All of a sudden there were these guys in these crazy jackets, popping up at campaign events, and nobody knew who they were. But they were funny.
The show sent correspondents up to New Hampshire beginning in 1999, before the primary. This was a big moment for The Daily Show, a big moment for the network. I remember that as the beginning of “Wow, we’re sort of in this politics thing.”
And the correspondents were totally flying by the seats of their pants.
There was a Republican debate in New Hampshire, so we were going to do a piece from the spin room. And the spin room even then was acknowledged as the least newsworthy event of all time. Our premise was that it’s essentially a parlor game, and if that’s the case, let’s really turn it into a parlor game. I had each of the correspondents asking questions from Trivial Pursuit to the candidates.
All of us were nervous as hell, and so I just went for it: “Senator McCain, who became the hottest pop star to come out of Iceland in the mid nineteen nineties?”
Immediately our other correspondents start yelling, “Don’t skirt the question, Senator! You have to answer!”
And McCain showed why he almost upended George W. Bush in that race, because he played along, making this silly face. I remember the CNN people looking at us like, “Okay, that was funny. But who are you guys?”
When we went up to the first Republican debate we had our jackets with The Daily Show embroidered on them, and we’re walking around with microphones. It was terrifying because people didn’t know that we were fake. So we could get away with a lot of stuff. Bush looked at us like we were insane.
The producers said, “Go over and get Tim Russert to talk to us,” and Russert said, “I’ll only go on camera if you give me your jacket.” And I couldn’t do it. And Russert didn’t talk to us.
When we went up to New Hampshire we were under the mistaken assumption that we had to integrate ourselves with the political media’s process and become them to parody them. Turns out we didn’t have to do that. We had thought, “Oh, you’re a political reporter on television, which must mean something.” Turns out it doesn’t mean anything. All it means is that somebody pointed a camera at you and lit it. So that was a revelation, and not a positive one.
After that year we always talked about, “Did you get any on you?” Meaning, becoming like them. That was my problem with the New Hampshire bits that we did, is you could get it on you a little bit.
That trip provided a second breakthrough in defining the new Daily Show tone—when Carell climbed into McCain’s bus.
Remember, McCain that year was a huge deal. He won the New Hampshire primary. That was really his moment. And his big gimmick was his bus, the Straight Talk Express.
I was supervising in the field department. Our idea was that we were trying to get on the Straight Talk Express, but we couldn’t. There was a secondary press bus. If you’re in the rollover bus you just don’t feel like you matter. So the premise was going to be if Steve Carell finally does get on the Straight Talk Express, that means we were at the table with all the big important players. To get on McCain’s bus was a coup for us, it meant that somebody was going to allow us to bring our reindeer games into a legitimate political moment.
The actual press bus, which was completely different from ours, was really awful, in fact. Steve Carell was talking about, did we feed the press, or did we just lock them in the bus? They were pleading with me—is there any way I can get them on the main bus? They were a hoot to be around, so John invited them on the Straight Talk Express.
You watch the finished piece and it feels like I’m chasing McCain for days. But we shot it in one day.
We needed to then have Carell basically ask one question that is going to get us kicked off. The idea was going to be we had a brief moment of glory, we asked a question, and then we lost our privileges. If you watch the piece, he asks a bunch of innocuous questions. They’re almost like those Who Wants to Be a Millionaire $100 questions—you can’t get this wrong, no one’s going to get hurt.
Then Carell asked a real question: “How do you explain that you are such an opponent of pork barrel politics, yet during your time heading the Commerce Committee, that committee set new records for unauthorized appropriations?”
Carell and Nick McKinney, the producer, had pulled the question out of Time magazine on the way there, driving to the shoot.
Nick and I were both flying blind and he handed me that magazine story and said, “Ask him this.” So I wrote it down and I just thought I’d really get McCain in a jovial mood, and the last thing he was expecting was anything even remotely serious. Then to ask him something that he actually might be asked on the campaign trail, he just… for a politician like that to be caught momentarily off guard, he just had sort of a quizzical look on his face.
Steve Carell: [on board the Straight Talk Express, reading from a legal pad as McCain grins] Let’s do a lightning round: your favorite book?
Senator John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Steve Carell: Favorite movie?
Senator McCain: Viva Zapata!
Steve Carell: Charlton Heston?
Senator McCain: Marlon Brando.
Steve Carell: Close enough. If I were a tree, I would be a…
Senator McCain: If I were a tree, I would be a root. [pause] What does that mean?
Steve Carell: Senator, how do you reconcile that you were one of the most vocal critics of pork barrel politics, and yet while you were chairman of the Commerce Committee, that committee set a record for unauthorized appropriations?
[Four seconds of silence that feel like four hours]
Steve Carell: I was just kidding! I don’t even know what that means!
[McCain looks at ceiling, shrugs in relief, awkwardly slaps hand to his own face]
[Carell shuffles awkwardly down bus stairs and out the door, then stands on a highway median]
Steve Carell: Oh, they all laughed at my little question. But two things were abundantly clear. It was the wrong question to ask, and I was going to be walking.
Just the fact that Steve Carell can get those words out of his mouth and that it sounded like something a smart person would say really threw McCain off. There was such a delay.
It was really funny because all of McCain’s handlers, you could feel the whole bus tense up. I thought McCain might just laugh it off, or probably give me some sort of joke response.
I remember seeing it in the editing room. I remember Jon called me down, and seeing it and thinking, “Yeah, this is what we should be doing. This is the goal.” It was one of Carell’s most incredible moments. He asks McCain a question in a way that no journalists were talking to the candidates. And it was like, oh shit, we are able, in this weird, unintentional way, to add a level of insight to the process that doesn’t exist. That was really, really exciting. It meets the standard of being funny, it meets the standard of being relevant.
A show that can open the door to a discussion and then take a comedic detour, I think didn’t feel important at the time. It just felt like a silly, fun moment.
That was great. I still remember Steve Carell on the bus. I was certainly aware of Jon and the show early on, and knew they would try to have some fun with us. I wanted to be funny. I wanted these young people to know that I’m a guy with a sense of humor. I’m not some dull, dry, old senator.
That moment, it was the beauty and the weakness of The Daily Show. You had this incredibly pregnant moment where you forced a politician to go off book, and it was uncomfortable, and it was honest. Then, because of our role as a comedy show, you have to take the air out of it, and it let McCain off the hook.
Yeah, to press it—we really hadn’t set ourselves up in that context to start going after him. It was making fun of a gotcha moment. And I think that’s a lot of what we do on The Daily Show is making fun of journalistic tropes, and I think that was one of them.
There’s no joke unless you walk back from it. But we were living in this moment of the press starting to be not so interested in making politicians uncomfortable, and of having the candidates being able to tailor their appearances and their media in a way that didn’t put them on the spot. It felt like we were able to slip one in.
The fact that it touched on something real, it opened the door. It went just a tiny bit deeper. You know, there was satire to it.
That’s the moment where you realize what’s real and what’s comedy can blur in these bizarre ways that are compelling and disturbing.
That was the first time we were in the New York Times—in a news analysis piece, not the TV column.
I still have those jackets, by the way. I talked them out of their big New Hampshire jackets. They were around John so much, and I finally said, “Look, these jackets are too good. I’ve got to get one from you, please.” They gave them to me. It’s a great souvenir.
The show got better. The year and a half leading up to the 2000 election was the most amazing time creatively. Have you ever seen The Greatest Millennium, our end-of-the-year special? That was the turning point. The Greatest Millennium was when The Daily Show with Jon Stewart became The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It was so much fun, because of the absurdity that you can do a look back at a millennium in an hour.
We tackled a very, very topical thing—Y2K—with a ferocity and with a real specific point of view. You saw a million shitty Y2K segments on every local news and national magazine show, but we were the only ones who did a really, really funny one. For me that was a turning point.
And then you’re into the 2000 election, and then everything just came into focus.
The 2000 presidential primaries provided The Daily Show with a bounty of comedic raw material: The pixie-size right-winger Gary Bauer, the flat-tax fantasies of Steve Forbes, the wooden wonkery of Bill Bradley. But the campaign also gave the show the substantive narrative framework that Stewart wanted and needed.
What also allowed the show’s increasingly confident satiric voice to stand out was the absence of real competition. Sure, Letterman and Leno took shots at the candidates, but that usually added up to a couple of jokes each night as part of a wide-ranging standup monologue. Over on SNL, the year started with Colin Quinn behind the “Weekend Update” desk and ended with Jimmy Fallon and Tina Fey. All three are gifted comics, but “Weekend Update” didn’t have the time or the inclination to plumb the depths of, say, the paranoid stylings of Pat Buchanan.
At that time late-night political humor was pitched toward the middle. It was about foibles and politicians’ particular characteristics and tics and failures—the Monica Lewinsky joke, the George Bush–is-kind-of-dumb joke. Leno would handle something like the O. J. Simpson case through the “Dancing Itos.” It could be scathing and damaging and influence the public’s perception of a candidate or a politician, but it wasn’t really that much about engaging with the ideas of politics, the politics of politics. Before Jon Stewart came along.
There was no competition. There were late-night monologues, but that’s “setup, punch line,” and you never go beyond that, and there’s not much depth to those things, so there’s not a lot of edge or risk.
“Weekend Update,” they wrote good jokes, but it was a very small part of a larger show that didn’t really drive the success or watchability of SNL. I’m truly speculating here, but I think the way The Daily Show started getting a little bit of attention probably fostered a little more competition on their end—like, “Oh shit, we’ve got to maybe raise our game here, because this is now something that people are paying attention to.” I wouldn’t deign to say how aware or not aware they were of us. But I don’t think we ever really looked at them as something that was analogous to what we were doing. And if you’re doing The Tonight Show, and Enron’s the front page of the news, you know what you do? Ignore it.
As Stewart and Karlin pushed the show steadily toward politics, many of the holdover elements of the Kilborn-era Daily Show peeled away, accentuating the shift in tone. “The Beth Littleford Interview” had parodied Barbara Walters’s celebrity confessionals by smearing Vaseline on the camera lens and smothering Littleford in fresh flowers as she quizzed Boy George about whether he’d “ever come face-to-face with a bearded clam.”
The way those interviews started was that we were in Las Vegas working on two field pieces, and we heard that John Wayne Bobbitt was staying at the hotel. We ended up doing a walk-and-talk that looked exactly like a Barbara Walters walk-and-talk, with me asking things like, “And how is your penis today?” My now ex-husband, Rob Fox, who was a Daily Show producer, wisely saw that footage and said, “Okay, this is something.”
I got to shovel manure with Jesse “the Body” Ventura. I got to dance with Boy George, who told me that I’m pretty cute. A lot of those were really fun.
Beth was hilarious, but the show definitely did not, under Jon, have a camp sensibility to it.
I wanted to be on a network show and I wanted to be on a sitcom. I got put under contract from Spin City for about a hundred times more than I was making on The Daily Show, and the work was much less exhausting. I was in good standing, but I told Jon and Madeleine a year in advance that I was going to go.
I wasn’t hugely supported by Jon, but I felt supported by the show. I remember when I left and had my little roast party, Jon saying, “Listen, I do like you.” Because we had just never been close, and it seemed awkward even then.
Littleford left in the spring of 2000, just as the George W. Bush–Al Gore general election contest was starting to take shape and The Daily Show was gearing up its first real political season. That summer, beginning with the guerrilla coverage of the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia and the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, Stewart and the correspondents became a cult hit. Then, after a long November election night, The Daily Show became indispensable viewing during the thirty-seven-day Florida recount fiasco. The epic and absurd standoff, with its hanging chads and Supreme Court contortions, seemed to have been designed by the comedy gods purely to showcase The Daily Show’s approach. The slogan “Indecision 2000: Choose and Lose” was a good joke—and it became an even better, if grimmer, one when it became political reality.
We’d used the “Indecision” moniker for election coverage before, on Politically Incorrect. But in 2000 it really became meaningful.
I started at The Daily Show on the same day Allison Silverman did, February 21, 2000. They were staffing up to cover the election. I had been doing standup in this kind of nexus between what was then mainstream comedy and alternative comedy, as embodied by downtown places like the Luna Lounge and Surf Reality and Collective:Unconscious. I’d be on a bill and maybe Dave Chappelle or Janeane Garofalo would show up.
Was it clear at that point what Jon wanted the show to be? It was not. People talk about the 2000 election as being kind of the thing where the voice starts coalescing, but I actually think it was Elián González, that spring.
That’s when there was a sense that we’re following a story that’s building. We’re not just doing, like, a segment about somebody’s long fingernails, we’re actually learning about the characters in the story. Janet Reno was a character in the story, Elián was a character in the story. The media was a character in the story.
I do remember covering that Elián González thing, and I remember there was a real philosophical divide between some of the writers, and myself, and Jon, which was, does the inherent humor value of a story have to be the number one quality that makes it worthy for us to cover? And if there’s something that doesn’t have a lot of apparent comedic angles to it, isn’t that a harder story to write about? And our attitude was—and I came from the Onion, which was making up stories—at the core of those stories were some real fundamental truths about the news and politics.
So I was like, “We have to come up with the funny take on this thing that doesn’t necessarily seem funny. But there is humor, there is hypocrisy, there are people lying. In most of these cases, especially when you get into politics, there’s people saying one thing but you know they believe something else.”
My big experience at The Daily Show, and later at The Colbert Report, was learning to react with great speed to find out the information, form your opinion on it, and then find a comedic take that expresses that opinion.
I was always the only woman in the writers’ room. There were times when I really felt that viscerally, especially when I was reading a bunch of jokes and it had been a not-great day and I felt like I was somehow responsible for 51 percent of the world’s population. It would’ve been great to have more women, I would’ve liked that. But I didn’t feel like I was being alienated for being a woman or anything.
There would always be spasms of raw, spontaneous genius on The Daily Show. But Stewart was intent on creating a structure that made room for the wild mercury moments to happen, a process that could reliably generate four nights of comedy a week with a minimum of backstage complications.
Some of the times and details of The Daily Show’s daily production schedule would change over the years, but the outline that was established by Smithberg in the Kilborn era endured for nearly two decades. During his first two years as host, though, Stewart made key alterations that eventually created a highly efficient comedy machine—but that initially threw off sparks.
The way it had worked with Kilborn, at noon, or 12:30, there was something called the joke read. The writers would read their jokes, out loud, basically because a lot of them have a performance background. We’d have a packet of jokes, and we’d circle the ones we liked. And then we’d assemble the headlines based on that. After a certain amount of time Jon was like, “This is ridiculous. The writers can just turn in the jokes, we’ll read them and pick the ones we like.”
It was taken as a repudiation of what they were doing, and that we were wrestling control away from them. And a lot of people were like, “Fuck you. Who are you to come in here and do this?” As we started shifting the show, and as we wanted to explore ideas a little deeper, we had to change the process.
It’s so important to remove preciousness and ownership. You have to invest everybody in the success of the show, and to let them feel good and confident about their contribution to it without becoming the sole proprietor of a joke. There has to be an understanding that that may be a great joke, but it might not serve the larger intention, or the narrative, of the show. You have to make sure that everybody feels invested without feeling that type of ownership.
Kilborn, as host, would arrive after the Daily Show morning writers’ meeting. Stewart arrived as it started, at 9:30 each morning, or not long after. It was a free-flowing discussion of stories in the news, possible segments, and available video clips that could be choreographed with jokes. After about an hour, Stewart and Karlin would assign segments to writers—sometimes working solo, sometimes in pairs. Scripts were due at noon. Then Stewart would meet with the executive producers in his office to read the drafts and assemble notes to be used in the revisions. Second drafts of scripts were due by 2:00.
I would compile the headlines. My job was to take all these individual jokes, find an order that made sense, find the connective tissue that made sense, and write little asides and little moments that made it feel like a cohesive script rather than just the individual jokes from ten individual writers.
People were very proprietary. Certain writers always worked with Lewis. Certain writers always worked with Frank DeCaro. They felt like it was their segment, and that Jon and myself shouldn’t have any real say over them. And Jon was like, “No. It’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and anything that’s going on the air is going through me.”
Well, Ben hired me, so he obviously had a very sharp eye for talent. I think Ben is very funny. I think Ben has a really strong point of view about stuff, and a lot of times with the stories, he’d find where the outrage lies in this story, or, “This is the passion about this topic.”
I felt like what Jon and Ben were looking for was something I was interested in writing, so I didn’t really have much of a problem. But there was tension for sure, especially for people who had been there before Ben and Jon arrived.
There was a drive to Jon on The Daily Show that he didn’t have on his old MTV show. I think he was happy to have a show the first time around: “Hey, that’s my name on the show.” Not that he didn’t work hard. But having had a show canceled, there was a responsibility to make this one work.
His attitude was, “I’m going for it on this one. I’m going to leave it all on the table.” And Jon would come early, he would stay late. We would work on weekends. There wasn’t any half-assing. He wouldn’t let you off the hook.
During my first several weeks on the show there was definitely a lot of pot around. Maybe the first several months. I won’t say which executive producer got me high on my first day before five in the afternoon, but yeah, it happened.
And it wasn’t unusual to get some kind of afternoon assignment, be done at 4:00, and go home. That stopped happening very shortly. And I think that it was just Jon putting his foot down. It’s fine to leave at 4:00, go up to the roof, and get high, having written two minutes on the guy with the longest fingernails in the world. But Jon had higher aspirations for all of us.
They realized in 2000 that actually engaging with elements in politics that people really cared about and got animated about was a more powerful fuel for the show, as opposed to the show being what it was earlier, more sort of a parody of newscasts. “Indecision 2000” is the point at which you see The Daily Show moving from parody to satire.
Instead of Jon playing a character—the news anchor, one of the derelicts in a derelict world of media—Jon made a creative decision to take the show in the direction of the correspondents presenting the idiocy, and then Jon is the person who calls out the idiocy with the eloquence that the viewer wishes they had. And he did it in a way that’s not condescending, it’s not smug. It’s funny, it’s emotional, it’s calling out bullshit. So Jon became the voice of the audience.
We learned there was only so much you could do with three white guys and a green screen—and that was the show for a long time. For the 2000 campaign, we very much wanted to find somebody who could speak from a position of authority, not a position of outside ridicule. This was all about establishing various tributaries, so that you don’t have to go to the same well.
Bob Dole was our opportunity. We hired him for, I think, six to eight appearances. You had a guy who had run for president, and not in the distant past, and this was our presidential campaign coverage. The idea was sort of Statler and Waldorf, if Statler actually had been an actor for a long time, then had lost his show and now he’s up in the booth. And Dole turned out to have a great wit. He knew how to deliver a good line, and he was open, and he was not political. It gave us an authority that we shouldn’t have had. Dole helped us understand that this is a more intricate and interesting game.
The next step was sending the show to the conventions. It was an investment for the network. It was huge.
Well, for the Republican convention, in Philadelphia, we were staying in the dorms at the University of Pennsylvania, because all the hotels were full. It was summer camp and we’re all putting on this show.
Jackie McTigue, the show’s security guy, was my roommate in the Penn dorm. The best guy in the world. Old school cop: “I was up at a gin joint in the Bronx…” He’d tuck me in every night: “You want a little nip before bed, kid?” And we’d have a nip and tell stories, and I fucking loved it. We had a ball.
We didn’t have press credentials, but the Republicans would let us into the arena for forty-five minutes, so we’d run correspondents in and shoot for seven minutes at a time—go, go, go!
They had me sidle up to the back of Wolf Blitzer and kind of repeat everything he was saying, but it was like a game of telephone. At that point I had never heard of Condoleezza Rice, so it was easy to mess her name up. Blitzer was playing along in that one. He was a really good sport.
Jon Stewart: [at RNC anchor desk] We’re going to check back in one more time with Nancy Walls, she’s live at the First Union convention center. Nancy, we’re in the home stretch here, you’ve been there all week, what’s your analysis?
Nancy Walls: [with graphic identifying her as SENIOR POLITICAL CHIEF CORRESPONDENT] My analysis? Oh. I thought you were going to be asking—[ looks over right shoulder]—me about… my… analysis. [backs up out of frame]
Jon Stewart: Nancy? Did we lose Nancy down there? Nancy?
Wolf Blitzer: [looking off to left side of screen and confidently addressing a CNN camera] This convention has really energized a lot of these Republicans.
Nancy Walls: [standing shoulder to shoulder with Blitzer and haltingly addressing Daily Show camera while too obviously trying to listen to Blitzer] Jon, here at this convention there’s a lot of… energy in these Republicans.
Wolf Blitzer: It’s a new Republican Party. Because they’re showing a new face of the Republican Party.
Nancy Walls: These Republicans have many faces.
Wolf Blitzer: It’s not the old Republican Party.
Nancy Walls: It’s the old Republican Party.
Wolf Blitzer: Not the old Republican Party of Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Dick Armey.
Nancy Walls: It’s not the old Republican Party of… Tom Gingrich… Dick and his army.
Wolf Blitzer: This new Republican Party is the party of Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice.
Nancy Walls: Conda—Consuela Gonzalez.
Wolf Blitzer: Minorities. There’s even a gay Republican congressman from Arizona who addressed this convention.
Nancy Walls: And gay people. A lot of gay people, Jon.
Jon Stewart: Well, that’s interesting, Nancy. Thank you.
Wolf Blitzer: For now, I’m Wolf Blitzer in Philadelphia.
Nancy Walls: I’m just—Wolf Blitzer.
Wolf Blitzer: Back to you, Bernie and Judy.
Nancy Walls: Back to you, Bernie.
On day two I said, “Why don’t we just use our forty-five minutes putting a cameraman and a producer inside the arena and get lock-off [stock background footage], then we can use a green screen and do all the bits we want at our leisure and we can pretend that we’re on the floor and nobody will ever know the difference?” And that changed The Daily Show forever, because now we could do two sketches with the correspondents in act one. And I will take full and 100 percent credit for that.
This was a great stage, the conventions. We’d all been sitting around noodling in the studio, and then you went to the conventions and said, “Oh shit, we could really make a meal of this.”
There was a moment, a Carell-on-the-convention-floor moment, where he just played it in the pauses, the huge disbelief of where he was and what was happening. And it felt like: “This is the show. This is the show. You can totally feel it.”
If you notice in the 2000 coverage everything is done on a street, running. Everything looks like ambush journalism. I climbed a fence for one piece at the Republican convention. There was no other way to do it, and back then security was not as tight. It was a different era.
You look back and you realize you squandered a lot of opportunities. But there was a certain charm to it, and I remember at the time a grand excitement about it, because you couldn’t believe “Peter Jennings is going to talk to me, holy shit!” At that point we still felt a certain deference. Which we were quickly relieved of.
As much fun—and as practically necessary—as the guerrilla pieces were, the Philadelphia excursion also included a semiscripted piece that was an important step in The Daily Show finding a structure and a point of view with which to frame jokes.
The Shadow Convention was a group of very angry liberal people who were protesting very legitimate issues. I think it was my idea to say, “Well, why don’t we just treat these people in a mock way, like they’re a bunch of crazy idiots? You have to understand the unreliable narrator—the joke’s on us because we’re actually the assholes. We’re making fun of society for treating them like assholes.” That front became a thing that we often did.
Stephen Colbert: [at anchor desk with Jon Stewart] I found one event that was happening a little bit aways from the hustle and bustle of the convention center called the Shadow Convention. Featuring such wacky characters as Senator John McCain and the Reverend Jesse Jackson. [holds up poster] You know, it was such a chucklefest that it prompted even the normally reserved Bob Novak to make this comment on CNN’s Capital Gang:
Bob Novak: [in video clip, on CNN set overlooking Republican convention floor, voice dripping with disdain] “What in the world John McCain was doing at that nutbag convention I don’t know, but Arianna Huffington asked him to go and I guess he did!” [fellow panelists guffaw]
Stephen Colbert: [laughing both sympathetically and sarcastically] You know, with a teaser like that, I just had to go check these crazy kids out.
[Video clip begins, shows tables of literature]
Stephen Colbert: [voice-over] “As an alternative to the main convention, the Shadow Convention deals with issues that are, to say the least, not mainstream!” [shot of pamphlet reading, “Working to End Hunger”] “But were the Shadow Conventioneers as funny as I’d been led to believe?”
Woman Wearing Shadow Convention Badge: “Right now, more than three million children are suffering from hunger.”
Stephen Colbert: “That’s hilarious!” [woman, stunned, raises eyebrows] “Some of their ideas are absolutely whack-job nut-case!” [walks by display on high U.S. infant mortality rates while sucking on red, white, and blue popsicle]
Different Woman Conventioneer: “Wealth is power, and the top 1 percent of the population has more money than the bottom 95 percent combined.” [Colbert blows kazoo]
Stephen Colbert: [voice-over, as video shows Republican delegates dancing in the aisles and wearing elephant headgear] “So if you get tired of the substantive issues being debated by the Republicans, head on over to the Shadow Convention. But don’t forget your rubber underwear, because you’re gonna laugh ’til you pee!”
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk, looking bewildered] Stephen, I have to say, it seemed like the Shadow Convention was the only thing here addressing real issues in a serious and meaningful way.
Stephen Colbert: [smiling, cheery, and clueless] Thanks Jon, it was a lot of fun to do!
Colbert would sit in the lounge with a bunch of writers around him and call the Dianetics hotline. And he’s so good at remembering key words that he can pretend he knows what he’s talking about, about Scientology for minutes and minutes and minutes. And he would have these very entertaining, very in-depth conversations with people about his norms and his, whatever it is, thetans.
What we were also learning is that Colbert has a verbal equity that is second to none, and so, you could stuff ten pounds of shit into a two-pound sentence and he would Baryshnikov his way through it. Stephen has an agility, verbally, that’s unmatched.
Jon Stewart: [at RNC anchor desk] Now Stephen Colbert, our intrepid reporter, he’s been down on the convention floor all week for us, filing wonderful reports. Stephen, let’s go to him now. Stephen, now that the convention’s over, can you tell me, what’s your overall sense of the mood down on the convention floor? How did it feel to be there last night, during the speech?
Stephen Colbert: [with graphic identifying him as SENIOR FLOOR CORRESPONDENT] Well, Jon, as a journalist, I have to maintain my objectivity, but I would say the feeling down here was one of pervasive and palpable evil. A thick, demonic stench that rolls over you and clings like hot black tar. A nightmare from which you cannot awaken. A nameless fear that lives in the dark spaces beyond your peripheral vision and drives you toward inhuman cruelties and unspeakable perversions. The delegates’ bloated, pustulant bodies twisting from one obscene form to another. Giant spider shapes and ravenous wolf-headed creatures who feast on the flesh of the innocent and suck the marrow from the bones of the poor. And all of them driven like goats to the slaughter by their infernal masters on the podium, known by many names: Beelzebub, Baalzebul, Mammon, Abaddon, Feratis, Asmodeus, Satan, Lucifer, Nick, Old Scratch, the Ancient Enemy, and He Who Must Not Be Named. This is Hell, Jon, where the damned languish forever in a black flame that gives no heat, sheds no light, yet consumes the flesh forever and will not go out. Jon?
Comedy Central threw a party during the convention, and Jon walked in and was mobbed by reporters. I remember going, “Oh, this is a sea change.”
The best thing to come out of the 2000 Republican National Convention? I met my wife in Philadelphia. She was working for the Comedy Central website. I was smitten immediately, and here we are fifteen years later, and we have a family and two kids.
Philly, we were in dorms, and we were away from everything else, but in LA there was debauchery. Now I’m implicating everyone in my own drinking pattern during the LA convention.
You know, I think I’m most proud of the stuff we did at the conventions, and that was so much on the fly. They’d say, “Get down there on the convention floor. You have five minutes.” There was one where my producer wanted me to imitate a Jewish lady talking about, oh my God, now I forget his name. He was the vice presidential candidate. [Joe] Lieberman! And I was supposed to talk like a proud Jewish grandma. Jon called me in later and he said, “Have you ever actually met a Jewish person?” And they used the clip, I think, as a “Moment of Zen” because I sounded like a vampire. Like Dracula.
It was one of Jon’s favorite things.
I was pretty white.
We did a piece where the idea was that when Al Gore picked Joe Lieberman, the media was making a big deal about this being the first Jewish candidate on a major party ticket. They’re acting like there aren’t other Jewish people in government, in terms of the novelty of Lieberman, so let’s just pretend we’ve never seen ethnic people in our life.
So we would find people who looked obviously ethnic in any possible way and chase them down saying, “Senator Lieberman! Senator Lieberman!” So it’s a Sikh, it’s a woman wearing traditional Indian garb, it’s a Native American.
At one point Colbert says, “I’ve got something. You guys follow me.” So we run like crazy. He taps this guy on the shoulder and the guy turns around and it’s James Woods. Stephen acts like he’s kind of disappointed and says, “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were James Woods.” James Woods says, “I am. I am James Woods.” And Stephen says “Yeah, nice try, buddy.” Then Stephen walks off and the camera stays on James Woods, and he looks so confused.
Anytime you start one of these pieces, you’ve got to ground it in reality and then you can take it to Crazytown. When we’re telling James Woods that he’s a bad James Woods impersonator, I believe we’ve pulled into Crazytown.
Philadelphia was a real triumph for us, and Los Angeles was really challenging. The reason why Los Angeles was a shit show was partially Madeleine’s fault, as executive producer of the show. It was probably partially my fault for not organizing the writers better. Some of it was that Philadelphia was such a triumph that this felt like failure, even though it wasn’t.
The problem with the Democratic convention was there was no evil. For the Daily Show to really function, you’re calling out hypocrisy and bad behavior. Here it was teachers and the unions and legalized pot and no death penalty and increase the minimum wage. And you’re just like, “Where’s the fucking funny?” And because of the time difference and nothing happens before four at the convention, we were in a really fucked-up production schedule. It was a mess.
Jon very rarely, for a guy in that position, very rarely lost his cool, and I think everyone including Jon lost their cool in Los Angeles.
Jon felt like the stories we had selected were lazy, and the last day of the convention his point was “Look at all the stories that we’re not covering.”
Madeleine and I were in Jon’s office and a script was thrown out of frustration. I would not say that Jon threw the script at her head. My recollection, and I can’t stress enough how shaky my memory is, is that a script was thrown. If I was in a court of law, a script was thrown in frustration. Was it down on the ground, was it on the wall? From where I was standing in that room, I could not say that it was thrown at her.
The LA convention was a disaster. Based on administrative stuff, and so I was upset with it. I was in a room with Madeleine and Ben, and I did slam a paper down on a desk. Not a desk she was sitting at. She was not in the vicinity of it, but I did slam something on a desk.
Jon threw a newspaper at my face, and then he apologized to me at the party that night.
Nobody threw anything at her face.
Despite the squabbling, The Daily Show’s 2000 convention coverage left a vivid, positive impression, particularly within political and media circles.
The first time I appeared on the show was in 2000, at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles. I believed then and I believe now that when it comes to things going on in America, the most honest people are the comedians. Jon had quite the reputation of actually doing the work on issues. You didn’t go on with Stewart and you didn’t go on with Imus and later you didn’t go on with Colbert unless you were prepared.
The real revelation for the show, covering the 2000 campaign, was that before everything that happens publicly in politics there’s a meeting—so what’s that meeting? That’s what’s interesting. It always struck me as, “We’re always covering the wrong thing. We’re always covering the appearance, but we’re never covering that meeting.” When you watch that pack of cameras follow a presidential candidate, you go, “That’s not interesting. What’s interesting is to stand behind them and watch that,” because then you learn a little bit about the process.
That’s when the idea of deconstructing the process came to the fore of how we were going to make the show. Before, it was just we were making jokes. Some of them were insightful, some of them were not. The show came to exist in the space between what they’re telling you in public and the meeting that they had where they decided to do it that way. Seeing that was the a-ha of “That’s the show.”
There happened to have been a very big and interesting contrast in those candidates, Bush and Gore. It happened to really put on display, in a very stark way, how the nation was split ideologically. These weren’t two technocrats. The personality difference, the style differences, the qualitative differences between Bush and Gore made for outstanding television.
It also made for an election night, on November 7, 2000, that was as tense and strange as it was funny. The Daily Show did a special live one-hour broadcast, complete with indecipherable but colorful maps just like the networks, and—very much unlike the networks—Colbert sitting at a low-tech “analysis desk” that featured a bank of red phones and consoles that looked like something out of a high school production of Star Trek. The opening of the show both set the tone for the next eight years of Daily Show satire and proved prescient about the political mood to come.
Jon Stewart: [at Indecision 2000 anchor desk] Senior analyst Stephen Colbert will be joining us all night in the studio, dissecting the results as they come in. Stephen? What do you have for us? What’s the word?
Stephen Colbert: [turning away from some important-looking monitors] Well, Jon, of course this year is the closest race since 1960, when the young John Fitzgerald Kennedy battled it out with Richard Milhous Nixon, winning by the slightest of margins and ushering in an era of untold promise, hope, and enthusiasm. Of course, an assassin’s bullet ended all that. Jon?
Jon Stewart: Uh, Stephen, are you seeing parallels with tonight’s election? A country flush with prosperity, two young, energetic candidates, perhaps ready to lead us back to Camelot?
Stephen Colbert: No, I’m getting more of a ’Nam vibe—you know, unwinnable wars, an inescapable downward spiral, chaos in the streets, that sort of thing. But you know, the night’s still early. Be here ’til eleven!
The cool thing was that we really built The Daily Show as a news-gathering organization. We had footage deals. We had feeds. We started collecting B-roll. So we plotted our live election night special much as you would if you were an actual news-gathering organization. But we have to have a joke for whatever happened in every state. We had it all laid out on blue cards and in between commercial breaks we would assess where we were. That night felt like I was the pilot of a 747 in horrible turbulence and thunder and lightning and the bathrooms were broken, but it was really fun.
I remember at about midnight, D.J. coming in, walking up and down the hallway saying, “They haven’t called Florida yet, they haven’t called Florida yet.” And it was the first time I remember getting that feeling like, “Oh, this is terrible, and this is great,” which is a feeling I had over and over for the next ten years: “It’s a war—terrible! But it’s great for the show!”
Look, it’s no secret that there’s a relatively liberal staff at The Daily Show. There aren’t a lot of Republicans, or really hardcore conservative thinkers, and I remember on election night when they called Florida for Gore, you could hear a scream through the building, “Al Gore’s president, Al Gore’s president!”
So we’re on the air live and Florida fucking flips and that was the first step in what was going to become the most amazing opportunity-slash–biggest political fiasco in American history.
They were supposed to check in with me one last time at the end of the show. I had written one bit for if Bush won and one if Gore won. We had no contingency for a tie. And the producers said, “Go come up with something.” So I ran off into a corner and I wrote what I said to Jon on scraps of like four different pieces of paper. It was just random words with lines running from one word to the other, so you see me reading off multiple pieces of paper there. Jon and I just improvised the act with each other.
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] Stephen Colbert, what do you make of this race?
Stephen Colbert: [at decision desk] Well, Jon, one thing is clear at this point: It is neck and neck. It is a nail-biter. A photo finish, if you will. A clash of the titans and a real barn burner. It’s not the beginning of the end but the end of the beginning. Because what we’ve got here are two men who hunt with the hares but run with the hounds. Who must be feeling some butterflies in the stomach. The heebie-jeebies, Jon. The collywobbles. As nervous as a couple of whores in church. ’Cause eventually the chickens will come home to roost and it’ll all be over but the shoutin’. One of these men will back down. Back off. Back out. Buckle under. Bite the dust. Cave in. Cash your chips. Give up the ghost and go the way of all flesh. And once one of those candidates does yell, “Olly, olly, oxen free,” it’ll be game over. No fair changeys. Last one there… is a rotten egg. Jon?
What I said to Jon when we got off the air was, “This is the greatest job in television.”
After our election night show I went home and watched TV. Like everybody else, I was like, “Well, this is weird.”
The great part was just the giant fuck-up network-wise. “Gore’s the winner. Gore’s not the winner. Bush is the winner. Bush is not the winner, nobody’s the winner.” The media declared two people president, and then declared no one president. We’d met the media in New Hampshire during the primary and understood now, “Oh, this vaunted institution, that’s really just a nice coat of paint.”
The famous Fox News election night story—the guy on the phone with Jeb and George is their cousin: “Hey man, what’s up, you’re the president. Oh, wait, fuck, hold on.” That was the first time it occurred to me that we took it a little bit more seriously than the media did. We were serious people doing a very stupid thing, and they were unserious people doing a very serious thing, and that juxtaposition really landed.
Blogs barely existed when Stewart took over as host. He was ahead of the curve, turning The Daily Show into an audiovisual aggregator and deconstructor of politics and the media in a way that would, by the late 2000s, become a staple of the web (minus much of the humor). The Florida recount, and the Supreme Court’s intervention—chronicled under the recurring rubric “Courting Disaster”—provided a wealth of primary source material, to which The Daily Show added value both humorous and insightful. Stewart was leading his troops from fisting to fisking.
I think the first time we all got a sense of what the show could be was the month after the 2000 election, and that was a really crazy, fun month, during the recount. It was a comedy. The news was a comedy.
We had to cover the recount for a half hour each night. The news reporters who had to cover it twenty-four hours a day and had nothing to say, those were the people who went crazy, and that’s what we realized we could focus on. The coverage of the 2000 elections was the turning point in the percentage of how much we covered a news story and how much we covered how that news story was covered.
You could see the traditional media outlets struggling to cover this whole situation with some sort of dignity, and we weren’t bound by that. The 2000 election was so bizarre that only a comedy news show was really prepared to cover it. We were the only one who could approach what was going on in Florida honestly.
The whole time, during the recount, it was just this air of inevitability—that the Democrats are going to lose because they usually do, and Al Gore will find a way. It’s always worth thinking of the effects that resulted from the cause of 537 votes. Think of the effect on the world of a bunch of grandmothers oversleeping in Florida. It’s unbelievable.
A bunch of old Jews thinking, “Of course I… wait, I voted for Buchanan?” If it’s separated by five hundred votes, the truth is you’re never really going to know, it’s just too small.
The last night, we did a bit about how close the Supreme Court vote was, and I contributed this idea, that not only was it a five-to-four vote, but that in Kennedy’s brain, it was 51 to 49 percent, and I showed the brain scan. I thought that was fun. Because you’re bringing the subject of neuroanatomy in a germane way to a discussion of politics. I have a lot of things that I’m interested in, and to have a culture at the show where that is recognized and not thought of as being too obscure was great.
The night Al Gore conceded, I did a little editorial about what the Bush Administration was going to be like.
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] Stephen, it’s looking as if George W. Bush—that’s it, he’s going to be the next president. What is this going to mean for our country?
Stephen Colbert: [sitting to Stewart’s right] This is how I see the next four years playing out. On Inauguration Day, George W. Bush will take the oath of office and assume the mantle of leader of the free world, restoring his father’s fallen dynasty. And to ensure his legitimacy, Chief Justice [William] Rehnquist will anoint his brow with chrism. Doves will be released and lambs will be slaughtered. Bush will mount a golden chariot. Then, with his aged squire, Dick Cheney, holding a laurel wreath o’er his master’s furrowed brow, the man who would be boy-king will take his destined throne. And, in a much-needed show of strength, he will drive his enemies before him like leaves before a storm. He will make whores of our wives and slaves of our children. He will appoint a horse to the senate. He will have the oceans whipped for daring to turn their tides without his leave. And while gangs of willowy young boys rub his body with perfumes from Persia and the fat rendered from the corpses of the persecuted poor, all about the fevered crowds will stare worshipfully at their unknowing, unseeing, girlishly giggling idiot emperor’s head.
End of day one. Now, day two—
Jon Stewart: Thank you very much.
That was the spooky one. It was weirdly accurate to what things felt like five years later.
The tainted ending to the 2000 presidential election clearly colored Stewart’s delivery the next night, in a headline bit woven around clips of Bush’s victory speech that teed up The Daily Show’s approach for what turned out to be the next eight years.
George W. Bush: [in video clip] “I was not elected to serve one party.”
Jon Stewart: You were not elected. Nevertheless, Bush continued:
George W. Bush: “I have something else to ask you, to ask every American. I ask for you to pray for this great nation.”
Jon Stewart: We’re waaay ahead of you.
Bush, it will go down in history, it’s unbelievable that guy was president. Unbelievable. I’m sure, I’m 100 percent sure, in one hundred years, in one thousand years if society’s still standing, they’re going to say, “That guy was president? Like, what?” I know that to be a fact.
Nobody who was twenty years old cared about politics before that. There was a very sort of disenfranchised vibe of “What’s the difference, your vote doesn’t count.” And then all of a sudden this Bush-Gore thing went down, and people were so lost in, “What the fuck was going on?” and The Daily Show became this place that was helping people to churn through it.
I think that I’m proudest of the fact that when people go back and look at that 2000 election you won’t be able to talk about it without talking about Jon and the show. Probably the same way that they talk about the Smothers Brothers and Vietnam.
The average nightly audience grew 47 percent that year. It would keep growing steadily, but that was the biggest one-year gain ever for The Daily Show.
Jon never aspired to walk down a red carpet to get his photo taken. He never wanted to be a celebrity. But he would do what he needed to do to promote the show. Howard Stern was a big supporter of Jon’s, and Jon would get up early to do Howard’s show. The fact that Jon was a hometown guy really helped. He’s from New Jersey, but he essentially grew up in New York. Girls had a crush on him. But he’s a guy’s guy, because he wasn’t threatening. He always had some champions in the press. Rolling Stone was good to him, and GQ, and the New York Times. 60 Minutes did a profile.
The show won a Peabody Award for the 2000 campaign coverage. Jon started being on the covers of magazines. All of a sudden my parents’ friends knew what The Daily Show was.
Anytime you’re a new show and somebody says to you, “You’ve won an award,” as long as it’s not the award for fastest exit, then you feel pretty good. But outside validation goes away really quickly. That’s why, in some ways, I was glad that I had all those other experiences, failures and otherwise, before I got this. You just have to do your shit.
It was shocking to us, the idea that the show was influential. That was the reaction? We just thought that the show was really hitting its creative stride. There was no “Now we’re influence makers.” To self-deprecating comedy people that is just a nightmare. We didn’t think of ourselves as in any way important.
Listen, I knew the show was good and I thought we were doing excellent work. But I always felt the show was overpraised. I felt the media loved it because it was about them.
In the early days of standup, if I did a show where I thought it went really badly I would be rocked to the foundation. “Oh, this isn’t going to work, I’m not good at this, and it’s just not going to be a viable… I’m not going to be able to feed myself.” And then if you have a great show you’d be like, “Or maybe I’m Jonathan Winters, classic genius!” But as you go along you start to develop a baseline of confidence in who you are, and in your ability to sustain yourself. And that’s what, hopefully, started to happen with the show as well.
As if the political season and the remaking of The Daily Show weren’t enough excitement for one year, in 2000 Stewart also married his girlfriend of four years, veterinary technician Tracey McShane, and agonized as his beloved Mets made a surprising run to the World Series, only to fall to the hated Yankees.
Jon used to smoke during rehearsal. Marlboro Reds. He’d have his feet up on his desk, reading the script, deciding on jokes. It didn’t even seem weird at the time.
Tracey quit first, and so I thought, all right, well, then I should probably do that, right? Because, you know, now we’re married. I was driving out to Long Island in 2000 and threw the cigarettes out the window. And I’ll tell you what happened: The Mets went to the World Series. That’s what happened as soon as I quit, and I was like, “Oh my God, I’m not going to have smokes during the World Series? This is a nightmare.” So I truly did not enjoy having the Mets in the World Series in 2000.
I don’t know if you know this, but I have a bit of a stress issue.
The Daily Show would never completely lose its taste for inventive silliness, as long as the ideas fit within the news parody framework. But the lull following the fractious 2000 campaign, as the Bush Administration set up shop in the White House, included some of the show’s looniest moments.
There was a recurring segment called “Slimming Down with Steve,” and in one from early 2001, for reasons that I can’t even imagine were relevant, Carell ends up taking a big spoon out of a tub of Crisco and puts it in his mouth.
We were like, “Let’s just get some whipped cream.” Carell was so insistent on, “No, no, no, I don’t want to fake it. I need to feel the discomfort.” That was probably the single funniest thing that ever happened on the show, like when you’re stoned and you can’t stop laughing.
Oh my God. I bought the Crisco.
Carell tries to just sit there and be still with a bunch of lard in his mouth, but he can’t because it’s so gross. He’s trying to move it around with his tongue. You can see the sweat forming on him, and it’s like the Carol Burnett side of the show that nobody planned for. You’re going to do structural damage to the building it’s so funny.
I just wanted to see Jon’s face knowing that I was actually eating Crisco. I just thought that would be really funny. It wouldn’t be the same if it was fake, you know?
That’s Steve. He’s the Tom Cruise of comedy. He’ll put himself into the stunts. In Foxcatcher, that’s his real nose. He grew his nose weirdly longer and killed a man.
You almost had to be careful in what you wrote for Carell because the show didn’t necessarily follow OSHA rules. So if he was putting himself in harm’s way, I’m not sure we had the safety net in place to protect him.
The piece where Stephen and I go out drinking—God. That was actually my idea.
His idea was, “Let’s both go out and get as drunk as you possibly can and record while we do it.” I said, “I’ve got an idea—how about you do and I don’t.” He goes, “All right.” I said, “We’ll turn it into a report.”
I was watching, every year, these local stations that have the intrepid reporter who decides to test the effects of alcohol on the human systems to show that one should not drink and drive during the holidays. And they take the sobriety test. I always thought that was so corny and kind of dumb. So I decided I wanted to do that, but actually do it and not act it and really drink all that stuff.
It should be said you do not drink very often.
I’m not a big drinker. So I really didn’t know what I was getting into. Stephen did, but he didn’t say anything. First we went to Times Square and played some video games, and then we ended up at a bar. I started with, I don’t know, white wine and I ended up with Jägermeister, with a lot of gin and beer and vodka and all sorts of things in between. But that was all real. And I had my shirt off, and I was getting him to punch me in the chest. I was just yelling at him to punch me in the chest. The next morning I woke up and I thought, “Why does my chest hurt so much?” Later I thought, “Oh, he could have stopped my heart so easily.”
What the camera didn’t catch, because they ran out of tape before all hell broke loose and I was…
There was a lot of vomiting that evening.
In Stephen’s car.
Stephen drove me home and he said, “Whatever you do, there’s a bag here on the floor if you need to vomit. Please don’t try to vomit out the window.” And I said, “I’m fine. Don’t worry.” And the first chance I had I tried to vomit out the window, but the window was not rolled down and it was his wife’s car. It was Evie’s car. The vomit went inside the window mechanism. It was bad. It was bad. I still haven’t lived that one down.
The vomit went into the door. So no, we never got it out of the car. And I’ll never get it out of my mind, I’ll tell you that.
I was home and I was really pregnant at the time, too. Stephen delivered Steve back to our condo and Steve just went straight to bed.
I could hear them downstairs laughing at me. Colbert and my lovely wife were downstairs just laughing.
Well, we eventually laughed. Nancy was pretty mad, and I think at me, because I had done this to him. You know, no one wants their husband brought home stinking drunk.
Stewart was changing the show’s personnel, but he was also turning the look of The Daily Show into a comedy tool. As the producers and writers banged out the script for each episode, researchers in the postproduction department were editing tape and the graphics department was piecing together “over-the-shoulders.” At first the graphics that appeared over Stewart’s right shoulder were static, unimaginative titles and photographs. But they soon became a second, supporting joke, full of wordplay and sight gags, adding punch to what Stewart was reading from the prompter.
In 2002 we had one woman on one machine doing graphics. I’d been doing field pieces and she needed help. A lot of the over-the-shoulders had just been an explainer: Here’s a picture of the president. Here’s a picture of a Yugo. The technology has made a big difference, going from Paintbox, which was an early TV graphics system, to Photoshop. But as we saw that these things could get a big laugh, we wrote more of them and refined them, to the point where we had a photo of Charlie Rangel asleep on a beach chair, and we mocked it up so his hand was in cold water and then he wet himself. It was an animation over-the-shoulder.
Momentum built throughout the day. No one is quite sure when Stewart first instituted an intense rewriting session in the hour between rehearsal and taping. But those sixty minutes became the most distinctive element of the Daily Show day.
I have a bathroom in my office. I put the suit on in there, right before rehearsal. Some would say five minutes too late.
The root of every Daily Show script, like the root of any good sitcom script or any story, is a narrative arc. This is another Jon Stewart–ism: “The jokes are easy. We’ve got a lot of funny people. We’ll get the jokes. You know what’s hard? Why the fuck are we talking about this, and what are we saying about it? What’s the arc? What is the essay that we’re structuring?”
Now if that skeleton is laid properly at nine in the morning in the first round of scripts, then we’re just adding layers of fun and comedy on top of it. But the rehearsal, at four, is where you see everything on its feet.
We would rehearse act one, the headline. Jon would sort of spout notes out loud, in the studio: “We don’t have enough of that. We should start looking for a montage where we have this or this.” Then we’d do act two, which is usually a chat, with a correspondent. And the act-two writers would come up to the desk and Jon would give notes to them directly.
Jon would finish rehearsal, he’d make himself an iced espresso. The joke used to be that he would put in a splash of Nestlé Quik powder and he’d call it Selenium.
Now, the Selenium was really a very part-time situation. It depended: Was I Fat Jonny or Skinny Jonny? Fat Jonny had to cut down on the Selenium. Skinny Jonny needed a boost.
The craziest time of the day really was between rehearsal and taping. We’d go to a small, windowless room behind the set. It would be the two or three executive producers, the head writer, the script supervisor, and Jon.
Sometimes they did fine-tuning. Often the script that had been in the works all day would go through radical revision.
The rewrite room itself, regardless of Daily Show era, was the show at its best. Jon would always say, “You’ve got to keep your foot on the neck of the beast. The show is its own animal. The show lives and breathes. Our job is to contain it.”
It’s true. The show is going to happen. There’s a hundred people making it happen a day. It’s going to happen. Our job was to make sure that that dragon was a controlled beast that can spray fire where it needed to, otherwise it would just annihilate the whole audience because it wasn’t directed properly. So the rewrite was really just Jon crystallizing the fire.
You have to think of the whole process, each day of creating the show, in some ways as a refinery. The rewrite room, that’s at the point now where the raw material aspect of it is gone. Now it’s a relatively refined whiskey, and you’re trying to just bring out the right notes that make sense to you and that you can work with.
Jon starts pacing around, talking it out, rewriting the script out loud. For the other people in the room, the trick is not interrupting the fucking dude when he’s about to have an idea, which is hard. He’ll read a sound bite and then you’ll say, “Potato chips and cheese!” You’ll try to get a joke and he goes, “Mmmm…” and you can see his face sink. He’s never mad but the worst thing you could do in that room is disrupt his flow.
Every now and then the vibe would be brutal, because the rehearsal was bad and we’re all tired and Jon is in a bad mood. He would come into the rewrite room and say, “This is going to blow.”
I started doing the script under Craig Kilborn, in 1996. But it was very different then. Craig didn’t do much rewriting—a word tweak here or there—and we made changes either by hand on paper or on a desktop.
Jon cared about the material from the beginning, and he was involved in everything. The rewrite room really evolved in 2001 and 2002. We’d have a monitor so everybody could see the changes I was inputting. Later on, in 2006, Jon came back from hosting the Oscars, where they projected the script on the wall as they were rewriting, so we started doing that. It was definitely my idea to have two people on laptops, one typing the script changes as Jon rewrote it out loud and the other computer for fixing all the elements, while we used the headsets to call for new graphics or rolls.
The “rolls” are the tape clips. Jon says, “Move roll 112 before roll 108, drop this here, slide this here, I need two jokes off of that.” Then we’re farming out jokes to the writers’ room upstairs, telling them, “Gang that, gang that.” A gang is as many writers as are available, working together. It’s all hands on deck. “Here’s the sound bite, we need a joke.” They all pile into somebody’s office and then they just spout out a bunch of jokes, put them into one document, document gets printed. In the rewrite room, as we’re going through the script we’re getting gangs printed and handed in and I’m circling jokes for Jon.
It’s like any kind of creative game. You feed off each other’s energy, you pitch off the pitch. When the clock is ticking, you’re forced to really focus in on what you want. And as you’re coming up with stuff, you’re like, “Oh, shit, this is a visual medium.” So me, or Jon, or anyone else who might’ve been in the room would be on the phone to the graphics department—“We need an over-the-shoulder during this.” Or to studio production: “Okay, we need a quick clip of this, we need to cut away to a full frame of this.” It was the closest thing to Broadcast News, the comedy version of that, except all in a smelly room with Chicken Korma congealing in the corner.
At one point, the rewrite room was filled with Rolos and Three Musketeers, anything we could get our hands on that was sugar. Then I had a doctor’s appointment where he was like, “What have you done!?” So we decided, let’s switch out to something a little healthier, and it was a plate of every conceivable dipping vegetable and two barrels of hummus. Nobody ate any of it, but it was there for, like, three years.
I got pretty good at translating Jon. He’d be staring at the script on the wall and saying, really fast, “The thing, take the thing, move it above the thing, the thing, the thing, thing, thing.” Well, that was after we spent the first fifteen minutes every day talking about why fruit makes you burp.
Kira, if there’s a medal or career achievement award, she won it several years consecutively. She had to have that weird ear for “Okay, that’s the wording that they want, what they said three iterations ago.”
Kira was cleaning up all of the elements in real time, as Jon and the rest of us called out jokes. It was full-speed, badass kind of shit.
You know, not in the realm of helping children, but as far as making a nightly cable parody show, this is as badass as it gets. The jokes for, say, roll 102 come in from the gang upstairs, but by now Jon’s further down in the script. So we are reading the gangs, laughing our asses off, circling the ones we like. Then we give them to Jon. The goal of that rewrite room is for the words on that screen to match the words that Jon Stewart wants to say. Not necessarily what we think is the funniest joke, meaning the other two or three of us in the room. At the end of the day the dude in the chair takes all the glory and all of the shit.
In rewrite, D.J.’s style was very giggly and goofy, making silly insults. Ben was very passionate and smart and he’d really challenge Jon, stand up to him if he felt he needed to on a joke.
There were days, and this continued on well into the later years of the show, where sometimes we’d rewrite more than half the show between rehearsal and taping. Then you’re feverish. The audience has been loaded in, and you can hear the warmup comedian through the wall. You could hear the crowd in the studio, and we’re halfway into rewriting the first act—it’s like, “What the fuck are we going to do?” Jon’s an intuitive live performer, and if he’s got a super-bummed-out audience, because they were waiting outside on a January night and now we’re an hour late, it’s going to be that much harder. The whole thing is this incredibly delicate kind of organism and you’re just trying to get it to function healthily.
For Jon the jokes had to be in conversational language, but powerful conversational language. That’s where I really learned how to write. He used to say things like, “Specificity is key.” In other words, if you’re making a joke about, “Why don’t you have another ice cream cone?” if you say, “Why don’t you have another tub of rum raisin?” it gets funnier because now you’re specific in the flavor. He’d go, “What do I preach?” I’d go, “Specificity.”
The writers did unbelievable work, pretty consistently, so there was always a foundation of stuff to work off of. I just would never want to, in any way, propel any kind of myth that Jon and I were holed up, kind of saving the show from lesser minds or anything like that. The times that Jon and I rewrote the show were mainly in panic triage mode after a speedy rehearsal. Maybe one out of four shows during certain times—maybe on a bad week two out of four shows—we’d do that. When we’re in a really good groove, it would be like once every couple weeks we’d have to do that.
My first couple of years, I felt extremely lucky to be at the show. Around my fourth year, I started running into this frustration with the process, just the fact that as a staff writer I was so divorced from the actual on-TV version, and I would kind of whisper to other writers, “My God, do you ever feel this way?” They’d say, “Yeah, I do, but you can’t argue with the result.” At one point, someone told me, “I always think that my script is better than the final, but then I watch the show, and I realize I’m wrong almost 100 percent of the time.” That was the most frustrating thing. The show just kept getting better and better.
Learning to accept that rewriting process—it’s a journey that you have to go through, because you do feel some ownership. And even if it ends up being a great piece, you see things changing and it can be so painful. That’s actually the one thing I envy about SNL writers—they get to direct their own pieces when they get approved. We never got that. It was always taken out of our hands. The creative director of The Daily Show was Jon Stewart.
Here’s the beauty of it: You never had to worry because even if it was a shitty environment Jon would always power through. If the rehearsal or the rewrite had gone badly, right before the show I would be like, “Hey, man, I’m really sorry.” Jon goes, “What am I?” I go, “A professional.” He goes, “Yep, I’m a professional.”
One of Jon’s rituals was he’d walk into a room and say, “I’m open!” and we’d throw him a football. And Jon threw a football before the show every day, just to sort of get the blood flowing, before going onstage.
The truth of the matter is the entire day was built toward superstition and ritual. Not in the sense of, I touch this three times, and then I move on, but in terms of the structure of our day. And they used to laugh at me about it, that if I came into a room and someone was sitting in my chair, I’d be like, “What do we do? I can’t speak.”
He’d throw the football, turn the corner, go out there into the studio, charm the shit out of an audience, sit down and charm the shit out of America. Then after taping we’d go back to the postmortem, and Jon would say, “Now what the fuck happened?”
Stewart’s energies were initially focused on The Daily Show’s writers and performers. But early on he made two off-camera hires who significantly altered the look and feel of the show because they came from the straight-news world. The first was director Chuck O’Neil, who quit a job at ABC.
My wife, Michele, was familiar with Jon, and she thought he was going to be something big. Because I said, “Why would I leave the network?” And she said, “Yeah, but you’re miserable at the network. Why don’t you go have fun somewhere?” It turned out to be the job of a lifetime.
I really wanted to make the Daily Show set and graphics look like World News Tonight. It would give much more gravity to the jokes, if we made it look serious. And when I came in they used to stop between acts, and the warmup guy would go back out and talk to the studio audience while Jon talked to the producers. I came from a live TV background where everything was done spur-of-the-moment and you’ve got to keep driving the pace. I told them we’ve got to get rid of the warmup guy and get to the next act as quickly as possible to keep the audience engaged. And Jon, by allowing slips and flubs to happen on air and not reshoot, helped give it that live feel as well.
Jonny One-Take! There were no reshoots with Jon. Though every so often some machine would break and I’d need to interrupt taping—“Sorry, Jon, we need to bust. We have a small technical malfunction.” And he’d say, “I told you never to call me that in front of the audience.”
The longer-term project was revamping the field department. In 2001, Stewart hired Jim Margolis, a veteran producer from 60 Minutes, and continued shifting the subject matter away from eccentrics. The changes eventually paid off in some of The Daily Show’s most memorable and controversial pieces.
When I made my decision that I was leaving 60 Minutes to go to The Daily Show, I went to tell Don Hewitt. Don looked at me and he said, “That’s fantastic. What show is that? I’m happy for you kid, whatever.” It was, yes, kind of a crazy decision to make and one that I never regretted.
We were trying to move the field pieces from abject cruelty to something a little bit more relevant. The field is such an unusual place. You had these brilliant improv actors. But the field is improvising a scene with a partner that does not know they’re in a scene with you, and doesn’t realize that it’s an improv.
The thing about Colbert and Carell, they were brilliant at incorporating these other individuals into the scene so that they weren’t just roasting this person. They were taking a walk with them. You don’t know where this is going, and then all of a sudden you end up at Hilariousville.
These field pieces were parodies of this thing I was actually doing at 60 Minutes, so I knew how to do it. The shock to the system was the budget and pace. You had one day to shoot the whole thing, in three different locations, and you had one camera.
The one-camera thing was particularly brutal. You need to get the subject on camera answering the question, and then it takes twenty minutes to flip everything around and shoot the correspondent asking the question again. Stephen Colbert’s technique was to go outside, because he didn’t want to have to interact with these people when the camera wasn’t on. And people would change their minds or realize what they’d said. The one-camera thing went on well into 2006, just in time for me to stop doing those pieces because I was promoted to run the field department. Then Comedy Central finally had enough money to give two cameras to everybody.
During the spring and summer of 2001, as the Bush Administration was beginning to take shape, with “compassionate conservatism” still a major theme and Vice President Dick Cheney’s large role still underestimated, The Daily Show was still an uneven mix between lighter segments such as “Out at the Movies with Frank DeCaro” and wonkier headline bits like “Rich Man, Richer Man” that explored how the Bush tax cuts would screw working families—complete with a USA Today–style illustration of screws and butts.
Jon and I would have these late-night talks, after the show. I was a little more impatient than Jon, I was a little more of an angry young man, and I wanted to change everything instantly. Jon basically said, “If someone’s pitching a Michael Jackson story, it may just make your stomach turn, you may hate it. But if Michael Jackson is in the news, we’ll do the Michael Jackson story. Listen, the ship of state doesn’t turn quickly, you know? But we’re going to get there.”
However great Letterman was at that time, Leno was the guy who led in the ratings, and his philosophy was always the big tent—as much as possible, you don’t do stuff that alienates people.
What Stewart was doing was discovering and applying the programming philosophy difference between cable and broadcast networks that would define TV in the twenty-first century. The old network model was, you give people as few reasons as possible to change the channel. And cable, you’re appealing more to passionate niches and trying to give people a reason to change the channel to you. To me, as a viewer and critic, The Daily Show was not necessarily refreshing so much because I agreed with its politics—in those early years around 2000, I’m not sure that the show’s politics were as explicit as they later became. But I thought it was really refreshing to watch a late-night satire that had a point of view and wasn’t timid about it, and would just call bullshit on things that seemed to be bullshit.
The outlandish 2000 election and Bush’s victory had come along at the perfect time, helping Stewart, the correspondents, and the writers sharpen The Daily Show’s tone of bemused mockery. The next world-changing events would have just as big an effect—and a late-night, basic cable comedy show would become an unlikely outlet for mourning, an antidote to anxiety, and gradually a center of principled, patriotic dissent.