The political and media worlds had changed drastically in four years—and so had the stature of The Daily Show. The 2000 campaign, conducted during robust economic times between Bush and Gore, two easily caricatured but seemingly competent, seemingly moderate candidates had given way to terrorism, recession, and the bitter clarity that the Iraq War had been launched to find weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist.
Meanwhile, the major networks were wobbling from generational and technological pressure. Friends ended; Facebook launched. Tom Brokaw left the NBC Nightly News after twenty-two years and was replaced by Brian Williams, as the energy and influence continued to shift from the middle-of-the-road anchors to the cable opinionators on the left and right—Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough at MSNBC, and, at top-rated Fox News, Bill O’Reilly.
In 2000 The Daily Show, with Stewart as its rookie host, had been a scrappy, playful outsider. Now it was a cultural phenomenon, its audience tripling past one million per night, and it was becoming a sharp satirical machine. The jokes still came first, but more of them were about deeply serious issues: Daily Show segments highlighted the Bush Administration’s evasion of responsibility for the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, and how Republican campaign strategists were behind the wave of anti-gay-marriage referendums on the fall ballots.
The Bush Administration was so outrageous in the kind of false moral high ground that they took, and then to turn around and see this behavior with things like Abu Ghraib, with the White House backing away from it and saying, “It’s a few bad apples.” Whether you want to call it irony or whether you want to call it hypocrisy, it was so rich it was kind of impossible not to comment on it. And these are the people who the country reelected.
The Daily Show’s more precipitous disillusionment, though, was with the political media, particularly cable news. One vivid sign of the change came in New Hampshire. In 2000, this was where the unknown Carell had charmed his way onto McCain’s Straight Talk Express. Back then, the conventional media viewed The Daily Show as a cute curiosity, and The Daily Show retained some respect for real reporters. In 2004, Stewart went to Manchester in January to host a “town hall,” and big-name panelists were eager to be part of the show. But four years of close study had sulphurized Stewart’s opinion of TV journalism.
Jon invited me to be on a panel a couple of nights before the primary, with Tom Brokaw, Senator John Sununu, former senator Carol Moseley Braun, Bill Kristol, and the guy who was then the head of MSNBC, Erik Sorenson. Everybody thought it was going to be a lot of fun. I emerged unscathed, Brokaw did well, Kristol did okay, but Stewart fixed in on the guy from MSNBC and just brutalized him over cable news, that the coverage was superficial, stupid, and he had specific examples. And Jon was so smart and so quick, I think everybody was shocked by it.
Expectations, nonexistent the first time around, soared as the 2004 presidential campaign unfolded: Daily Show fans and the mainstream media saw it as a leading voice of opposition to Bush and the Republicans. A Newsweek cover story decreed The Daily Show “the coolest pit stop on television.” A Rolling Stone cover story went further: “The most trusted name in news.” 60 Minutes profiled Stewart for the second time in three years. In August, Bill Clinton became the first president to appear as a guest. Conservative critics and media pundits, meanwhile, turned up their attacks, saying Stewart hid behind the job title “comedian” when he was really a Democratic propagandist and sanctimonious media scold.
So Stewart doubled down on the workload (on top of becoming a father for the first time, in early July). The Daily Show wouldn’t just construct “Indecision 2004” segments four nights a week, air live coverage of the debates between Bush and John Kerry, and swarm the two conventions—Stewart and the staff would write America (The Book), a parody American history textbook, its 227 pages overstuffed with original humor and dense with actual educational nuggets. Plus one photo of nine naked Supreme Court justices.
At the same time, one key Daily Show cast member was growing eager to take on new challenges, while the newcomers were pushing for screen time. The combination of tumultuous world events and internal shifts spawned a great year of TV comedy, a brilliantly realized ink-and-paper version of the show, and one rivetingly awkward volcanic outburst. And 2004, even as it yielded another frustrating election night, sharpened Stewart’s focus on infusing the show with a point of view.
With Jon and The Daily Show, the conventions were our event. That was our MTV movie awards, our VMAs. It became, from a business point of view, a way for sales and sponsors to come in and package it up. And 2004 was when that started to become a big thing.
Getting credentials for the conventions—it’s funny, it’s gotten easier but in some ways it’s gotten harder, because the Democratic and Republican parties started to be like, “We don’t know if we want The Daily Show there.”
Creative prep starts about two months in advance. We start picking the title, and building the graphic packages, and we start working on the biographical films—that year, Bush and Kerry. We have an advance team that goes out about a week before and starts setting everything up. I’m usually on that team.
Jen is the center of the wheel at The Daily Show. She also seems to be the one producer who understands the word “polite.” She’s like the show’s Jewish mother, without the angst.
Going to the conventions was just so thrilling. God, I was like a pig in shit. I loved being close to the action, and realizing if I went to a dinner party or something, I knew what I was talking about, because this was my job. I could tell you every candidate and ten bullet points about their platforms, then I could tell you a bunch of their staffers and who they were and what, and I might have even known some of them personally at that point. It just felt like we were close to the beating heart of politics at those conventions.
The period that I’m proudest of was around the 2004 conventions. I did a piece with Corddry, his coming home to Boston for the Democratic convention. We started out stereotypical, like the networks do those convention city tourism pieces, and then got more real.
Rob Corddry: [standing in front of Faneuil Hall] From Beacon Hill to Back Bay, from burning witches to busing blacks, this city has something for everyone! [pause; walks off camera, then leans his head back in frame] Unless you’re black.
There’s so much history here. [montage of famous attractions] Like Faneuil Hall. Bunker Hill. The site of the Boston Tea Party. Of course everyone knows about this little piece of Boston history: [stands outside nondescript hotel] The Adams Inn! Where I treated Maureen Sullivan to my virginity. Room 223!
Of course, Boston isn’t all about my personal sexual history. It’s also about entertainment. Fenway Park! [strolls through ballpark gate, sits in front row by field] The world-famous Green Monster! Growing up, I had my own green monster. [pause; face goes fearful] Father Green.
Reliving painful childhood memories is sure to make you want to visit one of Boston’s fine watering holes, [walks into scruffy 21 Nickels Grille and Tap] where old friends are always happy to see you.
Drunk Guy: [shouting] Remember the time we had a fight with Sig Ep up the street? You were where? Come on, Corddry! You were gay! [Corddry gulps beer] What the fuck is up with your hair? You look like Gorbachev, for chrissake! This bald bastard, that didn’t fight, and didn’t do shit in college, and now he’s a pussy, and now he’s on fucking national TV and here we are! That’s bullshit. Fuck him!
Rob Corddry: [trying to sound macho] You remember Maureen Sullivan?
Second Drunk Guy: Whore!
Yeah, her name was Maureen, but not Sullivan. She said, “No fucking way can you use my real last name.”
Those moments where they’re giving Rob a hard time for being basically a pussy—yeah, that was real. That was actually a visceral moment. So was when they started wrestling and broke a bunch of bar stools.
Those are my real buddies from UMass. They’re Watertown, great guys, really funny, townies. We told them to get there at like 2:00 in the afternoon, and start drinking on us. We didn’t get there until 5:00 and had some catching up to do. They actually got into a fight in the bar. It was standard for them. I’ve been thinking of pitching a reality show based on those guys.
My friend in the piece who’s yelling “Come on, Corddry!”—that became sort of a minitrademark for me. Whenever I see Jon since that day, he yells, “Come on, Corddry!” Jon even said it at the final show.
There was nothing more frustrating than directing Rob while he was drunk. Though I was a little drunk, too. And Rob’s father was there. He was pretty sauced himself. But it was funny, and we brought his friends back for a few more pieces.
It was a great bar, 21 Nickels, but it’s closed now. When The Daily Show won Emmys, the correspondents got certificates, not Emmy statues. I sent my certificate to the bar and they framed it.
The Daily Show’s Democratic convention episodes beat all the other cable networks’ coverage in the ratings. Two weeks later, as the scene shifted south, the growing audience was served just as much humor, but delivered with a decidedly sharper edge.
The Republican convention, staged in New York three years after the 9/11 attacks, was a four-day patriotic panderfest. Stewart and the team displayed how nimble The Daily Show had become at lobbing jokes and throwing punches, walking the line between having fun with wide-eyed delegates and shredding the contrived symbolism of the Bush reelection effort.
The security at Madison Square Garden was crazy. I had a camera and a microphone and a producer, and we had a writer with us, Jason Ross. We would go out with fifteen jokes and we tried to get great responses from people. The first person I ever interviewed I think was Tucker Carlson.
Jason says, “Go up to Tucker and say, ‘Who did you have to blow to get in here?’” I was like, “Okay.” Jason says, “No, well, don’t really.”
And I was like, “No, it’s good. It’s a good question.” And so I went up to Carlson and I say, “Hey, can I ask you a quick question? Who did you have to blow to get in here?” As much as I don’t love the work that Tucker Carlson does, what a rude question. I mean, he was a professional person, and he didn’t really need this smart-ass from Nowheresville coming up and shining a camera in his face, and being so rude.
And that was actually the moment when everything coalesced for me. I thought, “I totally get it. This is what I’m going to be good at. That was a great moment. I just need to have a million more moments like that, and I’ll be completely indispensable.”
Then right at the end of the convention there was a delegate from Montana. I said, “Hey, welcome to New York,” and we had this really nice conversation. “Have you met any black people yet?” He says, “I haven’t, but I would love to.” “Do you have any black people in Montana?” and he said, “No. No, we don’t.” “You could get your picture taken with one.”
It was sweet in a way, actually, a really sweet moment with this really nice man. He was just so honest and earnest. And so I felt really useful after that.
I love journalism, real journalism. I think it’s an exciting profession, and there were times even during Daily Show segments when I would think, “God, I wish I could just put the comedy aside and really dig in with this person.” Being close to the politicians themselves, and actually being able to buttonhole them on the floor and ask them questions or even just, like, crack a joke in the men’s room with Lindsey Graham or something, it was a huge thrill.
In the studio, Stewart highlighted the Republican appeal to patriotism and fear, a political marketing strategy that he was both appalled by and delighted to deconstruct.
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] For more, we’re joined by Daily Show senior convention analyst Stephen Colbert. What did you make of last night’s focus on September 11?
Stephen Colbert: [sitting to Stewart’s right] Well, remember, Jon, 9/11 and its aftermath bring to mind a time of unprecedented national unity. When, from the crucible of an unthinkable tragedy, there arose a steely patriotism transcending ideology and partisanship. That stuff kills in the swing states. Those NASCAR dads suck it down in a feeding tube.
Jon Stewart: So you had no problem with it?
Stephen Colbert: Jon, I found it crasstastic! The message was delivered by the Republicans’ most popular figures, John McCain and Rudolph Giuliani. Two men of bravery and leadership. Qualities the president would very much like associated with him.
Jon Stewart: Well, Stephen, let me ask you this: What is tonight’s theme?
Stephen Colbert: Tonight, Jon, they took last night’s theme—a Bush victory would bring closure to the 9/11 families—and built on it with a theme of compassion. We heard from widows, orphans, the enfeebled, the limbless. All raising their voice in support of the president—whose compassion, like the Olympics, triumphantly springs forth every four years. You see, it all goes with the overall theme for this convention: a time for unmitigated gall.
Jon Stewart: But Stephen, to be perfectly fair, aren’t all political conventions manipulative?
Stephen Colbert: No, Jon, to call this convention “manipulative” is to call Marcel Marceau “a little quiet.” These people are artists, operating at the peak of their abilities. For example, take Thursday night’s theme: “Fuck you, what are you gonna do about it?”
Jon Stewart: That can’t be right! Stephen, that sounds absolutely awful!
Stephen Colbert: Yeah, but… fuck us, what are we gonna do about it?
The four RNC shows set a Daily Show record, averaging 1.4 million viewers per night, the most-watched week in the show’s history to that point. At least one viewer was watching in South Carolina.
At the 2004 Republican convention, we’re on the floor and this woman says to Stephen, “Who are you with?” And Stephen says, “NAMBLA.” The thing aired, and Stephen gets a call from one of his sisters. “You know that woman you told you were with NAMBLA at the Republican convention? Our kids go to school together.”
Sometimes the punch lines were born of brainstorming, sometimes booze. But the continual tightening of The Daily Show’s routine not only made space for the funny stuff to emerge, but it honed the points being made between the jokes. In the field department, for instance, this meant focusing on two new steps: the “take meeting” and the “elements meeting.”
By 2004, that was when the field pieces really started to have a form in terms of what they were saying and doing that was distinct from just goofy, or oddball, or even just unworthy targets that filled many of the early pieces. Even if they weren’t directly tied to the campaign or politics, the best ones often had a real issue at the center.
It used to be you would just pitch story ideas, the producers would collect pitches, some would get approved and some wouldn’t, and then you’d shoot. Now the producers cull the ones that we don’t like, bring them in to Jon, and then he’ll go through and approve usually about 30 to 50 percent.
They get assigned to segment producers, who start to try to book them—line up people who agree to be interviewed, and locations, finding out what is possible. Most of the pieces die because we can’t get either the specific people involved to cooperate or anyone to cooperate on that topic.
Then a field producer rewrites the piece in their own voice. Usually it’s about one page long. Then we go in for a take meeting.
The take is, “What’s our point of view, and what’s the larger point we are trying to make with this story?” Usually we’re trying to tie it to something in the real world. You can eliminate a lot of pitches right off the bat where the take doesn’t exist. Yeah, Newt Gingrich fell off the stage. That would be funny, but we don’t have a take.
We used to say, how does it make it different than a Jeanne Moos piece? We have somebody now at the show who keeps pitching these sex robot stories and it’s like, yeah, fine. CNN would cover this in exactly the same way, somewhat lasciviously, somewhat mocking the idea of sex robots. But unless we’re not connecting to something bigger, then what’s the point of The Daily Show doing it?
The take is usually about one page long. Sometimes the idea dies there, or Jon gives you notes on it. Essentially, now you’re writing the piece. You spend three days, five days creating what we call the elements sheet.
Elements could be interviews, they could be videotape, they could be sound effects—the building blocks needed to tell a story.
You can read it and you’ll see this is roughly how the piece will go based on preinterviews you’ve done with the subjects. Now we’ve written jokes off of those preinterviews. Much better than a one-line joke is a “run”: Here’s what this person says, here’s the correspondent’s response, here’s what we figured the subject’s response is going to be, here’s the correspondent’s response to that. If you get those, you have a piece.
You meet with Jon about the elements. It can die there for a different reason. If not, he’ll give you many more notes, and then you shoot it.
Afterward, back in the Daily Show offices, the producer and sometimes the correspondent would develop a script from the raw footage.
Then the editor cuts it together. And if the editor is Mark Paone, he tells you what’s wrong with it. And screams at you.
We always wanted to work with Mark. He’s the best.
You do maybe a couple of screenings with the field producers. Then we screen it for Jon. Jon’s notes are almost always that he’s worried about the point. And then, at the end, “Okay, just make it funnier.”
Here’s the frustrating thing. You would spend two weeks trying to make something work, and Jon would come in, and in twenty minutes he would fix it. It always made me angry how often he was right.
You’ll usually do three screenings, and then finally it’s ready to air. If you count pitches, that’s six separate meetings.
Jon was very demanding, and sometimes you just couldn’t get what he wanted with real people. So you would spend hours trying to reengineer things.
For six minutes on the air.
Certainly there were misfires, and there were plenty of field pieces whose highest aspiration was generating wild laughter (see: “Dirty Dancing,” in which Colbert boogies to Van Halen and later, while slow-dancing, grabs a Democratic convention delegate’s ass). But as Stewart continued turning more of The Daily Show’s energies toward relevance, a pair of 2004 field pieces stood out. They tackled two subjects that would become major American issues in the next decade, and recurring Daily Show themes: the hypocritical, divisive arguments over guns and gays.
We did a piece about gun laws in Arizona, and I got a little sassy with this bar owner. It’s a biker bar, a big, huge, well-known, superscary biker bar in Phoenix, and I’m talking to the owner, who’s a big, intimidating guy, and he doesn’t think guns belong in bars. Really reasonable point of view. But because it’s a Daily Show segment, I’m on the opposite side of reason. And I call him a pussy, and he doesn’t like that at all.
And he knows it’s a comedy show and we’re supposed to be having fun, but there was a very primal reflex that kicked in for this guy. This is a guy who does not tolerate humiliation at the hands of a nerd in a suit with glasses. And it took him a second to pull back and remember the context. That was one of the sketchiest moments for me, for sure.
By the way, he was not opposed to bar owners having guns.
The Central Park Zoo had a pair of gay penguins. And our angle was “We can’t acknowledge that there are gay penguins because then it starts to have a ripple effect.” Samantha is interviewing the director of the penguin section of the Central Park Zoo, and he’s saying, “This happens in the penguin community, but it happens in a lot of other animal species. It’s actually very common, and in fact it happens a lot in nature.” I knew that he was going to say that, because we had done a preinterview. So the joke that I had written for Samantha was “Just because it happens in nature doesn’t make it natural,” as though she’s that dumb.
And the zoo guy says in a snooty way, “Actually, I think by definition it does.”
But the other half of the piece was even tougher. There were traditional family values groups that were instantly fighting the idea of “gay penguins,” and Sam interviewed one of their spokesmen.
I only saw Sam upset once. In the middle of the day, we had to have lunch with this guy, and he was so hateful.
Oh, yeah. We had to sit and eat French fries with him at Tad’s Steaks or something. That’s an awful restaurant, and it was a terrible dining experience. I could barely get through my meal. I just thought he was a person putting terrible things into the world, floating disgusting ideas out there that were hurting people. He had a lot of theories about how gay people consume each other’s fecal matter.
Sam’s the nicest person in the world. And she wanted to kill this guy. And then we have to go back to work with him—“All right, Sam, you’re going to remark on how that penguin looks like he might be gay, but that one looks very hetero.” It’s a crazy job, and a testament to those performers, because they were able to wring so much comedy out of real people, who were not saying scripted lines.
You had to be nice to the people you were interviewing. You needed them to continue talking to you. And you ended up spending like six or seven hours with someone who you really, truly, think is disgusting.
I liked them, and I think they liked me, personally. I thought Samantha was a nice person. If you’re a conservative, you expect to be drilled and mocked. I thought the piece was semidecent to me.
The piece was great. I think we accomplished a lot. It was the first piece that I ever loved.
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] This November, voters in many states will decide whether to ban marriage between people of the same sex. But would such laws still leave room for a loophole? Recently Samantha Bee discovered the real effects of gay marriage.
Samantha Bee: [in video, voice-over as we see frolicking penguins] The effects of gay marriage are being felt across the country, in ways we could have never imagined just a few months ago. One of the most alarming developments is happening in New York City, at the Central Park Zoo.
How many gay penguins did you have two weeks ago, before the gay marriage boom?
Dr. Dan Wharton: [Central Park Zoo director, sitting in penguin house] Well, I don’t think gay marriage has anything to do with our penguins.
Samantha Bee: But according to Dr. Paul Cameron of the Family Research Institute, the gay penguins have everything to do with gay marriage.
Dr. Paul Cameron: There is no such thing as gay penguins. This is just propaganda. If you can believe that these are gay penguins, you’re buying the gay agenda.
Samantha Bee: When children see these featherdusters, these flightless felchers, these chum guzzlers, what message does it send to them?
Dr. Paul Cameron: When you have gay penguins, you tell the kids this—you’re saying to them, homosexual activity is everywhere! Even among penguins. You can even get homosexually married. It’s all okay, whatever you want to do.
Are there such things as homosexual animals? Boy, I don’t think so.
Samantha Bee: Then how do you explain Chip and Dale? [clip of the confirmed bachelor chipmunks wrestling]
Dr. Paul Cameron: Ummmm… Our children should not be taught such a silly thing as that there are, quote unquote, gay penguins or lesbian penguins.
Samantha Bee: Hey, I’m with you on the male penguin sex. Deviant and disgusting. But girl-on-girl penguin sex? That’s hot.
Sam’s got a heart, as they say, as big as the great outdoors. Her ability to get in touch with that is I think what made her pieces stand out so much.
Looking foolish in a field piece, especially as the show’s audience grew, left some interview subjects feeling embarrassed or angry, and they’d claim they were unaware that The Daily Show was a comedy, or that their answers had been taken out of context.
We don’t take people out of context. We don’t. Sometimes we will take an answer and condense. Sometimes we might even take an answer from a question and use it in a different part, but it’s still what they were saying to basically the same question. The whole point is to sit with people who really believe the things that they believe and confront them with the contrary point of view in a humorous way, and then let them give us their perspective. Otherwise, why not just hire fucking actors?
You would be surprised how much people like just having been on television. After the gay penguin segment, the homophobic guy came back for another piece. I never really could understand it.
I think it’s because in our culture, being on TV proves that you exist. It’s existential. You are alive. There’s evidence of your external existence above and beyond your own consciousness.
Oftentimes, the people who understood The Daily Show best gave you targets, because they were arrogant. They would sit down for an interview, thinking, “I’m not going to play along with your bullshit. I’m just going to get my message across.” And invariably, we’ve done more preparation than they have.
The other thing that they rarely understand—I’m sort of letting the genie out of the box—is that we have, like, two weeks to edit the material however we want when we get back. They lose all control once the interview’s over. Anyway, that’s one way of saying it. We generally get something close to what we want out of the interview. If not, we go back in the edit room and just hack it up so we get something funny.
A guerrilla approach had been necessary during the 2000 campaign. The 2004 version of “Indecision” was more calculated, because the producers and writers now thoroughly understood the talents of the individual correspondents and because Stewart had identified the issues he found worth satirizing. As the Kerry-Bush race stayed close, The Daily Show kept coming back to the corrupting influence of money in politics, the obsolescence of media norms, and the Republicans’ cynical use of cultural wedge issues.
Sam could do anything. Her skill set is very unusual because she could do the broader sketches, or a performance piece, but then she could also do the straight commentary.
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] Throughout the year the public has been subjected to negative, marginally legal attack ads known as 527s. They’re part of the miracle of democracy. And Samantha Bee shows you how to get involved.
Samantha Bee: [in video, smiling and striding through the glass doors of a law firm] Starting a 527 group is a snap!
The first thing you’re gonna want to do is understand the law, because you’re gonna be right on the edge of it. To do that, you’ll need an election law specialist like attorney Cleta Mitchell, who can explain the legal restrictions on what your 527 group can say.
Cleta Mitchell: You can say, “Candidate X is a scumbag.” You cannot say, “Vote against candidate X.” You cannot say, “Vote for candidate Y.” As long as you stop short of that, you can say pretty much anything you want to say.
Samantha Bee: Can I legally say, “If you like pussies, vote for George Bush”?
Cleta Mitchell: If you like what?
Samantha Bee: Pussies.
Cleta Mitchell: No. No. You can’t say that. It’s not the “pussy” part. It’s the “vote” part.
Samantha Bee: What about “John Kerry went to Vietnam—but he went for the whores and the drugs”?
Cleta Mitchell: You can say that. Sure.
Corddry, you could see he would aggressively inhabit characters.
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] With more on the Swift Boat controversy, I’m joined by our senior political analyst, Rob Corddry.
Here’s what puzzles me most, Rob. John Kerry’s record in Vietnam is pretty much right there in the official records of the U.S. military, and haven’t been disputed for thirty-five years.
Rob Corddry: [in “Vietnam,” standing in front of photo of lush rice paddy] That’s right, Jon. And that’s certainly the spin you’ll hear coming from the Kerry campaign over the next few days.
Jon Stewart: That’s not a spin thing. That’s a fact. That’s established.
Rob Corddry: Exactly, Jon! And that established, incontrovertible fact is one side of the story.
Jon Stewart: That should be the end of the story. You’ve seen the records, haven’t you? What’s your opinion?
Rob Corddry: [sarcastic] I’m sorry—my opinion? I don’t have—[ makes air quotes with his fingers]—o-pin-ions. I’m a reporter, Jon. My job is to spend half the time repeating what one side says, and half the time repeating the other. A little thing called objectivity. You might want to look it up someday.
Jon Stewart: Doesn’t “objectivity” mean objectively weighing the evidence and calling out what’s credible and what isn’t credible?
Rob Corddry: Woah! Well, well, well, sounds like someone wants the media to act as a filter! [in haughty, girlish voice] “Oh, this allegation is spurious! Upon investigation this claim lacks any basis in reality!” [pinches own nipples in mock excitement] Listen! Listen, buddy! It’s not my job to stand between the people talking to me and the people listening to me!
Corddry, he’s much more of a punchy personality, and you write for that. Whereas Ed Helms, I think of him as this Jimmy Stewart kind of all-American man of the people.
Ed was very laid-back, and all of a sudden, he would drop the hammer.
Ed Helms: [somber voice-over] Last year, Massachusetts became the first state to allow gay marriage. And critics feared the worst.
Senator Rick Santorum: [in video clip from Senate floor speech] “The breakdown of the family, children being born out of wedlock, and communities and cultures in decay.”
Ed Helms: Now, just one year later, Massachusetts family activist Brian Camenker believes those fears have become reality.
Brian Camenker: The gay marriage issue is destructive on many levels. You have to deal with it in the public square, you have to deal with it in the public schools.
Ed Helms: [deadpan] So the quality of life is decreased?
Brian Camenker: Yeah.
Ed Helms: Homelessness has gone up?
Brian Camenker: I could, you know—
Ed Helms: Crime rates?
Brian Camenker: [puzzled] Crime rates?
Ed Helms: Air quality?
Brian Camenker: [pauses, stares] I mean, let me put it this way. I could sit here and I could probably find some way of connecting the dots from gay marriage to all of these if I had enough time and I did some research.
Ed Helms: Yeah! Why take time to do the research when saying it is so much faster? Besides, the statistics are clear-cut. Now that gay marriage is legal, Massachusetts ranks dead last in illiteracy. Forty-eighth in per capita poverty. And a pathetic forty-ninth in total divorces.
I’d never watched The Daily Show. I thought, “It’s on at 10:30 at night—nobody will ever watch that.” I had no idea what I was getting into. For the interview, they have the cameras looking at me, and Helms reads me a bunch of questions, and I answer them. Then they move the cameras in back of me, so they’re facing him. And he asks different questions from the ones he asked me. It wasn’t really fair. The interesting thing was, the final piece, they were reasonably fair, given the fact that the whole thing was a setup.
That’s not what happened. Sorry. There’s a list of questions we go in with, we flip the camera around, and it’s the same list when we do it on the B side. We never did that. I want to be absolutely clear about this. We didn’t lie or deceive anyone. I remember him distinctly saying, “Everyone in the world is telling me not to do this, but I think I’m pretty smart, and I think I’m gonna do okay.” And he just said all these awful things, which we used.
The Daily Show at its best, and certainly the field department at its best, it wasn’t just finding hypocrisy. It was exposing cynicism. A lot of what was perceived as a kind of an agenda-driven attack on some of the cable channels, like Fox News, was really more about us saying, “What they did in this situation is actually incredibly cynical and manipulative.” Whether or not we agree with the politics, we should at least understand the kind of Goebbels-style information control that’s happening.
The priority was holding people and institutions accountable for things that were preposterous, and things that most of the mainstream media just sort of take for granted.
Or, to put it another way: Applying common sense was often the funniest tactic possible. Certainly that was true when it came to the Iraq War, and how the Bush Administration was tying language and logic in knots. Stewart sometimes found it hard to out-absurd reality: Reading Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book Imperial Life in the Emerald City, he learned that Bush operatives so prized political loyalty that they put an antiabortion advocate in charge of rebuilding Iraq’s health-care system, firing a physician who specialized in disaster zones.
When he couldn’t top the preposterous, the tone of Stewart’s satire became more direct, more disappointed, and often more powerful.
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] We begin tonight with the story dominating the world’s headlines. The situation in Iraq, which we had been calling “Mess O’Potamia,” but as of this week has officially grown into a “Giant Mess O’Potamia.”
The stories and photographs of Iraqi prisoners being beaten with broom handles, threatened with pistols, and doused in acid poured from broken chemical lights are very difficult for all of us to wrap our heads around. Clearly, this is a time for our leadership, starting with our defense secretary, to speak clearly and honestly to the American people about these egregious instances of torture.
Donald Rumsfeld: [in press conference clip] “I think that—I’m not a lawyer. My impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse. Which I believe, technically, is different from torture. And therefore I’m not going to address the ‘torture’ word.”
Jon Stewart: You know, I’m also not a lawyer. So I don’t know technically if you’re human. But as a fake newsperson, I can tell you, what we’ve been reading about in the papers, the pictures we’ve been seeing—it’s fucking torture.
However you choose to characterize what took place—torture, abuse, or, to use deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz’s term, “freedom tickling”—the real tragedy is the damage it has done to our standing in the Middle East. So just how is this playing with Muhammad Q. Public?
Iraqi Citizen: [in video clip] “I’m going to answer this question with another question: How would the Americans feel if this happened to them by Iraqis in America?”
Jon Stewart: We would bomb you. It’s kind of our first response.
Clearly the best first step toward soothing Arab anger would be for the president to appear on Arab TV. Which he did yesterday, giving two separate interviews, one of them with Alhurra, the U.S. government–sponsored satellite network.
President George W. Bush: [in video clip] “What took place in that prison does not represent the America that I know. The America I know is a compassionate country. That believes in freedom. The America I know cares about every individual.”
Jon Stewart: In fact, I would really love for you to meet that America someday. The one that you’ve seen, the bombing one—yeah, he’s kind of a prick. But the other America—very sweet!
You have a friend who is an alcoholic, and he goes, “Hey, you know what we should do tonight? Cinco de Mayo, man! Let’s head out to that bar!” You say, “You’re not supposed to drink.” “Yeah, I know, I just think it would be a good idea.”
You can feel nothing but pride in that person and still want to say to them, “I think being around people wearing ammunition belts filled with tequila, I think that’s going to be a bad thing for you.” What became infuriating when expressing that concern about the war, on the show, was the attempt to shut us up by accusing us of not being patriotic.
That’s when confusion turned to anger. And that fueled a lot of the show, that sense that if we disagreed with what the government was doing because we thought it was disastrous, it would be viewed as somehow not supporting America. The whole bullshit to me was how ridiculously symbolic everybody else’s patriotism within that was, as though by putting on a flag pin and a little bit of Sousa, that means you love the country. To me, that’s what informed so much of what we were doing during that time.
One of Stewart’s core methods for keeping The Daily Show fresh—and to keep himself from getting bored—was to continually find new creative challenges. So covering the presidential campaign and the Iraq War wasn’t enough: Stewart and the Daily Show’s writers would research and reinterpret two hundred years of American history for pointed laughs in print. Work on America (The Book) had started in 2003, with two hundred years of history divided among the eleven staff writers, plus Stewart and Karlin and Javerbaum. Now the Spring 2004 book deadline was closing in.
Why do a book? Hubris, I guess. I was probably thirty-two, thirty-three years old. I wasn’t married. I didn’t have kids. I just felt infallible at that point, there was nothing I couldn’t take on. It was part of that arrogance of youth, the last vestiges of it, I guess.
We were overwhelmed.
We basically did it on nights and weekends.
We spent the entire last week writing a quarter of it. There’s a lot of jokes in there that I like. There’s a picture of Hitler in the Western Europe section, and the caption says, “In many countries, people say, ‘I’ve never seen things as bad as they are now.’ That does not happen in Germany.”
So many of the political books that come out are polemics—how virulently can you attack your opponent? We thought, “Let’s take a step back, take an overview of the system.” A textbook is the least emotional form you could use and still maintain the pretension of sort of academia or news. So the book has the same sort of voice of the show without the restrictions.
You get a little punch-drunk because it’s so many jokes and it’s so dense. We were doing a mix-and-match chart for Scandinavia geographical locations and the event that it’s famous for. So it was “Stockholm” in one column and “syndrome” in another. Every one had an actual analog in a real world topical event, except for Helsinki. We were stuck, it was probably two o’clock in the morning, and one of us, D.J. or me, said, “Rendinki.” We probably laughed for twenty minutes straight on “Helsinki rendinki,” you know? It was just ridiculous. When I think back about the book that’s the moment I think about, that joy of being there, late at night, in a room, just pure writing, in a moment.
We worked really, really hard on it. All the writers, but especially Jon and Ben and I, and while not skimping on the show. Ben did an amazing job producing that book.
America was probably one of the things I’m most proud of, of everything we did. It was topical. It was timely. It felt like it would withstand the test of time. We had one of the best designers in the world, Paula Scher. We had no idea how big it was going to be, but we knew the book was going to be good.
I remember coming home, I guess probably September or October ’04, and my wife was waiting outside, pregnant, and said, “David, you cowrote the number one book on the Times best seller list.” We were number one for fifteen weeks as a comedy book.
We did a signing for America on Union Square, in the Barnes and Noble there, and it was a mob scene. Over a thousand people. There was a Q&A portion, and a woman came up, with tears in her eyes, and begged us to stop making fun of John Kerry because we were too important to the country, and he was too important to the country, that we should never be at odds, and we needed to be on his side 100 percent. I could see, at that point, it’s like, “Oh boy, we’re not just a bunch of kids in the back of the classroom lobbing spitballs anymore.”
And then Stewart, without much planning, seized the spotlight and made it even brighter by dropping the jokes and the subtext to directly attack one of the political media’s more risible formats: the cable-news bipartisan yellfest.
The more the news media got delighted and tickled at how they were being sent up, the more gross it felt. It felt like, “Fuck you, we don’t like you. We think you’re doing a bad job. We don’t want to be your friends. We’re not taking a pose because we figured out it connects with viewers. This show is an expression of what we think of the media, and if you really looked at it, you might not be so tickled. You might actually think, ‘Oh shit, maybe we should change some of the ways that we do things because we’re so easily decoded.’”
That’s a crass version of what happened on Crossfire.
We were in DC, riding high. We did a big bookstore event, a thousand-plus people. An in-store, a signing, for America (The Book). We were kind of giddy off of that. And we had booked the Crossfire appearance.
I remember being in the room before Jon went over to Crossfire. It became a really, really big turning point, but at the time it really seemed, if anything, like a last-minute “How do I spice this up?”
The only time I ever really got in trouble is when I was out promoting, because normally you’re not outside of your studio, and so the machine that digests conflict does not have access to you. We were out promoting America, and I think had been at a book signing that morning in DC. We used to talk sometimes in the writers’ meeting, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I went on Crossfire?” given how much I hated the show. “Wouldn’t that be hilarious?”
Turns out it really wasn’t. Turns out it wasn’t as hilarious as it would be in theory.
Ben and Jon would whip each other up. They shared a lot of interests and frustrations.
I just remember being in the car, on the way to the studio, and talking with Jon. “This is the moment. What are we going to do with it?” We were debating how to get into it, and Jon is an incredibly thoughtful person and really takes pride in being able to deliver what he wants to say in a coherent and funny way. The whole conversation on the way to the CNN studio was about how to do that—and how not to be sucked into being a little toy that they bring on for comic relief.
The idea wasn’t necessarily to burn the place down. The idea was to go on and say, “Just to let you guys know, I do hate your program.” But combine low blood sugar with a show that you truly did not like, and with a guy that I thought was instigating in an incredibly purposefully ignorant way—that instigation is what probably caused it to go into that area.
I’d never seen The Daily Show, though I knew Jon because in 2000 he was always around CNN doing Larry King, and we’d both be outside smoking cigarettes. I thought he was kind of a sparkling conversationalist, intense and genuinely interested in politics—not well-informed, but sincere about it, and pretty funny. So I didn’t have any inkling that he was going to try to make a statement on our show.
I remember being in the green room with one of the producers, watching Jon with Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson. When it started going south, it got real quiet in the green room. Jon started to slowly sag toward the floor a little bit, and I could tell that it was not going the way Jon wanted it to go. But you’re in the moment, and then a conversation takes on a life of its own.
Jon Stewart: [on Crossfire set, seated between hosts Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson] I made a special effort to come on the show today, because I have privately, amongst my friends and also in occasional newspapers and television shows, mentioned this show as being bad.
Paul Begala: We have noticed.
Jon Stewart: And I wanted to—I felt that that wasn’t fair and I should come here and tell you that I don’t—it’s not so much that it’s bad, as it’s hurting America… Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America… See, the thing is, we need your help. Right now, you’re helping the politicians and the corporations…
Paul Begala: We’re thirty minutes in a twenty-four-hour day where we have each side on, as best we can get them, and have them fight it out.
Jon Stewart: No, no, no, no, that would be great. To do a debate would be great. But that’s like saying pro wrestling is a show about athletic competition… You’re doing theater, when you should be doing debate… What you do is partisan hackery. And I will tell you why I know it.
Tucker Carlson: You had John Kerry on your show and you sniff his throne and you’re accusing us of partisan hackery?
Jon Stewart: Absolutely.
Tucker Carlson: You’ve got to be kidding me. He comes on and you—
Jon Stewart: You’re on CNN! The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls.
Tucker Carlson: You need to get a job at a journalism school, I think.
Jon Stewart: You need to go to one.
The thing that I want to say is, when you have people on for just knee-jerk, reactionary talk—
Tucker Carlson: Wait. I thought you were going to be funny. Come on. Be funny.
Jon Stewart: No. No. I’m not going to be your monkey.
Tucker Carlson: I do think you’re more fun on your show. Just my opinion.
Jon Stewart: You know what’s interesting, though? You’re as big a dick on your show as you are on any show.
I am a dick. I think that’s fair. I’m a total prick. I don’t think I’m a dick in my personal relationships, but I was hosting a debate show. So, yeah that didn’t bother me.
When Tucker Carlson challenged Jon, saying, “You’re not any better than us,” and Jon says, “I’m on a show where Crank Yankers is my lead-in!”—I remember that very clearly. It was a moment that Jon became this figure.
I could never fully understand, even years later, his argument against the show. If his argument was the show is sort of mediocre, I was in full agreement with that. But if the argument was, “You suck up to politicians,” well, that’s the only sin I’ve never committed. And I have to say, I found it ironic at the time because I was annoyed by the fact that he didn’t use these awesome opportunities he had to ask real questions. It was pure projection. He had just fellated John Kerry on his show and really kind of let his viewers down, and you’re saying I’m a suck-up?
Jon was never brave enough, really, to challenge the unthinking assumptions that his audience had, and that made them feel morally superior to everybody else. He never had any balls.
Carlson was so out of his league. But the reaction to it was truly mind-blowing. What we thought was a low point—maybe we’d gotten a little full of ourselves—the fact that people had the exact opposite reaction was genuinely shocking. To this day, if I was trying to list a bunch of amazing things that we did, I wouldn’t remotely put Crossfire in the top of anything. I guess because Jon had the capital to spend, the reaction wasn’t “Shut up and be funny.” It was “Thank you for saying that.”
I remember the moment, and this is obviously long before I was ever on the show. I was sitting there working on something on my dining room table. Jon was on Crossfire just eviscerating Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson. I had the TV on specifically so I could find something to distract me from actually working, but in this case it was really worth it. Jon is saying, “You guys are doing theater, and it’s bad for America.”
And Tucker telling him to tell a joke, and Jon saying, “I’m not your dancing monkey,” was just this one-two punch of principle that I think defined what attracted people to Jon, and it was a principle that Jon was figuring out for himself at that time.
I had to go host a dinner after the taping, but my assistant called and said Jon wouldn’t leave. He was backstage for an hour and a half waxing on about his political views to Paul Begala.
Well, I wanted him to know that there was a foundation behind what had just happened. That it wasn’t a random act of sabotage or anarchy. I didn’t just come in and go, “Hey, do you mind if I take a shit on your drink table?” There was actually a thought behind it that was interesting to me about what political debate was and what television could be, and what news shows were.
And that was the day TV news got better.
Clips of Stewart’s Crossfire appearance became an Internet hit, even though video-file sharing was still cumbersome—a combination that helped spur the creation of YouTube. Well, along with huge demand for video of Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction.”
When Jon went on Crossfire I was a PA at the time. I remember watching that in the office and thinking, “Well, the show’s been going good for a while, but this is when we stop being popular. Jon’s gone too far here.” But he hadn’t. I constantly thought that we were on the crest of the wave when in actuality there was a lot more yet to come.
Including the cancellation of Crossfire. Four months after Stewart’s combative appearance, CNN president Jonathan Klein shuttered the show, saying, “I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart’s overall premise.” The Daily Show didn’t really need or want the help, but CNN’s reaction made Stewart even more of a force inside the Beltway.
In 2004 I was on the 9/11 commission, investigating the attack on the World Trade Center. Shortly before we went to the White House to interview President Bush and Vice President Cheney I was on The Daily Show, and talked about how the administration had been uncooperative. The next day, on the Senate floor, I got a note from Senator Roy Blunt, claiming it was undignified to talk about the commission’s work on a comedy show. I was smiling when I got the note. It’s part of being a Republican senator. Defending your guys. But I would say Jon Stewart is at least as dignified as all one hundred members of the United States Senate. And I have a high regard for the Senate.
It was proof of The Daily Show’s relevance. And I wouldn’t even say it’s backhanded proof. I mean, Blunt doubled up his fist and took a shot. He was worried that if they didn’t respond, that whatever I said might have more credibility and might damage President Bush and Vice President Cheney.
Jon had a lot of impact in Washington. Especially with the introduction of YouTube and the ubiquitous deployment in Washington of social media. I don’t think politicians worried that they were going to get thrown out of office because they did something to displease Jon Stewart. But I do think that he affected the debate.
There were two times when it really hit me that, “Oh, people are paying more attention to the show than I thought,” and it got in my head a little bit. The first was after we won Emmys in 2002, and it felt like we had to live up to them. The second was the reaction to the Crossfire thing. People were not necessarily accustomed to having something amplified through social media. That was a really strange feeling.
You just have to remember, “Oh, right. I have to make my decisions exactly the same way,” which means that we’re going to put in this ridiculously absurd scatological joke without the concern that it will be looked down upon by those who have bestowed upon us this title. You had to let yourselves just be free.
One aspect of the outside world that Stewart allowed to shape the show—indeed, an element that he actively sought out in greater, firsthand detail—was the experiences of American soldiers. Because even as the campaign horse race was gobbling up media attention, the grisly toll of Operation Iraqi Freedom was soaring, with 849 U.S. men and women killed and more than 8,000 wounded in 2004.
We tried to be thoughtful because of the material that we were working on, not because of the reach of the platform. It’s one of the reasons why, after the Iraq War started, I started going to the VA hospital. I wanted to know what I was talking about. I wanted to know the people involved in this. But that’s what had the impact, not “Your show is in the political conversation.” The subject matter dictated the approach much more than the external effect, or not effect. I was talking about the war on the show. We were making satire, and I wanted to know what those guys who fought the war thought.
So I went to Walter Reed [Army Medical Center] and Bethesda [Naval Hospital]. That started relatively early on after the Iraq War started, 2004 maybe. There was a woman named Elaine Rogers who ran the Washington USO. I’m going to be making jokes about the war every day, and I want to have a sense of what it is that I’m talking about from different perspectives.
If you didn’t have a point of view or an intent in your first draft of a Daily Show script, Jon was pretty good at making you think about “What is the real irony here? What do we really want to say with this piece?” For me, personally, it was always a bit of a triumph when you came up with a dumb, goofy sight gag and Jon wanted to do it. Like during the 2004 campaign, one of the candidates, Wesley Clark, said that Journey’s Greatest Hits was his favorite album. So we wrote a bit where we played the clip of Clark and then Jon said, “Okay, now we’re going to check out Wesley Clark’s campaign rally,” and it was two of our interns slow-dancing under a disco ball to “Open Arms,” like it was their prom. It sounds so stupid when I say it, but…
The tone of The Daily Show could be sarcastic and adversarial, but it generally wasn’t cynical or snarky. The show cared about stuff and it didn’t simply give up. It didn’t have the point of view that the world is just fucked up and it’s unsalvageable, so LOL, nothing matters and we might as well laugh about it, you know? The humor was always from a point of view that held out a hope that the world could be improved, and I think that tone was essential to its success.
My husband worked as a producer at Dateline for nine years while I was at The Daily Show. When he left NBC, in 2005, he said to me, “When I first started at Dateline, we were the news and you guys were the jokes. And then by the time I left, you guys were the news and we were the joke.”
Through the mid-2000s, as the Internet and cable TV eviscerated the business model of major network news divisions, politicians eagerly exploited the media chaos, and the peddling of truthiness and outright dishonesty ran rampant. The Daily Show’s main mission remained comedy. But Stewart became more determined to fill the media-credibility void, shifting The Daily Show’s emphasis even more toward holding politicians and the press accountable.
Often those reality checks came in small doses. For instance, during the 2004 campaign, The Daily Show played a clip of Bush jabbing Kerry on taxes by saying, “The rich hire lawyers and accountants for a reason, to stick you with the tab.” Stewart then said, “Let me get this straight: Don’t tax the rich because they’ll get out of it? So your policy is, tax the hardworking people, because they’re dumb-asses and they’ll never figure it out?”
When it came to Fox News, Stewart had a queasy respect for Roger Ailes’s creation, for how entertainingly and relentlessly it could deliver a partisan narrative dressed up to look like news programming. Fox’s right-wing truth-bending, however, drove The Daily Show crazy.
You could say, “Yeah, Fox was really good at what they were doing,” I guess in the same way that you can admire cancer, because it’s a really effective killer. But Fox wasn’t good for anybody. It wasn’t even good for their cause.
Bill O’Reilly had twice been a Daily Show guest, and in September 2004, Stewart returned the favor by making his first visit to The O’Reilly Factor. “You know what’s really frightening?” O’Reilly told him. “You actually have an influence on this presidential election. That is scary, but it’s true. You’ve got stoned slackers watching your dopey show every night and they can vote.”
Stewart took the line as it seemed to be intended, as a joke—mostly. And The Daily Show’s tone toward Fox was often still playfully mocking—never more so than when the words of Sean Hannity or Ann Coulter were read by a panel of children in a segment called “Great Moments in Punditry.” But The Daily Show was devoting an increasing amount of time to dismantling Fox’s skewed point-of-view, and doing it with a harder edge.
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] The Republicans see the economy one way. The Democrats seem to see it another. I wish there was somebody to tell us who was right.
Chris Wallace: [host of Fox News Sunday, in video clip, sitting across from Republican New Hampshire senator John Sununu] “There are a lot of charges flying back and forth right now, and it’s frankly hard for the layman to understand what’s right and what’s wrong. So let’s try to have a truth squad, if we can here.”
Jon Stewart: Oh, a truth squad! Oh, oh, oh my God, I think my nipples are hard. A truth squad! A nonpartisan exploration of what’s real, of who’s telling the truth! Please, have at it.
Chris Wallace: “So let’s try to have a truth squad, if we can here. Senator Sununu, tell me the three worst things about John Kerry’s economic policies.”
Jon Stewart: [after long, dumbfounded pause] You know, it’s questions like that that almost make a man lose his faith in Fox News truth squads.
One of the main, early things that Jon would pick up on was, “Fox is saying that their opinion people only say this stuff during these opinion hours. No—in the news hours, they echoed the thing that Hannity said last night.” And we’d find the clips to illustrate that.
It’s now pretty much widely accepted in the media that Fox News is a conservative news outlet. But I’m old enough to remember when that was a controversial thing to actually come out and say at a mainstream organization, because Fox’s party line was, “No, we have conservative commentators, but we play it down the line when it comes to our news reports.”
The Daily Show did a lot to change that narrative and change that perception in the larger consciousness. They would do video essays and compilations to show how interviews and statements made during Fox News’s straight news programs would feed into the controversies that Fox’s conservative commentators would then argue about in prime time, or conversely, inflammatory statements that Fox’s conservative commentators and their guests would make in prime time would become the “People are saying such and such” fodder for their straight news shows during the day. It was a great critique, often using Fox against itself. And no one disputes that Fox is conservative anymore.
In 2004, Stewart’s viewership was double that of MSNBC’s Hardball, but it wasn’t just the raw numbers that gave The Daily Show influence. A large portion of its audience was young, male, and politically aware—a demographic that politicians found hard to reach.
Let’s face it, cable doesn’t deliver the biggest absolute number of eyeballs on a good day. But is the show going to be influential? Is it going to be noticeable? Are people going to talk about it? I mean, that’s what I wanted from Jon and The Daily Show: cultural heat. Comedy Central wasn’t as loud a brand as MTV or Nickelodeon. Jon kind of dragged the network up with him, frankly.
And for all the growing acclaim and ratings—they would climb 14 percent during 2004—The Daily Show remained a remarkably unpretentious, low-budget operation. Correspondents wore their own suits. Props were improvised.
The guest entrance was this low-ceilinged hallway with a broken coat rack and a fly strip hanging from the ceiling, which was stained acoustic tiles. The show’s gift bag for guests back then used to have a big bottle of vodka in it. Christopher Hitchens was on the show and he was there with some college students, girls that I guess were students of his, and he walks in and just immediately opens up the vodka and starts pouring it.
To Stewart, the value of The Daily Show’s success wasn’t political influence, but the leverage to add news weapons, in the form of talent and technology.
As long as we were selling enough beer we knew we’d stay on the air. The thing I always said to the writers and correspondents was, “When you leave this show you leave with no friends but this room.” It just has to be that way, so that we didn’t bow to external pressure. I never had to go to those parties, and sit at those tables, and make nice with those people. It always felt like, “If we have access to powerful people, great. If we don’t, great. Who gives a fuck? Green screen’s our friend.” We can find a picture that resembles the place we’re supposed to be and we’ll still have fun. We were parasitic on the political-media economy, but we were not a part of it.
Washington is very similar to Los Angeles in this way. In their insularity, they don’t realize that not everybody runs on their currency. So when I went and did the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, in 1997, and they said, “Man, you better be careful, you saw what happened to Imus,” I said, “Imus added, I think, fifty stations.” “Yeah, but people in Washington were really mad at him.” “Yeah, but he doesn’t give a fuck about that because he doesn’t work here, and he’s not running for reelection.” They do not recognize that. They view their economy as paramount to everybody else’s interests, when it’s not. That’s what they never understood about us, that we didn’t actually run on that fuel.
I used to get calls. I would get a lot of, “Could Jon come to my fund-raiser?” Jon, from day one, said, “I will never endorse a political candidate overtly for the show, or even behind the scenes.”
Offers for commercials? All the time. Everything from American Express to Microsoft and Apple. Jon’s never done one and wouldn’t. So I used to kid around with him. I used to beg. “Jon, do my kids have to stay in public school? This is not right. One day’s work. Come on, baby! I get a million dollars in commission, Jon. Just one.”
Now people, major politicians and stars, were coming to us volunteering to be guests on the show. But Jon still wanted a very different mix of people, people he cared about talking to. The ones that didn’t go well were the celebrities who were just selling something. The worst was when Jennifer Love Hewitt came on to promote Garfield, the movie. I know Jon felt badly about how he treated her.
I had to escort Jennifer Love Hewitt after the interview, and opening the door for her to the studio, she had tears coming down her face as she walks out.
The show’s ascent in 2004 brought new scrutiny and raised expectations. Even fans of the show, for instance, were underwhelmed by Stewart’s softball questioning of Kerry. But that letdown was nothing compared to the disappointment on election night.
It started with all these exit poll rumors that Kerry was going to take it. Then, by the end of the evening it hadn’t gone that way at all. Yeah, we were just feeling crushed, because of the whipsaw as much as anything else.
I have pictures from the 2004 Daily Show election night party. It was morose.
We couldn’t believe, from where we were sitting, that the country—or Ohio, which was really what mattered—was continuing to buy this bullshit, not just to buy it, but to embrace it.
It was also sad because it was a realization that we have to deal with these assholes for four more years, just on the level of making a show. It wasn’t a casual affair so much anymore. It was more like sustained, genuine anger. We would still be looking to make things funny, but it was funny coming from a bit more concerted place of… fuck.
The Daily Show’s election night coverage ended at 11 p.m. on the East Coast, too early to make the results official. But Colbert and Stewart managed to capture the mood—while also being remarkably prescient about the near future, both the country’s and their own.
Jon Stewart: Stephen Colbert, it’s been a long night… clearly we are gonna have to get off the air soon. Do you have any final thoughts?
Stephen Colbert: Yes, Jon. For years our country has been torn apart by politics that exploit our differences rather than celebrate our common values. But tomorrow morning, regardless of who wins this election, we’ll be faced with an opportunity to come together as a nation. This is an opportunity we must reject.
Look at the facts. After decades of apathy, this election, filled with partisan rancor, marks the highest voter turnout since 1968, when our country was also bitterly divided. The biggest mistake we made back then? Quelling those street riots! They were just America’s way of letting democracy know it cared.
It’s too late to turn back. Ours is now an anger-based economy! I see a glorious tomorrow where hybrid vehicles run half on gasoline and half on seething hate! I call it rage-o-hol! Join me in the future, for the future belongs to the furious.
Jon Stewart: Very inspiring, Stephen.
Here’s the final electoral college votes that we know right now. There it is. [map shows the northeast voting for Kerry and the rest for Bush] It looks very red, and there’s some blue there at the top where many of us will most likely spend the next four years, I would imagine huddled together and, in fact, weeping.
It’s been a great night, I hope you guys have had some fun. It’s a great country. We love it.
I don’t think I was ever under the impression that what we were thinking was popular, or majority opinion, or anything else. It was more like I couldn’t believe that this guy, Bush, could make this kind of a botch of a major initiative, the war, and still get reelected.
My favorite thing was Bill Russell calling to try and cheer me up. Bill Russell, the legendary Boston Celtics center. He’s a gentleman, a real gentleman. In the sixties he stood up on issues when it was not easy.
Every now and again, he would call, and just chat. Said he was digging what we were doing, and don’t get down, and keep on keeping on. Like he was giving a pep talk, a halftime talk from when he was an NBA coach.
The election night show in 2004, you could see Jon just being crushed by Bush being reelected, but even more than that, by all these anti-gay-marriage amendments and referendums that were being passed in different states. It was a really depressing night, and that hits me as a turning point in realizing, “Oh, there’s a lot of people in this country who don’t want it to move in the direction we do.”
At work after that Jon was just like, “I don’t want to do another show like that.” From that point on I wonder if Jon felt a little bit more—not activist, because we were always very careful not to be too activist-y. It felt more like Jon started saying, “This show needs to make arguments rather than just point out absurdities. We need to have organized, coherent arguments.” Which became something we did more and more often.