a moment when Garry was considering continuing The Larry Sanders Show, and changing the name of it to The John Stewart Show, with an H so it wouldn’t really be Jon. Everyone was excited about it for a while, but it went away.
Probably my favorite Garry memory is his life being so bizarre to me. It was going to Warren Beatty’s house with Garry and having dinner with Warren and Sean Penn in this beautiful mansion on Mulholland or wherever it was, and then heading down to the Chateau Marmont. And at this time, Warren Beatty’s got to be fifty, sixty years old and Garry’s not a spring chicken, and we’re in the Chateau Marmont surrounded by fans, if you know what I mean.
I knew I didn’t want to live in LA. Because everything is inflected with show business, and I found that to be suffocating. Even your Saturday basketball game over at Garry’s house. It was a red carpet of people that you couldn’t help but think, “Oh, wow. Look at me, I just got my shot blocked by that guy from The Avengers,” or whatever it was. You always felt a little bit like you were on an audition, and I never liked that feeling.
Worst-case scenario, he could always be a writer-producer on his own or on someone else’s show. We didn’t say, “Let’s host a news parody show.” Jon was always smart about the long play.
The Daily Show wasn’t necessarily on the radar. I think they called and said, “Hey man, would you be interested in talking about this?”—something along those lines, something as romantic as that.
I definitely advocated for him to do it. I just said to him, “You can put this through your prism. You can make it smarter and different than what it’s been.” Now, I definitely didn’t see the show becoming the political lightning rod that it evolved into.
I knew of him as a sort of leather-jacket-wearing, hipster young dude who was different from the personality that we had been working with, let alone created, for The Daily Show, for Craig, the newsman thing.
Oh, it was really positive, my reaction to Jon being hired. He was a name, and he had a good reputation. Hiring Jon is Comedy Central saying this is an important show to them.
From the time I met Jon in the clubs, I liked him, he was funny. There was no bullshit to him. Hiring him for The Daily Show made sense. The only thing I found disturbing was that they auditioned everybody, and they didn’t audition me. And you just do that out of etiquette. You don’t have to hire me. I don’t care. You don’t have to put film in the camera. You just pretend that you’re allowing me to do this.
In the summer of ’98 when we announced that Jon was going to take over The Daily Show, we had a little press conference in the lobby of the old Comedy Central offices. And Stephen Colbert showed up, as a member of the press representing The Daily Show, wanting to know why he didn’t get the job.
“You told me he wasn’t funny.” That’s what Jon said to Doug Herzog.
The Daily Show offices and studio were in a still-rugged pocket of Hell’s Kitchen, at 513 West Fifty-Fourth Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. The Daily Show’s neighbors were abandoned warehouses, but the building itself was a cozy, three-story, redbrick townhouse. The production offices were upstairs, with the one-hundred-seat studio on the ground floor.
The area was rough in those days. I think Adriane Truex got carjacked outside the Fifty-Fourth Street studio.
Jon’s first day, he walked around and introduced himself. He was wearing a black leather jacket. I remember hearing rumors before he started: “He doesn’t want to wear a suit.” Our wardrobe girl at the time was upset. Jon did wear suits on the show. It was fine. But it was a big thing at the time.
Because of the point of view that had been created by Craig Kilborn sitting in the chair, the writers’ role had inflated. Yeah, they were spoiled rotten, because almost every show in late night is talent driven. They got too big for their britches.
Madeleine had hired me as a segment producer on Jon’s MTV pilot and then on the series, and then also on The Daily Show when she started with Kilborn. Jon came into Daily Show writing meetings originally and would listen. I think that he really wanted to make sure that he understood what the process was as opposed to coming in and immediately dictating terms.
A couple of months before I officially started as host there was a meeting with the writers and producers. Let’s call that “Jonny’s surprise party.” I knew that the people working on the Kilborn show were rightfully proud of it. It had done well. It was not the sensibility that I thought was right for me, and so when they approached me for the show, I was pretty clear about the direction I thought I wanted to take it. Seemed like everybody was on board with that, and so this was my first chance to meet with all the people who, I had been told, were so excited about that. So excited. They’re so happy you’re here.
And I walked in, and it was a room full of people who, as it turned out, were annoyed that I had an idea about where I wanted to go, who thought that I was going to MTV it up. I was told, “This isn’t about bands. We do a real show here.” I just sat there like, “Oh, fuck.” It felt a little bit like, “Wow, none of this was in the brochure. The brochure said that this was oceanfront property.”
I had to talk Jon down. Not from a tree—from a skyscraper. Because they basically said to him, “Welcome aboard. This is how we do shit here. Grab a chair.” It was bullshit. And Jon had to systematically mold the show piece by piece, person by person.
The stakes for Jon were fairly high at that point, because he’s not a superyoung guy anymore, and he’s had shots, and people easily disappear and go into the woodwork. He didn’t get the Conan job on NBC, he didn’t get the 12:30 job after Letterman. If this doesn’t work on fucking cable, then where would Jon have ended up?
Technically I was Jon’s first Daily Show guest interview. I went to the University of Kansas, and my roommate, Stewart Bailey, became a segment producer who was with the show from the very beginning. I’d been on Kilborn’s Daily Show. When Jon replaced Craig, they wanted to do a test show so Jon could get used to the format. I was wearing my girlfriend’s Jon Stewart Show MTV T-shirt.
Stewart made his debut on Monday, January 11, 1999. His first joke was that Kilborn was “on assignment in Kuala Lumpur.” His first headline, “The Final Blow,” was about the Senate impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. His first guest was Michael J. Fox, then starring in ABC’s City Hall sitcom Spin City. But Stewart looked, for the first months, very much the guest himself. Other than a new couch and desktop—and blue script pages for Stewart to scribble on portentously, replacing Kilborn’s white paper—the set design was unchanged. The theme song, Bob Mould’s “Dog on Fire,” was the same. And Stewart’s suits were so ill-fitting that they looked inherited from his much-taller predecessor.
You watch his first shows, where he’s wearing David Byrne’s suit, you can see that it’s the exact same format. He didn’t want to change anything, at least at the beginning.
The first joke I wrote that Jon did on the air was on his first day. Popeye and Olive Oyl were getting married. We showed a picture of them, and you see Popeye, with his huge forearms. The joke is, “As for the wedding night, Olive Oyl had only one request: no fisting.” The crowd loved it. But when I go back and I look at the tape, I can almost see Jon falling to pieces inside his own head, like, “Maybe I should change things up here sooner than I was planning.”
Recurring segments from the Kilborn days—like “Ad Nauseam,” about dumb commercials—continued to appear regularly during Stewart’s first year. And there were wince-inducing bits, including one with Stewart singing, “Homeless, homeless, man,” to the tune of “Macho Man,” in a piece about the destitute former lead singer of the Village People. There was also a headline taking crude potshots at flimsy Florida targets.
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] In what must have seemed like a good idea at the time, the Florida Department of State decided to celebrate the coming millennium with “Great Floridians 2000.” The program stalled, however, when they only received two hundred nominees, including five governors, three athletes, and 156 misspellings of the name “Jimmy Buffett.” The list then dwindles to ten bearded ladies, the inventor of the funnel cake, and a blind guy who can fart the theme to M*A*S*H.
Stewart did not arrive with a precise blueprint for where he wanted to take The Daily Show. But he did have a clear idea of the sensibility he wanted to instill. One of Stewart’s comedy heroes was George Carlin, who wove social criticism into his jokes and riffs about dirty words, organized religion, and hypocritical politicians. Stewart wanted to give his Daily Show a similarly substantive foundation—and, crucially, he wanted it to “punch up.” He started shifting The Daily Show’s sights to target powerful people and institutions, and he began changing the tone of the show from randomly coarse to deliberately barbed. Not that he was opposed to making a good dick joke now and then.
It was pretty quick that things changed. One of Jon’s lines was, “No more Carol Channing jokes”—the celebrity stuff. Instead of doing six headlines a show, we started doing three headlines a show, but they were more intense. They were longer and had more power and research to them, and more tape.
During the Kilborn era, it was about “How can we seem like we’ve gone too far?” With Jon, we went from creating the news—creating funny spoof headlines—to making fun of the news. That was a big change.
You can satirize news media conventions just by embodying the form in slightly exaggerated or subtle ways—for instance, the way that they do those camera turns. Making the story itself have purpose—that’s when I felt we got something.
For me the key switch was relevance—turning the machine in a direction more toward politics, media, satire. The first two years, most of my energy was spent saying, “I understand that’s a funny joke, but our point of view here is not that the lady who is selling the Barbie in that commercial is a whore. That joke runs counter to the idea that we are maybe looking at the underlying sexism involved in this product.”
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] Belly up to the Barbie! Some of Hollywood’s biggest stars turned out to honor a hunk of molded petroleum, as Barbie turned forty, making her too old to play the girlfriend and too young to play the mother. Here’s Brandy, singing the Barbie marching song, “Be Anything,” with a choir of future divorcees. She looks just like Moesha!
And here’s Brandy talking!
Brandy: [in video clip] “I love Barbie. She’s so positive, she’s very classy, and I’m just happy to be here, because that’s the way I am.”
Jon Stewart: Yes, that’s exactly right, Brandy, because class is all about telling people you’re classy.
Shortly after Jon arrived, the whole staff piled into Madeleine’s office. We had done a bit about Dana Plato dying, and Jon felt bad about delivering a joke when the end of her life had been so pathetic. He said he had resolved that the show needed to have a point of view and couldn’t just be the kid at the back of the classroom throwing spitballs in all directions. I remember people trading the kind of glances that said, “Oh shit, this is going to be a disaster.”
To be fair to the writers who stayed from Kilborn’s show, they had a successful thing going. They thought of it as a continuation of their show. I thought it was a new show. To me it wasn’t edgy or provocative to just take napalm to a bush for no reason. You wanted it to be pointed, purposeful, intentional, surgical.
I felt like I walked in there with a very open “Okay, so this will be great,” and it was “Hey, motherfucker, you came here to kill a baby.”
Well, I would not agree with that. I don’t remember any of this being as hostile as it has been portrayed, I just don’t.
A month or two in, you could see flashes of pieces and jokes that have meaning, which has always been Jon’s thing. That’s what Jon instilled in everybody that came through there: “I’m not interested in the first thing off the top of your head. You’re saying it before you’ve given thought to what it is you really want to say.” That was the biggest learning process with working for Jon. It takes you away from being surface.
To change the culture of The Daily Show, though, Stewart knew he needed committed allies as much as he needed people who could write funny and fast.
I was thirty-one and I had been working as an advertising writer for Sony Music. It was a good job for someone trying to start a comedy career, because it was a company where they spent an awful lot of money, I had a big office, and I didn’t do much in the way of actual work.
I got ahold of the fax number at SNL [Saturday Night Live] for Colin Quinn, when he was doing “Weekend Update.” Every Friday, I would fax stuff to him, and he began to buy a decent chunk of jokes from me.
Jon took over The Daily Show, and he asked Colin Quinn if he knew of anyone who was writing decent topical stuff, and Colin gave him my name, which is awfully nice of him because I’d never met Colin.
I was called in by Madeleine Smithberg and Chris Kreski, who was the head writer at the time, and I had an interview with them. Jon came in only at the very end. He was eating Chinese food out of a Styrofoam tray. I think he had sweat clothes on: a gray sweatshirt and gray bottoms. He looked like an old-timey police cadet.
Jon just sat down on the couch, while he was eating, and he asked me one or two questions, and then said, “So, if we hire you here, are you going to be my guy?” And I wasn’t quite sure what being “his guy” entailed, but I was very eager to get out of advertising, and I said sure, and then I was hired about a week later. I was Jon’s first hire on the show.
Six or eight weeks in, the writers called me into their office. They’re like, “You can’t change our jokes anymore.” I didn’t know what to say.
So after a weekend of pacing and smoking and having tremendous Lincoln-Douglas debates on the couch by myself, I went back in, and it was horrible. I basically told them all to fuck off. “You work for me. And if you don’t like the direction, okay. I get that. Don’t work here.”
There were points where I thought, “I made the wrong decision. I’ve got to leave.” But I don’t give up very easily. It was open hostility, which is so enjoyable. It became that sense of “Okay, let’s arm-wrestle.” This will give you a hint of my personality of grudges.
It was tense. It was a weird experience to be involved in, because it was the first job I’d had in the industry, and I just kind of wanted to lay low and do my work. But there was a lot of conflict between Jon and the Kilborn writers. As time went on, it put into perspective the “Are you going to be my guy?” question Jon had asked me.
In those early days if felt like Madeleine and Chris Kreski had the final say over what went into the script. But that didn’t last long, and some heads began to roll.
My professional and creative worlds collided, and it was not smooth. It was bumpy, and painful, and uncomfortable, and awkward, but it had to go through those convulsions. You had a show that was a real collaborative stew, and now it was just being taken apart and put back together and deconstructed and reemerging as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Instead of things being in this big free-form orbit, boom, suddenly we had a sun, and Jon Stewart was the sun.
Well, I didn’t really have a game plan. I knew what I didn’t want. But then turning it into what you did want was the next scenario, and that was going to take time, and effort, and accomplices. What I needed most were accomplices.
I was living in Los Angeles, working with a bunch of guys from the Onion, selling pilots and doing punch-up on movies. We did a pilot for Fox called Deadline Now, at about the same time The Daily Show was launching. We kind of did the exact opposite. We didn’t want to be winking at the audience. We wanted to play it straight and not really acknowledge we were a comedy show. We hired actors and went about trying to produce a news show that was very much in the spirit of the Onion newspaper. And frankly, we were quite scornful of the Kilborn Daily Show.
Our template host, when we’d come up with show ideas, was always Jon Stewart. We loved Jon Stewart. So when it was announced that Jon was taking over The Daily Show, our little comedy snob nerd group thought it was a bad move. For him. Comedy Central was still pretty second tier, and that might even be nice. And Jon was the Letterman heir apparent.
I got a call from my agent saying, “Listen, Jon is looking for a new head writer, loves the Onion, has heard that you’re kind of the de facto leader of the Onion guys’ group out in LA. Would you be willing to come out to New York and meet with them?”
I was twenty-seven. I had developed a lot of TV shows, I was the editor of the Onion, but I really hadn’t worked on a TV show in a meaningful way, ever. You always feel like a fraud, unless you’re a crazy person. But I really felt like, “This is bullshit—I’m totally not qualified for this.”
I really liked his sensibility. Ben seemed to be concerned with hypocrisy and the silly facades of politics. He seemed to know where the absurdity was, and that was an important change in focus for what we wanted to do. There’s also a certain steeped-in-neurosis bathos that probably was a rhythm that we both clicked on. That similar Jewie Jewerman from Jewville.
The big thing was to find somebody who had thoughts, who cared, who had an opinion. Part of what the Onion is, and part of what Ben was steeped in, was the idea of deconstruction as your first step of re-creation. So Ben was a natural fit, although he had not had the TV experience.
I was friendly with Bob Odenkirk and David Cross. They were kind of like the grand poobahs of the alternative comedy scene in LA—Sarah Silverman, Janeane Garofalo, Patton Oswalt. It was that whole wave of comics. Bob and David said The Daily Show sounded like a great opportunity. So I sublet my apartment, sold my Harley, found someone to take my dog for a while, and came to New York with three duffel bags.
Ben walked into a buzzsaw.
I’m not going to talk shit about anybody. But the staff had its allegiances, and the things that they liked to do, and the way they liked to do it. Now you’ve got this guy, Jon, who is a writer, who has a strong point of view.
As much as I loved the original writers, I created some little monsters. Once Jon realized he needed to take charge, you can’t afford to have people who are not in the Jon Stewart business. And so there’s a bit of Kool-Aid drinking that has to take place.
It didn’t necessarily feel like Jon was in charge right when he got there. When Ben came in, that felt like more of a shift in the universe.
Karlin arrived as head writer in April 1999 and quickly formed a complementary duo with Stewart. Karlin pushed for a higher quotient of righteous anger in the Daily Show’s jokes; Stewart had an innate sense of what would get big laughs.
We were very kindred spirits, with very similar points of view, and my critique of the show was very much in line with his problems with the show: Why are we going after these helpless targets? Maybe we should focus the power of this kind of big news show on things that are actually newsworthy, rather than just look through the paper for what seems funny.
Clashes between Stewart, Karlin, and some of the holdover Kilborn writers would flare over the next year, with one confrontation—which became known inside the show as “the fuck-you meeting”—being leaked to the New York Post’s “Page Six” gossip column.
I think that was the meeting where I said, “You’re not a group. You’re not a unit. You’re not ‘the writers.’ You’re individual writers that have been hired, and you will be judged within that.” It was just an attempt to reclaim some semblance of order. It was an absolute flat-out power struggle, but one that I felt blindsided by.
At one point during the battle for the heart and soul of the show, one of the writers snuck into Madeleine’s office and replaced some of the items on the board that tracks the stories we’re doing with personal insults. Some of them were about me, some were about other people. It was the most juvenile thing in the world, and it only could have been two or three people.
Jon and I used to have this thing: crazy out, sane in. We wanted to try to build a show of smart, funny, reasonable people with a similar vision who were hard workers.
An enormous step in that direction was Karlin’s first addition to the writing staff: a dizzyingly fast-thinking, cheerfully caustic twenty-seven-year-old who would become a major figure in the creative life of The Daily Show.
I’d gone to Harvard and written for the Lampoon and Hasty Pudding, then I went to graduate school for musical theater composition, at NYU. It’s arguably the most useless master’s degree even by master’s degree standards. I had a lot of creative things I was interested in, but I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was temping for three years at law firms and Merrill Lynch.
I knew Ben Karlin from a teen tour that we were on together, the thing where Jewish middle-class kids go around the country and pretend to rough it for six weeks. Ben, after college at Wisconsin, wound up working at the Onion, and he said, do you want to contribute? So I began writing a lot of Onion headlines and some articles, and I had the idea for the book, Our Dumb Century.
Then I spent a year at Letterman as a writer, and I hated that. Not the people, per se, but it all comes from the top down, and Letterman, even at that point, which was ’98 to ’99, was just a detached, aloof figure who would stay there for, like, thirteen hours a day for no reason. And I quit. I was making six figures. I’d never made the upper half of five before, but it just was not worth it. It was crushing my soul.
I was writing a musical. In the interim, Ben was hired as the head writer for The Daily Show, and once again, he called me and said are you interested in writing? So I owe Ben for both of those opportunities. I think I was Ben’s first writing hire, in July 1999.
D.J. has genius-like qualities, almost to the point where—it’s not Asperger-y, because he’s a funny, normal guy. But the way he can hold information, the speed with which his mind works, it’s almost like he’s got a broken brain that works really well in this way. I’ve known him since he was sixteen years old. He always was like this.
Usually in a writers’ room, you know that this guy is my joke guy, that one is my story guy, that’s my structure person. And D.J. has the ability to pitch individual jokes that are funny; he can come up with overarching structures that are funny; he can take over someone’s script and make it better.
I remember mainly Ben used to say, “Best idea wins.” Well, that’s nice, but what’s the best idea? I mean, the best idea on Benny Hill is to run around in fast motion to “Yakety Sax.” That’s the best idea. So yes, best idea wins, but even more important than that is to create a culture where everybody agrees what the best idea is.
Ben liked things that were more sophisticated. A little more wordy. His sensibility was more of a knowing kind of thing. It was more interpretive of the news. It’s like, “Oh, here’s the news and here’s what this means.”
I think the personality of the Onion, abstractly speaking, is more despairing than Jon’s. There’s Horatian satire and Juvenalian satire, and I think Jon’s is more Juvenalian, and the Onion’s is more Horatian. I think Jon offers the hope through his personality alone that we can do better, and the Onion doesn’t. I personally probably side with the Onion more on that one. I don’t believe there is hope in the biggest sense.
I would’ve liked to have seen D.J.’s feet less. We were officemates, and he was a real shorts-and-sandals-wearer to the office. D.J. was, like a lot of talented people, a bit of an odd duck. He might say the same thing about me, you know.
Changing the lineup of correspondents and contributors, the on-air faces of the show, was also crucial, if less contentious. Brown and Unger left when Kilborn did; Colbert, Rocca, Beth Littleford, Frank DeCaro, and Stacey Grenrock Woods stayed on. Stewart’s first correspondent addition was Vance DeGeneres, who had a gift for the authoritative-but-vacant news reporter delivery. Then two major talents joined the correspondent team, almost by accident.
I got a call from Stephen Colbert. He and I were on The Dana Carvey Show together in the spring of 1996, and one of the sketches that we did was called “Waiters Who Are Nauseated by Food.” And Madeleine Smithberg, who had hired Stephen onto The Daily Show, saw that and asked who I was—asked Stephen—and then Stephen called me and said, “Would you be interested maybe in doing a field piece?” And then Madeleine called and followed up and asked if I’d do a field piece out here in Los Angeles. We were living out here at the time and I had a holding deal with ABC. So we were just watching a lot of the Game Show Network.
We decided to stage the field piece right underneath the HOLLYWOOD sign, up in the hills, and that I was going to do the walk-and-talk as I was essentially walking up the side of a mountain, and obviously play up the fact that I was really out of shape, that it was a very bad correspondent to have chosen for a walk-and-talk.
Apparently Madeleine Smithberg really liked that moment within the piece and thought that that was a good choice. They asked if I’d move out to New York and be a regular on The Daily Show.
No one was really familiar with this show. My agent didn’t see it as a positive step in my career. Let’s put it that way. They just saw it as a little nothing cable show. A job, but nothing that was going to amount to much. Jon had just become the host about six months before.
We’d met Ben Karlin a couple years earlier. He was shooting a pilot, in Madison, Wisconsin, for an Onion-related TV show. They came down to Chicago and auditioned a lot of Second City people, including me. I don’t think Steve auditioned for it. So we were up in Madison shooting this, and Steve and I were dating at the time, and he rode his motorcycle up to join us.
I remember Carell’s first field piece, and all of us at the show saying, “Who is this guy? He’s just, like, fat Brian Unger.” I look back and think, “I can’t believe that’s what we were saying about Steve Carell. He’s a comic genius.”
I had been on Saturday Night Live for one season, and then we had lived out in LA for about three years with mixed success, and I felt like it was a good move to come back to New York.
You know, The Daily Show was a pretty loose atmosphere back then. You would do a field piece and then you’d do a follow-up piece in the studio. So I went to Steve’s first studio taping and met Madeleine and she kind of looked at me, she said, “Well, do you want to try it?” It was really that casual. That’s how I began there as a Daily Show correspondent.
One of my first pieces, I think Deborah Norville had just gone to a prison in North Carolina and stayed for a night. So I went to a dog pound and got into a cage. I’m still living with the ramifications.
As the Carells found their place in the new Daily Show order, some of the on-air holdovers were having a tougher time figuring out where they fit in Stewart’s plans—or if they even wanted to fit in.
Lewis Black’s segment was so haphazard. It hadn’t been brought under the new, larger Daily Show writing rulebook yet, because it was a holdover from the Kilborn era. The transitions in a “Back in Black” segment would be, “And then there’s this idiot!”
Lewis Black: [sitting to Stewart’s right, necktie askew, hands jabbing at the camera] Welcome to ’99! And if you’re so delusional you think this year is gonna be better than last, get a grip! Just take a look down Mexico way, where the price of tortillas went up for the first time since syphilis was transmitted… Meanwhile, they’re trying to shut down a Leonardo DiCaprio movie in Thailand. At least their hearts are in the right place. Anyway, environmentalists claim the production will damage the ecosystem on—now, get a load of this!—Phi Phi Island, located in the Krabi Province. Now, could you imagine? “Where do you live?” “Phi Phi Island, in the Krabi Province.” “Where’s that?” “Southwest of Bangkok.” Hey, I’d be boycotting those names! And there’s more: Here’s the genius who’s bringing Starbucks to China!
Lewis had a sensibility that was political, but they were wasting his ability on footage of the Nazarene protest in the Philippines, just because that was the AP footage we could get. Everything we did was an attempt to move the show toward active pursuit, with a point of view about material we could get our hands on, instead of being passive and reactive.
I love Lew. Lew is the reason I’m a standup. But the segment didn’t feel organic to the show anymore. Lew started showing up on the show less, and then they took the creative process out of his hands.
I take some of the blame for it, but there were two producers, who will remain nameless—yeah, D.J. and Karlin—who had no sense of why I was funny, none at all. I was not in their orbit of comedy, and they treated me like a piece of shit. They treated my words like a piece of shit.
I don’t know how close we came to cutting Lewis, to tell you the truth. It might’ve been very close. I’m not sentimental. I would’ve gotten rid of the “Top Ten List” on Letterman years ago. I was like, fuck that.
Lewis fell into the category of all these other little segments—“Ad Nauseam,” “The Public Excess”—that were the property of the writers. The idea was, “No, we’re doing a whole show that has to have a unified voice and everything needs to filter through an editorial control, and that editorial control, whether you like it or not, is Jon.”
There was no guarantee the network was going to go for this. We were moving away from what they wanted as well. I can remember hearing, “There should always be an entertainment portion of the show. That’s what people like—they like the entertainment.” We can all look back in hindsight and go, “Of course, it was inevitable they’d succeed.” But it wasn’t.
What Stewart and his Daily Show colleagues could not have known was that they had arrived at the perfect moment, with the media and political worlds on the cusp of upheaval. When Stewart first sat behind the fake anchor desk, the anchors of the real news were still a trio of white male eminences: Tom Brokaw at NBC, Peter Jennings at ABC, and Dan Rather at CBS. But the network news hegemony had been rattled by the arrival of CNN, especially its coverage of the 1990 Gulf War. Now Fox News and MSNBC—both launched, coincidentally, within months of the Daily Show’s 1996 debut—were rapidly expanding their footprints on cable systems. Soon the Internet would flatten the traditional TV news industry. And a wised-up, postmodern generation of viewers was hungry for what The Daily Show would soon deliver.
We’d come along at the right time and the right place. Jon ends up in a position on a show when the tipping point had been reached in terms of cable news, 120 hours of news a day coming out of five channels. So all of a sudden people have a visceral understanding of the way in which they’re approached when they watch the news, by the newspeople.
The turn of the century was also a boom time for network newsmagazines. NBC was airing Dateline five nights a week. ABC had 20/20 and Primetime; CBS had 48 Hours. Syndicated shows including Inside Edition added an even cheesier, tabloid flair to the genre.
The TV newsmagazine formula—leaning heavily on sensationalized crime stories, breathless celebrity profiles, and consumer products scares—was ripe for parody. As were the self-serious anchor-reporter stars of TV newsmagazines: The style of The Daily Show’s correspondents drew special inspiration from the overinflated gravitas of Dateline’s Stone Phillips.
I always say that Stone Phillips deserves a “created by” credit for The Daily Show, because I was obsessed with the guy, and we studied him.
We studied his listening-face expressions. We studied the different ways he put his fist to his chin, the way that he furrowed his brow. We studied his walk-and-talk. We studied his attitude. We studied his self-aggrandizing, the way that he inserted himself into the story.
Colbert will tell you his character for years was just Stone Phillips.
I had actually worked very briefly with Colbert. Robert Smigel was producing The Dana Carvey Show, and he wanted to buy some Onion stories and to do them with Colbert as the anchor. I flew in for the tapings of those episodes to see how they were using our material, and had a ships-passing-in-the-night moment with Colbert. Carell was also on that show.
Carell, I knew very little about him. These guys didn’t come from standup. I knew standups. I knew Dave Attell, I knew Lewis Black. I did not know Vance, Mo, Steve, Stephen.
In Karlin, Stewart had hired an invaluable off-camera ally. But he quickly recognized that he had inherited an indispensable on-camera coconspirator. Stephen Colbert had a subversive streak that was greatly abetted by the fact that he looked like a trustworthy middle-American insurance salesman.
It was a complete happy accident that I ended up at The Daily Show. I had been working for ABC Entertainment at The Dana Carvey Show in 1996. That show got canceled, my wife wasn’t working, and we had a baby. I desperately needed a job. Someone from the entertainment division recommended to the news division that if they were looking for somebody who was funny but looked really straight, for a correspondent for Good Morning America, that they should consider me. They hired me. I did exactly two reports. Only one of which ever made it to air.
After those two reports, I pitched twenty stories in a row that got shot down. At the same time, my agent, James Dixon, who also represented Madeleine Smithberg, said, “You should meet with Madeleine. She’s doing this other show and I bet that they would do those stories.” They had me on for a trial basis, and for the next nine months I worked at The Daily Show occasionally, during Craig Kilborn’s second year. But it was totally a day job. I never expected to stay because I did sketch comedy and I wrote, and I really didn’t think that The Daily Show was going to go anyplace.
The first bit Stephen did on the show after I arrived, I think it was something about baby back ribs. You could just feel, “This guy knows how to perform in a scene, is present, has an ease with language.” The key then was, “What do we do with that?”
I don’t really know why Jon and I worked together so well. It’s hard to quantify, but it happened very early. When Jon first got there, he had a rough ride with some of the people who had worked with Craig. But I immediately knew he was a guy I should listen to. I saw how thoughtful he wanted to be about political comedy and how he invited us to have our own thoughts, invest the jokes with our own beliefs. And maybe he thought he could trust me.
So much of the writing of The Daily Show actually comes down to brainstorming and coming up with the big-picture ideas. Once we started realizing what an incredible tool Carell and Colbert were, we said we’ve got to bring more of that into the studio. Let’s not just see them once a week or once every two weeks in a field piece. Let’s get both those guys on the show several times a week in one form or another. They’re too talented.
One answer was “Even Stephven,” pitting Colbert and Carell as warring pundits. The segments exaggerated the style of the superficial, vein-popping “debates” of cable and Sunday morning news shows, but also started making serious points about everything from the similarities between Islam and Christianity to government’s responsibility for disaster relief.
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] You know, scholars and historians may well debate Bill Clinton’s presidency for centuries. But here to do it in two and a half minutes, our own Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert, with “Even Stephven.”
Stephen Colbert: [to camera] Have the Clinton years been good for America?
Steve Carell: [sitting two feet away] Yes!
Stephen Colbert: No!
Steve Carell: Yeeeessss! In 1992, our country was in a severe economic recession. Eight years of unprecedented prosperity later, America is richer and stronger than it has ever been. And the man responsible? William Jefferson Clinton.
Stephen Colbert: Oh, come off it, Steve. Alan Greenspan runs this economy. Not Bill Clinton. The only thing Bill Clinton has brought us these last eight years is moral turpitude and national shame.
Steve Carell: Two words, Stephen: Dow 10,000!
Stephen Colbert: Whitewater!
Steve Carell: Welfare reform!
Stephen Colbert: Monica-gate!
Steve Carell: Eight years of peace!
Stephen Colbert: Shut the fuck up! Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP! God, your voice is like a jackal picking at my brain! I hate you! I hate who you are and what you do and how you sound and what you say! You’re like a cancer on my life! God!
Steve Carell: [pauses] Well, that was ugly and humiliating. Feel any better now?
Stephen Colbert: I’m sorry. I’m just tired and, uh, I’m upset about Clinton.
Steve Carell: Every time we fight, it’s because of Clinton. Or the economy. Or NAFTA. I don’t think the problem is out there. I think the problem is right here and I think we need to talk about it… I’ve been giving this some thought, and maybe we need to commentate with other people.
Stephen Colbert: Have you been working with CNN’s Robert Novak?
Steve Carell: Bob appreciates me.
Stephen Colbert: I can smell him on you.
I was always interested in politics. I was always interested in the news. I didn’t do political humor. Political humor to me meant “Hey, Ted Kennedy’s drunk again!” Then Jon came in with a real desire to have a satirical point of view about the substance of the ideas, not just the actions of the people. What are they really talking about? What are they arguing about? What are the philosophical underpinnings of this argument going on in America right now? Part of the assignment when Jon came in was “You have to give this some thought—where do you stand here?” Because he wanted us to be able to write our own stuff and not be instructed. He wanted it to be from the bottom up, the process. He wanted us to come with our own sincere interests in the news, so each one of us had to find our own hook—what was the thing that interested us most about a campaign or a political argument or something of social significance?
I found out, through that invitation from Jon, that I had a political point of view. I wasn’t just a consumer. I don’t think I would have done that if Jon hadn’t shown me a way to do it and still be joyful and inventive about it, rather than being finger-waggy.
There was a bumpy transformation taking place away from the studio, too—more slowly, but equally important to establishing the new direction of The Daily Show. The field department does what the name implies: shoots segments out in the streets, fields, and offices of the real world, to parody the interview, investigative, and ambush segments of real TV journalists. But the name does not come close to conveying the spirit of the unit. The field department has always been, in the words of one of its longtime bosses, “the red-headed stepchild” of The Daily Show—the pirate squad of producers and correspondents who reveled in traveling from Homer, Alaska, to Uttar Pradesh, India, and operating beyond the direct observation of the home office and company lawyers. “The field department, we don’t do things that are immoral,” says Tim Greenberg, one of the department’s top producers. “We only do things that might not be technically allowed, but that I think most reasonable people would say are okay.”
In the Kilborn era, field department pieces frequently featured obscure eccentrics—say, a man who pulled his own teeth and replaced them with driveway gravel. Those kind of bits didn’t go away immediately under Stewart.
I was managing the field department. There was a piece with Stacey Grenrock Woods as the correspondent, about a guy who had been a rock star in Ukraine and came here and was now a waiter in a hotel restaurant in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This piece may well have been in the works before Jon arrived. But it airs, and after the show you have a postmortem. And Jon was not happy. He said, “Your targets are just wrong. They shouldn’t be people on the fringe. Our targets need to be the people who have a voice, and that’s politicians, and that’s the media.”
I heard Jon was very unhappy with that piece, and I don’t blame him at all. I didn’t like it, either, but it was given to me. I think it ended up being a policy-changing piece.
Stewart was clear about how the tone of The Daily Show needed to change. But he still gave the writers, producers, and correspondents plenty of creative room.
The correspondents had their own little thing going on with the field pieces. Jon left it up to us in terms of what sort of characters we were developing.
I saw my character as a former local news anchor who had been demoted to reporting on a nondescript cable news show and was a little bitter about it. Everyone to a certain degree had different variations on blowhard or idiot reporter. But I mean, let’s face it—we didn’t know what we were doing.
No.
None of us are correspondents. None of us have backgrounds in journalism.
Mo was pretty knowledgeable, actually.
It’s a hard job description because you’re not really a reporter. You’re pretending to be one. You’re not really in character but you kind of have to be. So you’re improvising all day and you’re pretending to be a correspondent, which none of us had any background in. So we were all sort of winging it. My character was a guy who took himself pretty seriously, but wasn’t really up to the task, basically that.
There was a very specific way we were supposed to present ourselves when we set up field pieces: “I’m from The Daily Show.” “What’s The Daily Show?” “Well, it’s an alternative news and entertainment program.” “What channel is it on?” “Well, I don’t know what channel it is where you live. Where we live it’s Channel 29.” Anything other than saying the words “Comedy Central.” We were never allowed to lie, but let’s not advertise we were on Comedy Central, because not being a famous show was really useful to us in the early days.
I was the first correspondent to be sued. After a piece ran, a guy claimed I claimed I was from CNN. I never said that. But if you make a man comedically look like Hitler and it turns out that he is a retired lawyer with a lot of time on his hands, you’re going to get sued. That’s the lesson for today, children.
The field pieces with eccentrics and oddballs, those were uncomfortable. For all of us. I almost didn’t… I won’t say I almost didn’t do the show, but I had some major reservations about doing it for exactly that reason, because I didn’t like the idea of making fun of people only because they were eccentric or different, and…
Duping them.
Yeah. Shooting fish in a barrel is easy. When you go after someone who is intolerant or racist or has any sort of hateful nature, that’s a different story. I think that’s fair game. So part of what I tried to do with my character is put the impetus on myself, the comedic impetus, that I was the bigger idiot.
But I talked to Colbert about how to deal with it. His advice was that you just have to rectify it somehow, and be okay with it, and my way of doing it was to become more of the butt of the joke.
Colbert just goes to confession.
It’s interesting, too, because all of those correspondents were incredibly kind people. With the possible exception of my wife, all extremely kind and generous. So it was really out of character for any of us to be in someone’s face.
Not all of the great field-piece performances took place on camera.
It turned out this always happened when you traveled with Stephen, but the first time I never saw it coming. When we check in at the hotel in Denver, they ask for his address. He says, “Sure. My name’s Stephen Colbert. I live at 52 Poopiepop Lane.” And they always would react, and they’d start to say, “Is that a…” And Stephen says, “Heard them all. Heard every one of them. Please don’t make fun of it.” So it was like a great antijoke. And they said, “Okay, so 52 Poopiepop Lane.” And he says, “Neptune, Maine,” and it’s a made-up town. And the weird capper was, “And I’m going to need a zip code out of you,” and he says, “I don’t know my zip code.”
Or I’d say, “We have three demands: I need a fifty-gallon drum of saffron oil, twenty feet of parachute cord, and a dwarf.” It was about practicing being ridiculous.
Another time we decided that we wanted to use a code expression that didn’t mean anything and see how people responded to it.
The hotel clerk says, “So would you like a key to the minibar?” and Stephen looks at this woman and he says, “Okay. The squirrel is in the basket.” And she says, “I’m sorry?” and he says, “You know what I mean. The squirrel is in the basket.” And she says, “Sir, I really don’t. I mean, I’m just asking if you want a minibar key.” And he said, “You know where the squirrel is.” And she said, “I’m going to just take that as a no.”
The next morning, the wakeup call happens at 6:00 a.m., so Stephen answers the phone by saying once again, “The squirrel is in the basket.” I’ve got to remember I’m traveling with a very strange person. And he’s a supernice guy. It’s not like he wants to make people uncomfortable, but he’s just trying to get himself into comedy mode.
During his first year as host Stewart devoted far more energy to retooling the staff and the process inside the building. The show was becoming his own, even in small ways: Near the end of Stewart’s first year, They Might Be Giants rerecorded the Daily Show theme song. And then, in December 1999, the field department and Steve Carell, on an excursion to New Hampshire, created five minutes that changed the trajectory of the entire Daily Show.