President Bush had urged the nation to fight terrorism by… going shopping. Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, tried to explain away the failure to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction—which had been the supposed justification for the war—with an abstruse pronouncement about “known unknowns.” A series of jingoistic, made-for-TV slogans—“Operation Iraqi Freedom,” “Operation Enduring Freedom,” “Operation Anaconda”—were trotted out to market an increasingly dubious military adventure. Refracting the lies and absurdities through comedy, The Daily Show’s tone mixed more indignation into the wisecracks.
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk, after being interrupted midsentence by blaring trumpets as big black letters reading BREAKING NEWS fill the screen. From Moscow, Steve Carell reports on a press conference by Attorney General John Ashcroft to—belatedly—announce the arrest of an Al Qaeda operative, just as congressional hearings were investigating U.S. intelligence failures] Steve, I’m worried that whenever the dialogue about the war on terrorism gets difficult politically, these scary stories start surfacing, and the media jumps right on board. Watching the news today, you’d think terrorists had actually built this dirty bomb and were caught today trying to detonate it. But the story’s a month old! So let’s go back to talk about what our government and security agencies did and are doing to prevent—
Steve Carell: [imitating the portentous trumpets] Ba, ba, ba ba baaa! Iraq! Jon?
Jon Stewart: Iraq, what? What are you even—
Steve Carell: Is Iraq behind the dirty bomb? Should we overthrow weapons of mass destruction? Saddam!
Jon Stewart: Steve, you’re just fanning the flames of fear. You might as well be shouting “smallpox” in a crowded theater.
[Trumpets blare. BREAKING NEWS logo fills the screen]
Stephen Colbert: [sitting behind Stewart in the studio] I’m Stephen Colbert from the breaking news desk! Cable television anchors are reporting a potential smallpox epidemic breaking out in theaters here in the United States! This is a nightmare scenario, a biological doomsday from which there can be no escape!
It was so obvious, the snow job that was being pulled, and it was so heartbreaking. We felt, from the beginning, that the people who were being unpatriotic were the people who were lying about vials of anthrax and weapons of mass destruction. You just knew it was bullshit. And once the show decided that we were going to talk about the most important things that are going on in the world, you always had two ways to go: the story itself or the coverage of the story. But it was only over time that we started to realize how it could work.
By early 2002, The Daily Show’s nightly average audience had more than doubled from the Kilborn years, from 350,000 to more than 800,000.
We knew that people liked what we were doing, but we were still a little show. Then I went someplace in Florida to do a piece where there were college students, and I could barely walk. I remember turning to the producer and going, “What’s happening?” I had to hide because people were storming me as a correspondent on The Daily Show. That was really shocking to me and I thought, “I wonder if they know we were joking?”
Another sign was that Stewart became a hot show business property. Fox came calling in 2003, offering a primetime or late night show; years later, NBC wanted to make Stewart the “permanent guest host” for Jay Leno. But the closest Stewart came to leaving The Daily Show was in 2002. ABC had pursued David Letterman, who eventually decided to stay at CBS. ABC’s next target to host a show after Nightline was Stewart, who was highly interested. Then, as a deal seemed likely, Lloyd Braun, ABC’s president, quietly became intrigued with Jimmy Kimmel. Making the situation more complicated was that Dixon represented both Stewart and Kimmel.
Lloyd Braun came to us, and Jon definitely thought about it. They made a fucking offer. The offer was basically what Jon was making doing The Daily Show. ABC said, “We can’t pay this guy or any guy who isn’t already like Letterman that kind of money. This is big-league. We’re giving him a major opportunity.”
Jon and I never viewed it like that at all. If you’re going to cheap out on Jon, you’re not going to get Jon. So when it became obvious that it was like, “Hey, cable boy, this is the big leagues,” I said what I needed to probably get it done. That killed it right there. That doesn’t mean that even if they gave me the money that we were looking for that Jon would have said yes. It wasn’t like Jon was pining for the ABC job. The first meeting with Jimmy was after it became obvious that Jon was not happening. Lloyd never met with Jimmy behind my back.
By the way, I love Lloyd Braun. He’s one of my best friends in the business.
In May 2002, ABC hired the lesser-known Kimmel to replace Bill Maher and Politically Incorrect at midnight. Stewart stayed at The Daily Show—a turn of events that disappointed him at the time, but proved the right fit for both Kimmel and Stewart.
Jon always said, “I don’t need to be on a broadcast network to validate myself. I’ll do what I do for basic cable, and if I do it well it won’t matter where I do it from. That will be my legacy.”
The fallout from 9/11 was providing plenty of bleak grist for The Daily Show. What had been billed as a quick and tidy punishment of Al Qaeda and the Taliban was turning into an extended, costly mess, with Osama bin Laden eluding American troops and Afghanistan descending into civil war. The Daily Show responded by becoming one of the rare media voices that was openly skeptical of Bush—pointing out how the president was shifting attention away from the Afghanistan fiasco by supervillainizing Saddam Hussein, in segments like, “Showdown: Iraq? Wal-mart of Evil.” The show geared up for the invasion itself by hiring two new correspondents with the edge and range to file mordantly funny “battlefield” reports. And with the Republicans surging in the polls and on the verge of seizing a majority in both the House and the Senate, The Daily Show, as part of “Indecision 2002,” made its first midterm road trip, this one to Washington, DC.
In the fall of 2002 I was an intern. There was a lot of energy in the place. It felt like being on a TV show in the movies, and it felt very low-rent in some ways. Things were a lot less structured than they would become later. It was a fun, creative place to be. Every Thursday night most of the staff would go drink and hang out.
As Nancy said, it was so loose back then. People would just come in and say, “You want to do this?” And I’d say, “Sure.” I don’t remember who came to me with “Produce Pete.”
Where did “Produce Pete” come from? Just boredom. It was a time where we were really beginning to shift into constant news coverage, and I just wanted to do something else. I stayed late one night, and there was a guy in New York who used to appear on, I think, the NBC Saturday Today show, and his name was Produce Pete. I think he was a guy from Staten Island, and they would do these ten-minute segments talking about what was in season. I’m thinking to myself, “Do you think this guy was a journalist once?”
I’m thinking about the career path one takes to become a produce expert on a news show, so I just banged out one segment. They all eventually melted down into him being a loser, and it was never about the produce. It was always about Produce Pete and living in a men’s residence and people he tormented.
And then the more “Produce Pete”s we did, the more his character kind of came to life as this extremely depressed guy who was probably living in his parents’ basement. You know, just the layers of sadness underneath this ostensibly very light lifestyle segment.
Carell and Colbert were similar in some ways. They did improv together in Chicago, and they shared that ability to react in the moment in funny but still real ways. They had both worked for other pretty good people. They had both worked with Dana Carvey’s show. That was a writing room of fucking legend—Charlie Kaufman, Louis C.K., Robert Smigel. But a good distinction between them, at The Daily Show, is vulnerability versus invulnerability. Carell’s characters would be buying their own bullshit ultimately less than Stephen’s, who were just a bulletproof fucking wall of believing their own bullshit.
Carell would just take his time and let these pauses hang in the air, and it was completely different from anything else we had done on the show.
“Produce Pete” Steve Carell: [wearing a lei and a grocer’s apron, standing behind a table piled with fruit] Aloha, friends! Today I, “Produce Pete” Steve Carell, am or will have discussed pineapple. This beloved fruit is a favorite July Fourth picnic refresher that is wonderful served whole or sliced and cooked on the grill with ham steaks. Who doesn’t love ham in the summer?
Pineapples began to spread around the world in the 1700s when explorers brought them along on voyages to prevent scurvy. Incidentally, I once contracted scurvy years ago. It’s not fun. My gums bled, my teeth fell out, and I was covered in these awful purple deep-tissue bruises. I wasn’t a sailor, of course, but I guess you could say I was, um, I don’t know, adrift? Out to sea? Living in a men’s residence in Chicago. Young man overboard. Really wasn’t, uh, taking the best care of myself back then. Shiver me timbers! [forced chuckle] Anyhow.
Look for a pineapple that’s firm, never spongy, and has no bruises or soft spots. Like the kind I had when I had scurvy. Remember [reads nonsense Hawaiian words from index cards], which means, “Me likey shaky hiney for old men.”
You know, I don’t know who’s messing with the cards, but I don’t think that’s funny. ’Cause it was a matter of survival, okay? [glares off camera] Like you guys never had sex for cash or drugs. Hypocrites.
Are we still on?
I wrote a bunch of them. Eventually, I think they got a little tired with my approach, and Eric Drysdale and I cowrote two or three of them, and then Steve went off to Hollywood and never came back.
We moved to LA in August of ’02. Our daughter was one at that point, and it was just time.
I was doing this birdwatching field piece. It was a twenty-four-hour birdwatching competition so we decided to cover it for twenty-four hours. It was like three or four in the morning, and we were in the middle of a swamp in New Jersey being attacked by swarms of mosquitoes and bats, and I thought, “I think I’m done.”
I left The Daily Show with nothing specific to go to. I didn’t have a job.
When Steve Carell came in to read for Anchorman, he was hysterical doing Brick Tamland. And then afterward Adam McKay, Will Ferrell, and myself were talking and we all paused. Steve was so amazing on The Daily Show as a correspondent, and then he had played an anchorman in Bruce Almighty. So we were considering whether or not that would rule Steve out: “Oh, he’s played around with the news too often.” And a couple of weeks later we said, “Are we insane? This is the funniest man ever.”
I did a couple Daily Show pieces after we moved to LA, I kind of kept my toe in a little bit.
I think from the beginning it felt like Jon was going to create something special. But I have to say, though, I didn’t have the impression that “Oh, this is going to turn into something that’s going to appeal to the masses of America.” It just seems that people like Jon who are that smart and funny, that doesn’t then go out to the masses. You have your niche audience for something like that. But that’s not what happened, which is amazing.
I didn’t think that a book would be written about this show.
No. It’s not a coincidence that the show really took off after we left.
We figured we had to do it for the good of the show. And I’d grown tired of carrying Colbert.
The exit of Mr. and Mrs. Carell was a loss, but it was the first high-profile example of what would become a pattern. As The Daily Show became a launching pad for comedy careers, Stewart didn’t fight to hold on to talented people indefinitely. He treated the defections as an opportunity to find new weapons. The show’s growing popularity ensured there would be eager applicants coming out of the comedy clubs and casting agencies. But The Daily Show’s success would in some ways also be constricting, at least at first.
Colbert was the master of false authority. The problem came when you’d go out to do auditions for new contributors and correspondents. I’d be having a casual conversation and it’d be superfunny. Then I’d say, “Let’s run it,” and do the real audition. So often they’d be like, “Four dead today…” I’d go, “Stop affecting your voice! Just talk the way we were just talking.” They had practiced Colbert.
The Daily Show is full of people who did one field piece and were never seen on the show again. There was Jerry Minor, there was Adrianne Frost.
When we looked at tape of Rob Corddry and Ed Helms, the code name for Corddry was “Tufty,” because he had a small tuft of hair right on the top of his forehead that he did not shave. The fact that we wouldn’t even use his name when talking about hiring him just shows you what awful people we are.
We were only looking to add one person, but Corddry and Helms were both so funny we just decided to add them both.
Corddry and Helms were kind of the new breed. Corddry was a very smart guy, and a very funny guy, and also a really nice guy, and those three qualities rarely join hands. Helms was unlike anyone we’d had as a correspondent, really unafraid to make himself look unattractive. There was one field piece where he’s having moles cut off his face. There was another where he’s in a Speedo for half of it.
It was just something that came up in the news about Cape May, New Jersey, reversing a ban on Speedos that they’d had since I think it was the ’70s. Stew Bailey liked it and assigned it to me, and the field producer was Glenn Clements. The only thing I’ll take credit for in creating that piece was fervent opposition to the dog licking my balls. I lost that argument.
I’d graduated from college, UMass Amherst, and been performing in a Shakespeare company, but then I joined Upright Citizens Brigade. Not long after that Amy Poehler and Rob Riggle, who were also at UCB, got cast at Saturday Night Live and so other casting agents started mining UCB, and The Daily Show came down. I think Ben Karlin saw me, and then I auditioned with Jon. It was a piece about an icicle as the perfect murder weapon. I made him laugh, which is not as hard as it looks.
Well, let’s see. I was living in New York City, really trying to make a career as a comedian, and I had managed to sort of wedge my way into the commercial voice-over scene.
I got involved with Upright Citizens Brigade, and it became this kind of mash-up of improv and standup. My end goal at that point was Saturday Night Live. I’d always been a fan of The Daily Show, even from Craig Kilborn. That started when I was, I think, in college. I went to Oberlin, obviously kind of politically oriented. When Jon took over, the show felt much more editorial, and I loved it.
In 2002, I went to a huge cattle-call Daily Show audition, three hundred people. Got a haircut, put incredible amounts of product in my hair. I looked like a Ken doll. They hand me a script. I recognized the segment, and I did it exactly how I knew that Stephen had done it. The callback was at the Daily Show studio, and there were five of us called back. It was Rob Corddry, Jessica St. Clair, who’s a dear friend, and a couple of other great comedians that I knew.
Later I get the call, “You got a segment.” I’m not staff, I’m not hired, but I got a segment. That was a very common way to initiate a correspondent at the time. You get a chance to give it a go, and see how it works. Was it nerve-wracking? Not really. My recollection is, especially looking back now, I was bizarrely confident.
The mole removal, that was right on the heels of Katie Couric’s—did she get a colonoscopy? I think she did. We were prepping it when I was on probation, before I got hired. I think that’s when the powers that be thought, “Maybe Ed can stick around a little while.” Jon loved that one. And I got a mole removed for free.
Ed immediately started getting all these field pieces, and I was sitting in the office for two weeks with no assignments, thinking I’d done something wrong. So I spent the time just studying tape of Colbert and Carell.
Corddry’s first field piece was a rough one. There was a new Spider-Man movie out, so the piece was to try and take that local news aspect of “Could this really happen? Could a radioactive spider bite you, and if so, what happens?” and blow it up into “What would happen if you really tried to be Spider-Man?”
They put me in a pink leotard and had me walk around midtown. It started a trend of making me wear ridiculous costumes and parading me around Manhattan.
We were shooting a piece where for some reason Rob Corddry had to walk down the street in a Klan outfit. Then he walked into a Dunkin’ Donuts where we were waiting for him, and he’s like, “I can’t do this bit. I can see the way people are looking at me. It’s too raw.”
So we rewrote it. He walked down dressed as Hitler, and then it was totally fine. For some reason Hitler was not real enough, and people on the street could react with “What?” as opposed to anger. And it impressed me that Rob was that in tune with both how people would react on the street and how an audience would react to it.
Dressing up as Hitler was the worst. I was out there and realized this could get ugly. I remember coming back to the studio for editing and Jon had some idea for another bit, and he says, “Aw, c’mon, get back in the Hitler costume.” He was almost begging. It was the one time I said no to him.
Colbert gave me two invaluable pieces of advice for doing field pieces. The first was, “Check your soul at the door.”
What’s funny about that is that it’s a little bit pissy and a little bit silly, but it speaks to something very real, which is when you’re doing those field segment shoots, and in the middle of an interview, your instinct is to be kind and gracious to somebody. You really have to squash that instinct and stick to the game plan, which often leads to a significant discomfort on the part of your interview subject and yourself. But it’s all in the service of irony, which hopefully is also funny.
And what I found out at Jon’s last show was that “Check your soul at the door” was a kind of mantra that Colbert had told many correspondents, when they were starting out. As I was sharing that anecdote with somebody else, they were like, “He told me the same thing.” It was fun to find out this Colbert nugget of wisdom that really trickled through a lot of us.
It’s not actually that way. What I would say is, “What you’re going to want to do is get a nice hanger—like a wooden hanger, something with padded shoulders. Take your soul off and hang it on the hanger. Don’t fold it up or leave it crumpled on the floor or put it on a wire hanger. Put it on a nice hanger, because you care about your soul. Don’t forget where you put it. Then go out on the road and do these interviews. Your soul will be part of this decision. It’s not like you do it in a soulless way, but when you’re in the field you’re in a character of a correspondent who has no interest other than getting what he needs out of the person he’s interviewing. Your relationship with the people you’re going to be talking to is purely parasitic. You are going to suck them dry like a lamprey until their brain and their soul is as dry as a crouton and you get everything you can out of this interview. Don’t get that on you, because that behavior has got to be cold-blooded. When you’re doing it you might get it on you—the badness of what you’re doing on you—and you don’t want to get that on your soul. You can get it out, but you’ve got to dry-clean it, and your soul gets shiny after you dry-clean it too many times. Just for the life of your soul, take it off before you go, and then when you come back to New York put your soul back on when you watch the footage. Because then you have the opportunity to exercise your ethics over what you did in the field and not put on the air what you think is unethical or is not comedy or is not fair to the subject.
“But when you’re out there you have to be able to immediately seize on an opportunity carnivorously, because you’re not there for just discovery. You’re there to get what you need to get. You’re a Spartan. You come back with your shield or on it.” I used to say, “Come back with your funny or on it, because you’ve got one responsibility, which is to come back with a story that you intend to tell no matter what the truth is. If you discover something better, you can do that story, but remember, you’ve made a promise to Jon and the other producers that you will go get this story come hell or high water. Then when you come back you can make the case that that is not the story, or this is better, or this person isn’t a worthy target or whatever, and Jon always listens.”
The end product always had ethics and always had soul in it, because Jon is not a soulless person. Ultimately, he’s a very moral person, and ultimately the piece was always filtered through his judgment, but you were allowed to inform him. If you said, “I don’t like this,” it wouldn’t go on the air. But when you’re in the field you can’t be second-guessing like that. You’ve got to be athletic. You can’t think about your backhand. You’ve just got to hit the ball. So that’s why I would say, “Take your soul off before you go.” Not because it’s a soulless business, but when you’re in character in the field, you’ve got to stay in character for what may be a ten-hour shoot day. Your soul will go, “They seem like nice people, stop making fun of Bigfoot.” No—you’re there to make fun of Bigfoot.
Colbert’s second piece of advice was, “When you’re traveling, make sure you spend all of your per diem.”
Which was nothing, by the way. It was thirty-eight dollars.
In my case, that became, “Make sure you drink the per diem.” What people don’t realize when they watch a four-minute Daily Show field segment is that it often meant sixteen hours of shooting. So we would spend the whole day working our asses off, and then the field producer and I would get ripped. It was just so much fun. Some of the coldest beer I ever drank.
Yeah. Drink it away. Drink it all away.
When you come back you don’t need the meal money because they have free cereal at The Daily Show. You can eat the free cereal in the break room and you’re fine.
Corddry and I shared an office for many years.
I don’t remember the days before Ed brought his guitar into our office. I remember every day after that, though.
Is he saying he was annoyed by this, or charmed by it? I thought we had a great time.
What Jon said at the finale wasn’t a joke—Ed loves to sing. And when he’s singing, Ed’s eyes say, “You can’t sing like that.”
If we went on the road, as a warmup thing, the correspondents would go out and sing the national anthem to the studio audience. Stephen and Steve, Nancy, Vance, and Mo could all sing, and they would sing the national anthem for the audience. Not goofing around. Ed could sing, and Rob could kind of sing. The audience loved it. Oh my God. An in-studio audience only ever saw it, because we never did it on the show.
Matter of fact, I have recording of a rehearsal that we did in my office at one point, when Mo Rocca was still on the show.
You’re waiting for the show to start, that half hour, and doing bits and jokes, and I think maybe we just started singing because Stephen knew the bass line of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” He knew this really beautiful bass line that I think he’d sung in a chorale at some point. I knew a harmony line, and Mo would sing the melody.
It was not a gag version. It was completely straight, and I would even say it was beautiful and transcendent. It always got a laugh when Stephen hit this low note. But it was really good.
The show’s segments were genuinely patriotic, too—but in a sardonic, increasingly trenchant way. Sure, Stewart played and replayed Bush’s verbal stumbles (“Fool me once, shame on… shame on you. But fool me—we can’t get fooled again”). But as the country was moving toward another major military action, the show was moving away from easy laughs toward more pointed, issue-based gags, like “So You’re Living in a Police State,” with Colbert talking to a surveillance camera as he peed into a toilet: “The curtailing of your civil liberties doesn’t have to be oppressive—it can be fun-pressive!”
And in the run-up to the Iraq invasion the media was becoming a more frequent target. The correspondents passed along the show’s one flak jacket to report “from” Baghdad or Kabul, and the garment seemed to bring out a delightfully overconfident pugnacity in Corddry as he mocked the war zone macho of blowhards like Fox’s Geraldo Rivera.
Rob in particular had a real kind of sinister gravity to his performing style that played very nicely with Jon, because Jon was able to become a wide-eyed naif. Ed played a little more into the Carell boob character, a little more clueless, so Jon had to pretend to inform him about things.
Helms, in some ways, was almost more subversive because he snuck up on you. Rob was a physical presence, and more of a sketch performer.
As a measure of how much things have changed, before about 2004, when we were traveling with Carell or Colbert they were always being mistaken for one another. I was with Carell once and someone came up and called him Stephen Colbert, and said how much she liked him and asked him to sign something, so he signed it “Steve Colbert Carell.” This also happened to me with Stephen Colbert—this woman was convinced he was Steve Carell. This might’ve been right after 40-Year-Old Virgin came out, and so Stephen signed something, “I crave cock, Steve Carell.”
People on the show were getting recognized more, though. We went to Washington, DC, for the 2002 midterms. One night we were all in the same hotel bar, and this woman was going up to the people she’d seen on TV, the correspondents, and sort of presenting herself with this “Wink, wink, I have a room upstairs” kind of thing.
She ended up not getting on-camera talent to go up to her room, but she picks this good-looking guy on the staff, and then they go away for thirty minutes. And she doesn’t come back down but he does, and he orders a drink.
We are all waiting: “And, and, what happened?” He says, “I just learned what a Rusty Trombone is.” And he explains as though he’s just literally had a sex education class. I don’t know if you want this for the book. You might want to end at “Rusty Trombone,” because it’s going to get dirtier.
And this is, of course, a book for the whole family. So: The Daily Show’s first trip to DC came at an unsettled moment, both outside and inside the show. The impending war made for a foreboding mood, but Bush was still riding the patriotic wave, and those four episodes were an indication that the show’s point of view and tone were still very much evolving. Stewart’s questioning of Torie Clarke, the Bush Administration’s Pentagon spokeswoman, about preparations for the invasion of Iraq was strikingly deferential. The Washington trip also became the final straw in the strained relationship between Smithberg and Stewart.
Madeleine and I had worked together well on the MTV show. With The Daily Show, I think she had built something she felt ownership over, and I probably underestimated that proprietary feeling. That was not openly expressed in the beginning, but it became clear to me that there was a resentment.
Of course. The Daily Show was my baby and I said to Jon many times, “Look, you control the content. Let me control the experience of life here.” I just wanted to own the vibe.
Smithberg, by all accounts, could be a great deal of fun. But her melodramatic style could make her an unpredictable boss when Stewart needed his executive producer to be a stabilizing force. Daily Show lore from those years includes Smithberg making personnel decrees in barrooms and making out with an intern.
No, it wasn’t an intern. It was a PA. It was Rory Albanese and it was a Comedy Central Christmas party. I was married at the time. He initiated it, but no, it wasn’t a mistake—it was awesome. It was really fun. It was at the point that maybe I should have known that my marriage wasn’t that great.
I definitely had a good time. Everybody did. And everything that I said at a party happened. Everybody that I promoted got promoted.
I was mortified at the time. I was twenty-two, and I’d worked at the show six months. I’m nervous I’m even around the bosses at a party. This woman leaned over and tried to make out with me in front of people. I wasn’t wanting to do that, or expecting it.
I had no bad blood toward her, and still don’t. She was very good to me as a person, but as far as creating a culture of drinking and going out and a party culture, she was bad at that. She was cool as shit when you are twenty-two and twenty-three and the EP is putting her credit card down. But there was definitely an immaturity in the management of the show in those days.
It was a different time, too. People smoked in their office. It was a component of that—Madeleine taking everyone out drinking matched the tone of the times in the industry, and this was cable. Nobody was watching cable.
As Stewart asserted more control over The Daily Show’s process and content, Smithberg’s estrangement grew. The more sympathetic accounts from colleagues say Smithberg’s and Stewart’s visions of the show diverged. Other staffers say Smithberg was lax in her duties as executive producer. What started as professional differences became personal as well. “Jon eventually cut her out of the loop,” one Daily Show veteran says. “But Madeleine earned it with her behavior.”
Especially during that first year, it felt like it was us against everyone. And there was a lot of politics and personal drama that we inherited in that workplace. And Madeleine, who was a real good friend of mine and who I loved, she kind of was okay operating in that environment. It just kind of fit her personality a little better. And Jon and I thought it was chaos, and we were really uncomfortable with it. I think we just always said like, “The job is hard enough, and to add in all this kind of crazy-making just makes it so much harder.”
Madeleine’s hilarious. But Madeleine’s a crazy person. She wasn’t showing up for meetings. She wasn’t doing anything with the show.
That’s complete and total bullshit. Whoever is saying that is a really awful, ungrateful fuck. What happened with Jon and I had nothing to do with my skills as an executive producer. I brought humanity to the process, and joy. I made it fun. We were doing comedy. If I wanted to save lives, I would have become an oncologist.
We went to Washington for 2002 for the midterm elections, and she was just such a trainwreck. She was just a difficult person.
That DC trip felt like a real breaking point. It was a technical shit show. I don’t know that it was Madeleine’s fault. I think it brought out tensions, but I don’t think she could’ve fixed any of those technical problems. And Jon and Madeleine’s split had been a year and a half in the works.
Returning to New York did not solve the underlying problems, so at the end of 2002, Stewart replaced Smithberg with Karlin, and Javerbaum moved up to become head writer.
We kind of spun it, my leaving. It was true that I wanted to be more present in my son’s life. I was missing everything, and I didn’t feel like it was worthwhile, especially since all the joy had been surgically removed from what had been the most joyful, creative, incredible professional experience anyone on the planet will ever have.
What Jon did with the raw materials and this sort of teenage show was to take it on a ride that nobody in the building on that awkward, horrible, uncomfortable Day One could ever have foreseen. The show could not have been more fucking successful and I could not be happier. I created the fucking thing. My name is on it every night, and yet there’s this sort of personal hurt and disappointment and really confusion as to how I ended up in that situation.
Thanks for dredging all this up, by the way!
There are a lot of great things about Madeleine that shouldn’t be discounted. She’s a very visceral, alive person. The Daily Show’s respect for people’s family priorities started with her, and Jon continued it. I was able to raise children while having a fair amount of responsibility at the show. That’s huge.
Madeleine is a very, very creative person. A lot of what still remains at The Daily Show—the senior whatever correspondent—that was all Madeleine. Whipping a staff into shape just wasn’t her strength. Jon gave her a long lead to try to figure it out, because he was appreciative. She created the show. He wasn’t looking to fucking get rid of her. He wasn’t.
Once Madeleine was out [in December 2002], it felt like the door was shut on those Kilborn transitions. The writers had almost all been turned over, and the new group was much more in line with what Jon wanted. They were less old-school, standup gag writers and much more conceptual writers.
After Ben brought in D.J. we were just looking for a different type of individual, so that’s when the writing staff really began to gel. People like Tim Carvell and Steve Bodow and Rachel Axler and Eric Drysdale started to come on board, and changed the tenor of everything really nicely.
I’d gone to Yale, where I’d helped found an improv group. Then I’d spent a number of years in New York splitting my time between being a magazine writer and a theater director with Elevator Repair Service, and had moderate success with both things. But it was August 2001, and I was thirty-four years old, and I was feeling kind of restless. I was thinking TV might be interesting. The one show that I could see myself really joining was this Daily Show thing. Then September 11 happened and the magazine business really cratered. I started to try and more actively look, how can I work my way into The Daily Show? And then I found out that Jon Bines, who had been the roommate of some of my theater buddies years ago, was a writer at The Daily Show, so I got in touch with him.
Bines told me writers don’t tend to leave very often. Then, just a few weeks later, he called and said, “So, they actually just fired somebody and they’re looking for one or two people.” If I’d contacted him a month later, none of this happens.
The process for finding and hiring writers would become more formalized over the years, as the show became a hit and was inundated with applicants, but the basics stayed the same. In the first round, aspiring writers submitted a “packet” of segment scripts about subjects of their own choosing, to be read by a couple of current Daily Show writers and producers. Candidates who advanced to the next round were given twenty-four hours to submit a second packet, this time on an assigned subject—a topic in the news at that moment—plus background research assembled by the show’s segment producers. If the writer did well, he or she would be invited to the Daily Show offices for an interview with the head writer and, eventually, Stewart.
The hiring was mostly based on your writing. The interviews were to make sure you weren’t the wrong kind of psychopath.
I was definitely nervous after I was hired. I wasn’t very good at it at all, and I started to choke a bit, too.
At one point, in December 2002, I went to Ben to ask for advice. He said he was glad I asked, because he wanted to have a talk with me. Not to fire me, but to put me on notice: This might not be working. The helpful thing that he said was, “You have to realize you got the job, so don’t worry about proving that you should have the job. Just do the job.” The second note, which I really took to heart, was, “Write about stuff you care about. Show us some passion.”
Then right around that time we were going to war in Iraq. And that really worked out great for me because I had a lot of ideas. The war was the best thing that ever happened to me professionally. We’re disgusting that way. We’re not good people.
Mixed motives and morality aside, The Daily Show locked on to the Bush Administration’s campaign to build public support for the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, examining the propaganda efforts with a rigor lacking in much of the mainstream media. When the White House effort paid off with congressional approval for Operation Iraqi Freedom, the fake gravitas of The Daily Show’s correspondents took on real substance. Stewart and the writers still prioritized laughs in every segment, but the tone and subtext of the setups to those punch lines grew darker.