Bush’s second term supplied plenty of farce—from the Texas hunting trip where Cheney shot a friend in the face to the Baghdad press conference where the president dodged two shoes hurled by an irate Iraqi. But it wasn’t necessary for The Daily Show to become heavy-handedly “activist” in 2005. The administration’s attempts to paper over serious tragedies and outrages with “info-ganda” handed The Daily Show the raw material to build stronger arguments.
Overseas, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged bloodily on. The mainstream American news media had become much more skeptical in its coverage, but it was still in the middle of a massive transition, losing nearly one-third of its audience during the decade. In 2005, Peter Jennings, dying of cancer, left ABC after twenty-two years as its news anchor; Dan Rather, embroiled in a dispute over his reporting about Bush’s National Guard service, departed the CBS anchor desk after twenty-four years.
But the most important changes weren’t about ratings. They were about the contours of the political-media culture. With the breakdown in authority of traditional news sources came more sensationalizing and fractionalizing, and less watchdogging of politicians. Washington and cable news grew more polarized along left-right lines.
Stewart pushed in the opposite direction: not toward “on the one hand, on the other hand” objectivity, but toward keeping The Daily Show’s fake news firmly anchored in verifiable reality.
This didn’t just protect The Daily Show against accusations that it was twisting the truth. Facts became a weapon as the Bush White House became more sophisticated in weaving a warped version of what was happening in Iraq or the American economy. “Stewart’s series provided a psychic salve, especially during the worst parts of the past few elections and the run-up to the Iraq War,” wrote New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum. “If you were driven nuts by the twenty-four-hour shouters, if you couldn’t bear to watch any more flashing chyrons and Sam the Eagle gravitas, here was your catharsis. Like Get Your War On, David Rees’s post-9/11 comic strip, The Daily Show became a gathering place for the disenchanted—a place that let viewers know they weren’t crazy… Over time, [Stewart] became not merely a scourge of phonies but the nation’s fact-checker.”
Research chief Adam Chodikoff read seven newspapers and a half-dozen websites a day, scoured the Congressional Record and Congressional Budget Office reports, and assembled a list of trusted academic policy experts to consult, generating ideas for and vetting the accuracy of Daily Show segments.
My motto is, “Without credibility the jokes mean nothing.” I want that on my tombstone.
No amount of credit is too much credit to Adam Chodikoff. The guy has come up with more content and more ideas for content, with the way his crazy brain works, than anyone else at The Daily Show, with the possible exception of Jon.
The Bush Administration was very aggressive about trying to create its own reality, and Jon was pushing back by creating this neat entity, a comedy show that had fact-based arguments. So when Bush appointed Paul Wolfowitz to head the World Bank, for instance, we found some of his most notorious quotes about Iraq—Wolfowitz pooh-poohing General [Eric] Shinseki’s suggestion that we’d need hundreds of thousands of troops, and saying that Iraqi oil revenue would pay for reconstruction and relatively soon. It definitely showed how badly the administration screwed up, and Wolfowitz was now being rewarded for it! Another personal favorite, from later, was from Cheney’s interview with Martha Raddatz—she mentioned how Americans were opposed to the war, and Cheney said you can’t go by public opinion. And then I found a Cheney clip from earlier in the war where he’s citing favorable Iraqi polls.
After The Daily Show’s morning meeting settled on a set of subjects for that night’s show, Chodikoff would assemble stacks of background material for the producers and writers, including two new hires who arrived as the second term of the Bush era began.
When I was hired the writing staff was all men, so when they interviewed me for a job, they asked me a lot of questions about how I’d handle being the only woman. But I think it was more about my comfort than about theirs. It wasn’t them saying, “Oh my God! A person with different genitalia!”
Actually, the most memorable thing about the interview process was after I’d submitted two packets of material, D.J. and Ben called me to come in. I get there and they were eating lunch, and they both had these steak fries. And they stuck one in each nostril. So they each had sort of tusks of fries while they were talking to me. And I was like, “Yeah. This is the first challenge: ‘Do not acknowledge the steak fries.’” It was really lovely, because that was kind of our goal on the show—ridiculousness central.
I’d been doing this kind of work for almost a decade, first with Bill Maher on Politically Incorrect and then with Dennis Miller. But to be at The Daily Show at the time I was hired, in 2005, was a unique experience because of the currency it had in the national dialogue. And because Jon was the most hands-on of the three hosts, by far. He wasn’t just the talent, he was the editor in chief. Jon was inventing something.
Stewart’s work in progress would soon get a big technological boost. YouTube launched quietly in February 2005. Daily Show clips were perfect for passing around on the web the day after they had aired, swelling the show’s viewership beyond what was captured by traditional Nielsen ratings.
More immediately transformative was The Daily Show’s move, in July 2005, two blocks south and one block west, to a studio at 733 Eleventh Avenue, conveniently located around the corner from Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club. The office space, previously occupied by Emeril (“Bam!”) Lagasse, Rachael Ray, and the Food Network, was nearly double the size of The Daily Show’s previous home and was laid out newsroom style, with Stewart’s exposed-brick private office at one end opening onto a floor of staff cubicles. The street-level studio was bigger, too, accommodating an audience of 216. Less happy was the set redesign: Cold and austere, it made Stewart look as if he were sitting inside a two-dimensional book.
The awkward on-air look was a coincidental reflection of backstage tensions. As the show started jousting with a second Bush White House term, The Daily Show’s success and maturation bred a restlessness during what would turn out to be the middle years of Stewart’s run as host. Funny and ambitious younger staffers were itching to contribute more than grunt labor. Veteran writers were looking to get paid more. A charming office romance entered a rough new chapter. And the show’s second biggest star was eager to move on to a show of his own.
That summer the show was moving from West Fifty-Fourth Street to West Fifty-Second, a much bigger, more modern studio. Ben said they wanted to expand what at the time was called postproduction. Now it’s called studio production, and both names are totally incorrect. It’s the department with the producers who collect the footage, work with the writers on getting the right material for the headline, then take the scripts and work with the editors who actually produce it.
At the time it was three guys. It was Rory, Lowitt, and Ari Fishman. And Ben said, “We want to do more with footage. We want to make that more the core of the show. We’re going to need more people, so we’d like you and Jimmy Donn to join as associate segment producers.”
The summer of 2005 included another milestone: The wedding of Jen Flanz and Rory Albanese, who’d both worked their way up from entry-level jobs to become not just valued senior producers but crucial elements in the internal culture of The Daily Show.
In college at SUNY Binghamton I made a pact with myself: I will get a job in TV no matter what, because I am not going to law school. I really didn’t know what The Daily Show was. I looked it up the night before my interview. They hired me as a production assistant in January 1998. I ran the scripts around.
I was just an upper-middle-class white kid from Long Island who didn’t want to be a lawyer. And I was funny and I was too lazy to really do anything else.
Jen was one of the people who interviewed me for a job in 1999. She was in charge of the production assistants. We hit it off right away. We still hit it off.
I had a boyfriend, so that is not why I hired him. He was in love with me. I was not in love with him, okay? I was supervising Rory, and we were friends for a long time. Once he got promoted into a studio production job, I was more okay with it.
We had the best wedding. Oh my God. Stephen Colbert still talks about the food. My parents know how to throw a good party. Elliott and Jimmy were there, Melkmann was there, Lowitt was there, Jo Honig, Dan Taberski, Thom Hinkle, Beth Shorr. Lewis Black pulled up in his tour bus.
Yes. It was badass. Lew rolls deep.
You start working at a place where everyone is twenty-three that becomes your group of friends. That becomes who you date, that becomes who you marry.
Rob Fox and Beth Littleford got married way before us, while they worked at The Daily Show. Then Elise Terrell and Pat King got married. I was in their wedding.
The place was a family, and Jen and I were legally family. For a while.
Meanwhile, Stewart was wrestling with a different kind of family dynamic: how to continue his professional relationship with Colbert. They had been searching for new collaborative vehicles since 2002, when NBC gave the pair a development deal for a sitcom starring Colbert, with Stewart as executive producer. But nothing came of it. In late 2004, Colbert and Dixon met with Doug Herzog, Comedy Central’s president, about signing a development deal and coming up with a spinoff show. The eventual, brilliant solution came about somewhat by accident. But Colbert’s exit turned out to be the first domino in a long, often difficult stretch that would roil and renew The Daily Show during the next three years.
It became clear that we’ve got to find something else if we want to still be working together. So we tried a sitcom about his life in South Carolina. Stephen and I wrote that together and pitched it to CBS, and it didn’t go because, apparently, Burt Reynolds had a reboot of Evening Shade or something. Who the hell knows?
Jon was, at some point, getting sick of being on camera all the time, and they were looking for easily producible, kind of refillable things to bump into commercials with. That’s where “Jon Magazine” came about, and D.J. and I worked on one of them. I think that’s an all-but-forgotten feature of the show.
But they were easy. It was a bunch of graphic stuff, and those would be about a minute and a half. Then, in 2004, there was an assignment to me and Bodow, “Do a minute of Stephen selling this book.” It was just a parody of a Bill O’Reilly commercial, where O’Reilly was selling one of his silly books. It’s just Stephen arching his eyebrows, turning to the camera, and asking the viewer if he or she had the balls to buy his book: “Do you have the balls? Do you?” And he says “balls” about nine times. That was the first time Colbert began to emerge as a conservative blowhard.
The Colbert character that became the sensation, a high-status idiot who was driven by his own narcissism, that wasn’t the character he usually played in the studio. It’s something he would inhabit at times.
We also wrote, in that same batch, something that honestly I liked a little more, with Rob Corddry, called Sunday Mosaic, which was a parody of those Sunday morning public-affair programs. It was basically Corddry, in a dashiki, in a small African hat, trying in vain to interview leaders of the black community. It was never produced. They decided to go with The Colbert Report over Rob Corddry’s Sunday Mosaic. It would be a very different world if they’d made a different decision. So, yeah, something that was produced to make things more convenient led to a whole other television show that ran for a decade.
I think the idea was that we would try and develop him a show that came on after The Daily Show, and that we would use those promos as kind of a template.
Stephen would come by the old Busboy [Productions] office, on Forty-Sixth Street. We just sat in there and bullshitted—here’s the character, here’s some bits. You could tell in the room when an idea is working. You both feel like you want to stand up and start pacing around and throwing shit in.
The Daily Show started with a local TV news model, and in some ways almost like a local TV newsmagazine. The first pieces I did, they were like newsmagazine pieces, with Craig Kilborn as a small-market anchor almost. When Jon came in, it became the equivalent of a network or a cable network anchor show. That changed the role of the correspondent. Instead of pieces about Bigfoot, we were parodying more of the network—or at least the cable network news—self-importance.
That went on for years very successfully. Then we started thinking, “Gosh, the real model here, a new area to model—” and this is how the conversation started at The Daily Show “—is we don’t have anybody doing a pundit show. We don’t have the equivalent of an O’Reilly or a Hannity or a Chris Matthews or other people who hold forth with an opinion on either side of the spectrum.” And so we started thinking about what that means and how that has nothing to do with facts. It has only to do with assurance, and really in some ways aggressiveness. That’s what led to “truthiness.” It was those conversations that we had on The Daily Show, which actually led to promos for a show that didn’t exist. That we did as a joke called “The Colbert Report—it’s French, bitch.” The No Fact Zone came from these promos. We did a few of them and they were popular and people started asking, “When is that show starting?” We actually started making jokes: “A new show that the New York Times has called ‘not real’ or ‘will never be on TV’ or ‘has already been canceled.’” Before we did the bit, Jon had to say to the audience, “This isn’t real.”
So that concept of emotion over fact started with us trying to figure out how to evolve my character.
Colbert was skeptical, as we all were, whether it could be sustained. He’s like, “I can’t do this character four nights a week every week of the year. I can’t do that.” Jon told him, “You can do it and here’s how you’re going to do it.”
Stephen’s concerns were, “How do I make this guy interesting, and in the long term, how do I keep people from utterly despising him?”
The reason I thought it was easily sustainable is that Stephen’s interested in and knows about tons of shit. So I felt like he could always embody the argument as long as he was interested in the subject. The main thing with a character like that is he sets the agenda. He feels the news, and in many ways, he is the news. The character is interesting because Stephen is interesting, and the core of this character is not hateful.
Stephen’s contract was up. He was definitely ready for something else, and so we gave him a development deal. I remember hearing the Colbert Report idea the first time and just trying to wrap my head around it.
We had to fight Comedy Central to get a two-week commitment for it. Two weeks, basically as a trial. We had to push it hard.
I remember sitting up on the roof of our building talking to Doug on the phone. Originally, Comedy Central said, “Well, we’ll do a pilot.” I said, “We’re not doing a pilot. Back this thing.” I knew what we had with Colbert, and I knew where the show was going.
Why was I on the roof? Because I was used to doing stuff on the roof, from the old days of smoking.
Like most things involving the Daily Show empire, I might’ve read about Stephen getting his own show in the paper.
To be clear, nobody owed me anything. But it gets back to the environment, that management-writers divide that might’ve led to some of the mistrust between writers and Jon. Because it would’ve been easy to tell us something. Finding out about things having to do directly with where you work in the press is really unpleasant.
Stephen’s show took our old studio space. We brought in Allison Silverman, who had been at our show, and she started working with Stephen as head writer. Ben started going back and forth. He had a moped, and he was basically commuting between the two shows, The Daily Show on Fifty-Second and Eleventh Avenue and The Colbert Report on Fifty-Fourth and Tenth. Ben was helping to construct the machine that can deliver that character’s point of view, day in and day out, because it had never been tried. The machine had to be built to spec, and so Ben’s experience in that was invaluable.
Stephen and I talked about what his show could be for months before he left, and you’re looking at the person who Stephen wanted to run the show. They wouldn’t let me go. It was flattering.
Jon said, “No, you can’t have D.J.” I didn’t understand how important it was until I ran my own show, and then I went, “Oh my God, I was asking to take his head writer! That’s crazy!” It’s funny the things you don’t know until you know them. One of them is how delicate the machine is that you’re building in terms of your process and who fits what position. As soon as I knew the enormity of what I was asking I apologized to Jon.
Did I want to leave The Daily Show and go to The Colbert Report? It was the new toy. Jon was more of a father figure and Stephen was more of a brother figure, you know. The Colbert Report was a new thing, and I felt a sense of ownership over it that I didn’t feel over The Daily Show, just because I didn’t create The Daily Show.
Colbert is—I don’t even want to say one of the most, he’s the most fundamentally decent man I’ve ever met. He’s a delightful person to talk about pop culture with, and he’d nerd out about Reign of Fire and weird dragon movies. I was fascinated by his Catholicism and how he can reconcile being a progressive, liberal-minded guy on most social issues with a very dogmatic religion. And to hear him speak so comfortably, and eloquently, and knowledgeably about how he can hold both those things, I’ll remember that more than any joke.
Stephen felt very thankful to Jon. He would sometimes talk about how he liked the idea of being of service to Jon, which I think had a lot to do with his thoughts about faith. A lot of Stephen comes down to his very real and complicated feelings about faith. Stephen felt that he worked best when he was in service to an idea or a person.
Stephen was kind of sandwiched between Jon, who was our ultimate boss, and me, who was his most direct employee. I remember him saying that he felt like he was a tool in the hands of two tough Jews.
From the first five fucking minutes of the show, when Stephen says, “I promise to feel the news at you,” it was like a rocket ship on a pad. To their credit, Doug is nobody’s fool. He knows his shit. He saw gold right away.
We just sort of put it on the air, and it was incredible. That thing came out baked. Baked. That’s a credit to Stephen, that’s a credit to Jon, that’s also a credit to the guy who was producing The Daily Show at that point, Ben Karlin.
“Truthiness” came from examining the behavior of punditry when I was on The Daily Show. I played a correspondent who had an ego and an agenda that was mostly preservation of his own status. That goes hand in hand with punditry, because pundits have to have status or why would you listen to them? Status has to be protected at all costs and you can never be wrong. The way to never be wrong is to not worry about what the facts are but to really go with your gut and what you feel is correct, because you will always be correct if you can name your own reality, which is closely related to what Ron Suskind wrote about in The One Percent Doctrine. He interviewed someone who later turned out to be Karl Rove, who is not named in the New York Times Magazine article where this thing started. A person in the White House, the Bush Administration, who turned out to be Rove, said, “You people in the reality-based community”—as opposed to the people in the White House, who were basically going to create a new and better reality with their own will toward truth. I read that and I’m like, “That’s at the heart of punditry as well, because it’s opinion treated as fact.”
Pundits, those people are advocates. As a matter of fact, the guys who protected us when we had our separate shows, Jon’s security nickname was “Educator” and mine was “Advocate.”
The first year that Colbert’s show won the writing Emmy, and The Daily Show didn’t, instead of congratulating them, we sent the writers each a nice dime bag of pot. We were just hoping that this will kill their ambition and work ethic, so they got this big basket full of weed, which I’m sure they appreciated.
I had no involvement with The Colbert Report except for two things. I wrote the Christmas special, and I would write the tosses between Jon and Stephen at the end of The Daily Show, which was one of my favorite things to do. There’s one I like a lot where they played the alphabet game. [Opens phone, plays video]
Jon Stewart: [at Daily Show anchor desk]… Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report. Stephen.
Stephen Colbert: [in split-screen shot at Colbert Report anchor desk] A little alphabet game?
Jon Stewart: But you promised we were through with this.
Stephen Colbert: Continue.
Jon Stewart: Don’t drag me into this, Stephen.
Stephen Colbert: Excellent.
Jon Stewart: For God sakes.
Stephen Colbert: God has nothing to do with it.
Jon Stewart: Ha-ha.
Stephen Colbert: I’m so glad you’ve chosen to—
Jon Stewart: Just stop.
Stephen Colbert: K.
Jon Stewart: Look…
Stephen Colbert: Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should stop.
Jon Stewart: Now, Stephen—
Stephen Colbert: Obviously, you want to quit.
Jon Stewart: Please. I’m having a great time.
Stephen Colbert: Quitter.
Jon Stewart: Really, I want to see this through.
Stephen Colbert: Seriously?
Jon Stewart: Totally.
Stephen Colbert: Understand, you’re stuck with X and Z.
Jon Stewart: Very challenging, I know, but I have an idea.
Stephen Colbert: What’s your idea?
Jon Stewart: Xylophone.
Stephen Colbert: You’re making no sense.
Jon Stewart: Zero sense.
The departures of Carell and Colbert had been expected, but that didn’t mean Stewart had a clear sense of how to fill the two enormous holes in the correspondent lineup.
Losing Carell and Colbert is not necessarily what changed the show. It might’ve been the beginning of the change, because we were still in some ways in that original paradigm. Carell and Colbert were so strong that I think we were looking to try and regain that: “Let’s get two more of those two guys.”
Bob Wiltfong, who was more in the Colbert blowhard mold, lasted a year and a half as a correspondent. Nate Corddry, Rob Corddry’s brother, left for a role on Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 after only seven months as a Daily Show correspondent. Demetri Martin made fitful appearances as the Senior Youth Correspondent before landing his own show on Comedy Central.
The unsettled casting stretch produced one big success: Jason Jones, Samantha Bee’s husband, went from working on a trial, piece-by-piece basis to a prolific ten-year run as a full-time correspondent. It also produced one painful mismatch.
They brought me to New York from Chicago in August of 2005. The night before my audition I sat in the audience and watched the show—Stephen Colbert’s last Daily Show. So we all knew it was imminent, they were going to hire somebody and it was going to happen soon.
A week and a half later, before I’d even moved to New York, I flew out to Seattle to do my first field piece. They don’t bring you in and go, “All right, what can we do to make you comfortable and happy and teach you how to do this job?” They just go, “Do it or don’t. Live or die.” It’s trial by fire.
I came from an ensemble background, at Second City and ImprovOlympic, and The Daily Show, it’s not an ensemble show. It’s a group of individuals that occasionally work one-on-one with Jon. It was a very difficult adjustment, and the adjustment period was nonexistent.
My first field piece was about this guy in Seattle who had invented what he called “bum-vertising”—paying street people a tiny amount of money to wear signs for businesses. Jon came in to view the footage, and it wasn’t what we had hoped it would be. They never are when you first look at them—they’re always a little sloppy. Jon came in and said, “I got a couple notes,” blah, blah, blah. And he turned to me and he said, “What do you think?” And I went, “Jesus, I don’t know.” Because I honestly didn’t know.
And that was the wrong answer at The Daily Show. It’s an award-winning show that’s trying to keep up with itself every year, and to come in and go, “Gee, I don’t know, what do you think?” as an answer is not helpful. And I think that that’s where it started. I felt like Jon froze me out.
Dan is such a funny actor and comedian, but he suffered from the people above not knowing exactly how to harness his voice and his talents. The show was not yet used to having someone who was that different from the Carell-Colbert form. Once it was clear that people weren’t quite sure how best to use him for the show, this kind of disillusionment set in on both sides.
I think Jon was way too smart for my clever little passive-aggressive game of just sit by and watch it happen. Jon’s attitude was, “Not around here you don’t. Around here you chop wood, you carry water, or you go home.”
Stewart himself was displaying that sense of urgency on camera more often. As the outside world became more infuriating and absurd, he was dropping the “anchor” persona and delivering unfiltered anger. In August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Stewart opened the show looking directly into the camera. In later years, the pile-up of national tragedies would leave Stewart drained, and his tragedy reaction monologues would mix rage with a poetic weariness. But in 2005, the tone of The Daily Show still sloshed between grave and juvenile, and Stewart was still loose enough to weave in a couple of jokes of dubious taste as he ripped Bush’s incompetent response to the Katrina crisis.
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] The real question is, in the four years since 9/11, have the government’s advancements, procedures, etc., made us safer, given us more comfort, that they will have a more effective response to catastrophic events? And I think it’s very clear that the answer is, Oh shit, we’re in trouble.
Now, for people who were saying, “Stop pointing fingers at the president, the left wing media—” No. Shut up. No. This is inarguably, inarguably, a failure of leadership from the top of the federal government. I don’t know if you remember this—remember when Bill Clinton went out with Monica Lewinsky? That was inarguably a failure of judgment at the top. Democrats had to come out and risk losing credibility if they did not condemn Bill Clinton for this behavior. I believe the Republicans are in the same position right now. And I will say this—Hurricane Katrina is George Bush’s Monica Lewinsky. The only difference is this: that tens of thousands of people weren’t stranded in Monica Lewinsky’s vagina. That is the only difference. Although, here’s an interesting point: Her vagina, at the time, was also known as the Superdome. [laughter and groans from audience] Do you prefer the Big Easy? That’s fine.
But that is my point. So please stop with the, “Well, people are carping on—” He didn’t even stop his vacation for three days! I mean, please, just shut up.
Katrina happened not long after I started working at The Daily Show, during a week the show was on vacation. There was a strong feeling of anger and frustration—the government is treating New Orleans horribly, how do we hold them accountable? People needed this cathartic voice, and Jon knocked it out of the park on the first day back. And I remember thinking, “Okay, this is why The Daily Show matters.”
The Daily Show returned to Katrina often, and while many of the segments mocked the political blame-shifting game, others showed a new attentiveness to class and race divisions, two themes that would grow as the show matured over the years—and that would put Stewart ahead of the media culture curve.
During those two years at The Daily Show I sat in my office and read Live from New York, the Saturday Night Live oral history, and as I read it I thought, “Yeah, some day, man, we’re all going to write a book. And we’re going to fucking tell the truth, and everybody’s going to know!”
My last three field pieces, in 2007, I just said fuck it. One was outside Mexico City where wealthy Mexicans would pay to have the experience of crossing the border like poor Mexicans. And I truly had totally given up at this point, so I wore a track suit for the piece instead of wearing a business suit like we normally do. I just started taking chances, threw myself into it entirely, and I think at that point I hit a stride.
Thankfully now I can look back and say I didn’t know how to take my balls out of my purse and just go for it. Do whatever you think is right, and at least if you’re trying and you’re wrong, you will have failed on your own terms. But instead I stayed in the middle and said, “Well, I don’t want to disappoint them, but at the same time, I don’t want to try, because if you try and you fail, well, then you’ve got no one to blame but yourself.”
I know for a fact my life would not be a third of what it is—my life wouldn’t be a tenth of what it is—if it weren’t for the experiences I had on The Daily Show. I learned so much about how to deal with adversity.
We are as unimaginative as most people. When Carell and Colbert left, that was when it really was like, “Oh, we’ve got to change the way that we view the correspondents and how they interact with the world.” And the Iraq War had a lot to do with that as well. Corddry and Helms and Bee, to their credit, were able to come in and create something different.
They could do anything. It was me—I had to get out of my comfort zone as far as what the correspondents’ role was, what they mean to the show. I had to reimagine it in a way. The show still had a lot of the patina of, “We’re an alt comedy. We’re that alternative white-boy comedy.” It was Harvard Lampoon, it was everything that late-night comedy had been, that had become the rage.
One of the things I learned from Garry Shandling when I was working on Larry Sanders was the difference between caricature and character. To give you an example, Hank is a complicated character on that show. He’s the second banana. Now, you can caricature him. When you were stuck in a scene or you couldn’t crack into a character, Hank would storm in and yell, “Cocksucker!” and then the lights would come down. Garry was showing us how not to take the easy way out. To look at how character would motivate the scene as opposed to caricature.
The way that applied at The Daily Show was in terms of shortcuts. The early years, we basically dried the well of looking askance. So later we gave the correspondents more leeway to be themselves, to drop the facade and to attack it from a position of, “Wow, what you just said was truly horrifying. How can you possibly, possibly think that?” as opposed to eyebrow up. So, you’re moving them from caricature to character.
Now, there is truth in caricature, but it’s not necessarily very finely calibrated. The simplest version of that is toward the very end of the run where I just made faces and grunted. But that was the thing that you were always fighting—not becoming a caricature of your method.
No matter how much I might have been furious with Jon throughout the years for my own feelings of being “wronged,” quote, unquote, I had to acknowledge the guy’s a fucking genius. You’d show up at 9:30 in the morning and his car was already in the garage, and you’d be sitting there at 10:30 at night doing an edit, and he’s walking down the hall to get in his car. The guy gave his life to that job.
Samantha Bee was becoming a stalwart, but the post-Carell-Colbert lineup was still in transition. Corddry and Helms were tiring of the correspondent pace, and were on the verge of leaving for other TV and movie roles. The show sometimes resorted to airing “Klassic Kolbert” clips to bolster episodes. It wasn’t until a rare overseas road trip by Stewart that The Daily Show stumbled upon the comic who would become the new era’s defining correspondent—and who would eventually become Stewart’s first choice as host heir.
In December 2005, Jon, D.J., and I were in London, doing this big live event for America (The Book) in the West End, and Ricky Gervais was going to help us out, because he was a big fan of the show. We were really looking to kind of expand the types of voices on the show and we asked him who he liked in the UK. Ricky told us about Andy Zaltzman and his partner, John Oliver.
I didn’t know Ricky, had never met him. I’ve subsequently said thanks. He kind of shrugged and went, “Oh, yeah, maybe I did tell them about you.”
The Daily Show wasn’t on TV in England at the time. I used to watch it on the Internet. I absolutely loved it. But as a goal, somewhere I wanted to work? No. I’d not been to America, so it did not seem remotely plausible that I would ever come here and work on the dream show.
I was living in London, planning to go to the Edinburgh Festival and perform. That was how my summer was supposed to shake out, and then I hear that The Daily Show is looking for correspondents. I think I wrote something, I put it on tape, and expected that to be the last of that. Then I got invited over here for a day to audition. I never really thought this was going to end up in anything other than a free day trip to New York, which seemed good enough for me.
I checked in to the Hudson Hotel and the next day walked to the Daily Show office. I ate at Applebee’s, thinking it was a kind of local diner, and then read a couple of chats in the studio with Jon. I remember being pretty overwhelmed just by meeting him in the flesh. It all seemed a bit like a dream. So then, afterward, Jill Katz spoke to me and said, “You should call your agent because you got the job.”
I called my manager and he said, “Well, you need to sign a lease for somewhere. Don’t sign it longer than four weeks, because you’ll get fired.” That’s a very English version of an inspiring coach’s talk, you know: “Protect yourself against inevitable failure.”
He is still my manager. Yeah. He is.
You could see Oliver had a quick wit. But he also has that ability to deliver biting commentary with a little bit of a gleam in his eye so that it doesn’t feel negative or dark. And he’s able to find the humor through performance, which is very hard. So few people have it. Colbert obviously has it in spades, and Oliver just had it.
It happened really fast. I came to New York in July 2006, landed late on a Sunday night, then had gone to work at the show on a Monday, thinking it would be a slow day. Then straightaway, at 9 a.m., it was, “Here’s the assignment.” President Bush had been at a conference with Tony Blair, and there was a live mic situation, and Bush said, “Yo, Blair,” and so we did a chat about that. I’m still jet-lagged, and it was crazy hot that summer, it’s my first day in America, I’m on the show.
I didn’t even have a suit of my own. I went to… where’d I go? It might’ve been Men’s Wearhouse. I think Corddry had told me that you can get cheap suits at Men’s Wearhouse. It was trousers and a jacket that didn’t match. The Daily Show music started, then you hear the audience go, whoa. It was like a loud noise. I’m standing just to the side, waiting to go in front of the green screen, and my knees buckled a little bit. I thought, “Oh shit.”
I went out, and did it, and it went by in a blur, and then I turned round to leave. And there was one audience member in the corner, whose eye I caught, and it was J. K. Rowling. So, I walked past her thinking, what the… there’s no fucking way that’s J. K. Rowling. This is on my first day on the show. It turns out Jon was interviewing her at Radio City that night for the latest Harry Potter book, so she comes round afterward, saying, “Oh, well done,” and I said, “I haven’t been here before, this is my first day.” So she hugged me.
And that’s like being hugged by the queen, if you cared about the queen. I care about J. K. Rowling much more than I care about the queen. She hugged me, and I had round glasses, and she said, “You look like Harry,” and then glided off. For a tired, jet-lagged, overwhelmed man, that was… I absolutely felt stoned.
I walked back to Stuy Town, where I sublet a place, and I remember lying down, thinking, “I don’t really know what just… Is it like this every day there at The Daily Show? Someone like J. K. Rowling is sitting in that corner seat?” And of course, she was never there again, so it was like a vision.
My stuff’s still in storage in England. Somewhere in South London. I have a kind of time capsule of a previous life in there. If there’s ever a South London Storage Wars, do not bid on that locker. There is nothing of any value inside.
When Oliver first showed up, we were told, by Ben, that Oliver doesn’t want to do those pieces where you talk to real people: “He’s not comfortable with that, he just wants to be in the studio.”
And then he started doing field pieces, and he could not get enough. No one, no one, enjoyed field pieces more than him, and he enjoyed all of the miserable parts of it. Oliver’s second piece, he participated in a Civil War reenactment.
It was supposed to be a field piece to do with America’s relationship with war in some way. I’d interviewed some reenactors and then put on a uniform to participate. All that was supposed to happen was I would charge ahead and ruin everyone’s reenactment. What I was going to do is run through the opposing army and just keep going into the woods.
And then I fell. I was wearing dress shoes—Men’s Wearhouse! And it had been raining, so I slipped. I had this bayonet, and I perfectly face-planted.
I got a call from Tim Greenberg, the producer of it, and he was in a panic. “Oliver fell, and his nose is bleeding. I think it’s broken, I need to stop this.” And I said, “Absolutely not. Keep rolling. Whatever you do, roll on it.”
Jim’s response was, “Did you get it on camera?” And Tim said, “Yeah.” And Jim said, “Was it funny?” “Absolutely!” So, then, it became a whole other thing. We go to the hospital and roll on it. That’s Greenberg driving me to the hospital in the segment. Little did I know, he was like Hitchcock. He always liked to put himself somewhere in the frame of his pictures.
I went to the hospital, and they sent the tapes back to the office, so by the time I got into the office, I could hear the echoes of laughter around, and people were going, “Look at this! There he goes again!” watching me fall.
Every reaction everyone had was exactly the one you want them to have, which is, “That looks funny, let’s do more of that. Let’s follow the fact that you’ve hurt yourself like an idiot and see where that takes us.” I thought, “This is exactly where I belong.”
Hiring a Brit was bad enough. What was truly radical for the pinko-liberal Daily Show was bringing in a correspondent who’d been a loyal soldier in President Bush’s regime-changing military.
I feel like an idiot even putting it this way. It’s certainly banal and not insightful, but at the time, it was like, “Oh, yeah, give me somebody who can talk about the war, but maybe with different life experience than just from the Lampoon.” It changed the way we viewed things.
I had joined the Marines after college, in 1990, but I always wanted to try comedy. In 2000 I was a captain and I was going to get out of the Corps, but they asked what it would take for me to stay in the Marines, and I said, If you can send me to Los Angeles or New York, I’ll stay on active duty. They sent me to New York, and I did Marines during the day, comedy at night at the Upright Citizens Brigade, for three years.
Saturday Night Live was my first job in show business. Talk about jumping in the deep end. But that ended after one year, and I moved to LA. In the spring of 2006 I get a call saying, “Hey, they’re doing auditions for The Daily Show and they want to see you.”
When Riggle first got to the show, he was concerned about the mechanics. He’d go down to practice on the prompter in the studio. He’s not a show biz guy. He’s like, “I want to be in this business, and I’ll work to get good.” I’m not sure Riggle realized how good he was. The key for Rob was just to figure out, “Hey, man, you’re funny as fuck. Just relax. Be yourself.”
What’s the biggest difference between Jon and Lorne Michaels? Lorne, I’m eternally grateful to him because he gave me a chance. He gave me a job. My personal experience, Jon was more hands-on, and I was granted perhaps a little more time to grow and figure things out.
I shared an office with Riggle. I was hired as a writer as well as a correspondent, and I had pretty hostile deadlines. If Riggle walks into the office during one of those, you’ve got a big problem, because he is like a six-foot-two-inch baby, so he will have his attention.
I felt I was helping by doing comedy bits. Get the creative juices flowing. He may have felt differently, you know, being a wimp.
The Daily Show was very difficult for Rob to do because he was still a Marine reserve at that time, so sometimes it was a little difficult to have him talk about Iraq or Afghanistan because the president was still his commander in chief, and there was certain shit he can’t say.
Was it awkward at times, being on The Daily Show as a Marine? No. It wasn’t. It really wasn’t. You can hate the war and not hate the warrior. That’s one of the reasons I served—because I live in the best country, where you can stand up and say something. If there was a segment I thought was too heavy-handed, I would either try to work on the verbiage or not do it. Now, did I hear from other people in the military? Sure. “Why are you on a show that’s against us?”
But Jon was great. He didn’t surround himself with sycophants and pound the drum and say the most popular thing the loudest and let the crowd cheer him. He would bring on people from the other side and say, “Well, explain to me why we are doing this.” He would be sincere to the point almost of a student or a teacher. He wanted to learn.
When the protesters in Berkeley started harassing the Marines and the recruiters there, Jon saw the foolishness of that and told me, “All right. Go do a story on this.”
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] One of the downsides of having an all-volunteer military is that you need people to… volunteer. That’s not usually a huge problem—you just have to ask nicely. But some people don’t want to hear the question. Rob Riggle has more.
Rob Riggle: [in video, wearing flak jacket, at antimilitary protest] Yes, the Marines dared to rent office space and open a recruiting center in Berkeley, California. I headed to the front lines to get the story, not only as a reporter, but also as a veteran of the Marines.
With this amoral force refusing to leave their strip mall desks, Berkeley enlisted its own fighting force: Code Pink.
Code Pink Protester: [wearing pink feather boa and tiara] It is our responsibility as the public to shut this station down, to shut this recruiting station down. It’s very important to protect free speech, and so we clearly have the right to be here.
Rob Riggle: If only there were an organization that was sworn to defend that free speech.
Code Pink Protester: Wouldn’t that be great?
It was an odd time at the show because Ed Helms was leaving that week when I arrived, and then Rob Corddry was leaving in three months. A time of odd flux.
The degree to which The Daily Show changed my career can never be measured. It’s like orders of magnitude. But while I was superproud of my work there and my ability to kind of fit into that process, I knew that I could do more, and I really wanted to do more.
And by that, I mean acting. That’s why, about four years in, I really started looking. And eventually, a meeting with Greg Daniels at The Office sort of brought Andy Bernard to life, and that became my next step. I had eight episodes offered to me, which is two months of work. I was pretty sure that was going to be the run of Andy Bernard.
It surprised me a little that when I asked for two months off from The Daily Show to do The Office, that they said they weren’t sure I could come back. It wasn’t Jon.
As The Daily Show’s popularity spawned opportunities for its on-camera talent, it also stirred backstage questions about whether the staff was being treated fairly.
It was a complicated year, 2006. Our show wasn’t unionized, and as far as I know, no basic cable show was unionized at that time, but we had started to have a level of success that was commensurate with network shows, and had won a bunch of Emmys in a row, and we were aware that the Daily Show writers were getting paid a bunch less than our counterparts at LA.
Didn’t have health insurance. We were getting a weekly fee for the forty-two weeks a year we were working. Our counterparts at these, in many cases, less successful shows were getting benefits and a lot more money.
And this was after we had won two or maybe three writing Emmys in a row. Someone on the staff knew this guy named Chris Albers, who was a Conan writer for many years and had just become the president of the Writers Guild [of America]. So, he knew the late-night scene very well and he was gung-ho about organizing the shows. The writers had little secret meetings over the course of a few months about whether to do this and how to do this.
Some of us wanted to approach Jon about it, and others said that if we did that, he would shut us down. And the union recommended, for various legal reasons and strategic reasons, that we organize ourselves first, have the union be our reps, and then present a more formal demand.
I lost my shit, and I remember we had a meeting about it, and I said something to the writers like, “Fuck you guys.” I was so angry, not at the unionization, but at the way it was handled. They’re very high-handed, union people.
In retrospect, we fucked up the communication on it. I was still pretty junior at the time. I was just sort of getting to know Jon. D.J. was the head writer. Ben was the producer. They found out about the whole thing because someone from Viacom called them and said, “We just got this letter, what’s going on over there?”
It felt like a betrayal of trust with the writers. But it was more just honestly a feeling of, “Wait—I’m management?” I viewed us as more of a team, or group, or whatever… and I shouldn’t have. They had to protect themselves. I could’ve handled it much better, too. The writers unionizing was, for me a misunderstanding of emotion, and what my role should be, and what their role is. I needed to understand that they were doing what they had to do for their families just like everybody else, and it wasn’t a personal thing, although I took it personally at the time.
As the thing moved forward, Jon became our greatest ally. He came to see that unionizing was the right thing to do. But that took months.
I went in to talk with Jon about unionizing because I felt torn between my first boss and the staff, and I was kind of being told to choose a side. Jon was not at all angry. He just seemed very saddened by the whole ordeal.
But as I was talking, I burst into tears. This would have been a moment when, if someone hated women or was uncomfortable with feminine emotions, he probably would have freaked out. Jon did not freak out. He didn’t even comment on it. He goes, “Would you like some water?” He gets me a bottle of water, and I immediately started laughing because I was so embarrassed.
And he says, “Yeah, my wife does this, too. The crying-laughing thing. What is that?” This is a very, very good man.
So, too, in many ways, is John McCain—which is probably why Stewart’s feelings about the Arizona Republican were volatile and varied. The arc of their relationship tracked the evolution of The Daily Show’s satire from playful to disgusted. McCain had provided The Daily Show a huge boost in 1999 by inviting Steve Carell aboard the Straight Talk Express. The senator then became a frequent guest on the show, with Stewart praising McCain’s willingness to go against Republican orthodoxy on campaign finance, environmental policy, and torture, and McCain’s boldly explicit condemnation of “agents of intolerance,” including Reverend Jerry Falwell.
Then, in the run-up to a 2008 presidential bid, McCain seemed to be violating his own principles by pandering to the hard right, and Stewart called him on it—gently, and somewhat regretfully, but in a preview of how their previously nuanced dialogue would soon take a sharp turn downhill.
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] Has John McCain’s Straight Talk Express been rerouted through Bullshittown? You know who we could ask—Senator John McCain!
I heard this crazy story that Senator John McCain is giving the commencement address at Jerry Falwell’s university.
Senator John McCain: [on split screen, live from Washington] Well, before I bring on my two attorneys, I’d like to—
Jon Stewart: Don’t, don’t make me love you! Are you really going to Liberty and delivering the commencement?
Senator McCain: I’m going to try to give these young people the same message I give to colleges and universities across the country—serve a cause greater than your self-interest, public service is good, character is necessary. And I’m going to invite you down, because I want you sitting next to Reverend Falwell when I give it.
Jon Stewart: Is that so if the rapture happens during the speech, somebody could be there to clean up all the clothes?
Senator McCain: Exactly.
Jon Stewart: Senator, you’re killing me here… Are you freaking out on us? Cause if you’re freaking out and you’re going into the crazy base world—are you going into crazy base world?
Senator McCain: [smiling sardonically] I’m afraid so.
Jon Stewart: We have great regard for you here, and I hope you know what you’re doing. I trust that you do. When you see Falwell, do you feel nervous, do you have vomit in the back of your throat?
Senator McCain: No, but I’ll give him your love.
Major changes kept rattling through the show during 2006. Javerbaum, the prolific and cuttingly sarcastic head writer, decided he would be leaving by the end of the year to write musicals; his chair would be filled by the more solicitous Bodow. Josh Lieb, who’d worked with Stewart on his MTV show before stints as a writer and producer at NewsRadio and The Simpsons, came on board as a co–executive producer.
On camera, Corddry and Helms, two products of the traditional improv pipeline, had been capably replaced by Oliver and Riggle, a literal foreigner and an experiential outsider. But Stewart wanted to further enlarge The Daily Show’s capacity to tell a range of stories. Larry Wilmore’s motivation for joining the Daily Show cast was different: He wanted to train to host his own show someday.
I had run The PJs for Eddie Murphy in the late nineties, and then created The Bernie Mac Show, and got a lot of acclaim. Then at the end of the second season Fox fired me. So I worked writing on The Office and ran Whoopi Goldberg’s show, but one of my plans was that ultimately I wanted to write a show for myself, or do a talk show. My managers suggested, “Well, what if you went on The Daily Show? That way you could get back in front of an audience.”
Colbert and Corddry had left, Helms was leaving, they were overhauling the show. I met with Jon. We had a great talk—about sports. I left thinking, “Wait, am I going to do this show or not?”
The first piece, the rehearsal went very poorly. I felt as if the crew wasn’t even looking at me—like, if you’re working on a farm and you don’t want to name the animals, because you might have to eat them at some point. We went out to do the taping and I was very nervous. I thought, “Oh man, if this dies like it did in rehearsal, I’m done.” Right before we came back from commercial Jon put his hand on my arm and said, “Hey man, just look in the camera and just fucking give it to America.” It was the best thing he could have told me.
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] As the summer winds down, the fall election campaign is heating up. And recently the topic of race has entered into campaign news. For a closer look, please welcome our Black Correspondent, Larry Wilmore.
Larry Wilmore: [sitting across from Stewart—silently staring at the desk, then up at the ceiling, his expression a cross between pouty and angry]
Jon Stewart: Uhhh—Larry?
Larry Wilmore: [more silence]
Jon Stewart: Okaaay—please welcome our Senior Black Correspondent, Larry Wilmore. [as the chyron adds the word SENIOR to Wilmore’s title and Wilmore breaks into a smile]
And that became our relationship on the show: I would make Jon squirm at these racial issues more than I would take a political position, conservative or liberal. We figured that out in the first chat: Let’s scoop out what the real racial relationship is between us, and it gave us more fertile ground.
That same month, another large step in diversifying the Daily Show lineup came about more by luck than by design.
It was August, I’m jobless and sexless, and I had just found out that my ex had gotten engaged, and I was in that funk that all guys find themselves in where they go, “I just fucked up this great relationship and now she’s engaged and I’m single and jobless. Where’s my life going?” I was sitting on a stoop. I was literally in a stupor and on a stoop.
I was writing a letter to her sort of exorcising all these things I had never said, all that shit that you say to somebody after the fact when it doesn’t really matter. And that’s when my phone rang. It’s my manager’s assistant and he says, “The Daily Show is looking for a Middle Eastern guy and they want you to go down there.” And I thought, “This is the best Homeland Security sting operation I have ever heard of.”
Oh, they probably want me for some fucking brown bullshit. This is going to be either me with a fake beard yelling, “Death to America!” or with a turban sitting on a carpet pretending to fly. And it’s going to be ninety seconds, I’m going to get a couple hundred bucks. So I said, “Tell The Daily Show to go fuck themselves.”
We’d written a chat for a Middle Eastern Correspondent. Except we didn’t have one. So we called a casting agent.
My manager calls me back: “Go in there today by three o’clock. If you don’t they’re moving on.” And it was one of those moments in life that I was like, all right, you know what, I’m going to fucking rally, and I’m going to go home and shit and shave, put on a suit and tie, and I’m going to go down there. And so I did. Maybe one of the best career moves I ever made. Probably the best career move I ever made.
There was Jon Stewart, who I had seen on TV many times, wearing his signature baseball cap and sweatshirt and jeans. I remember saying to Jon, “Do you want me to do an accent?” and he said, “No, no, no, we just want you.” And that was really reassuring. I was like, I love you, Jon Stewart. Because so many times you got asked in those situations to really make it campy.
I got done, Jon turned to me, and he said, “That was great,” and he put out his hand and he said, “Welcome to The Daily Show,” and I was like, “What?” Because jobs don’t ever happen like that. He says, “Do you have plans, because you’re going to be on the show tonight?” Then we had to do contracts and I was like, “I haven’t had any lunch.”
The rehearsal was an hour later. I go out there and they want me to do it again in front of like producers and crew. I’m reading the teleprompter and looking out at the audience, and there’s this dude sitting there with a baseball cap on next to a teenage kid in jeans and a shirt. I’m looking at him and I’m thinking, I know that guy. Then I realize it’s fucking Bruce Springsteen. I come running backstage: “Why the fuck is Bruce Springsteen out there?” Our stage manager says, “Yeah, he just came by to visit, we don’t know.” I was like, “Does that happen all the time?”
That first piece, Aasif fucking knocked it out of the park. It wasn’t even something we were trying to do, but it was like, “Oh, this opens up a whole new avenue for the show.”
In the Carell and Colbert years, we were having fun with broader performances. It started to shift with Corddry, who brought a more sarcastic style. And then the hiring of Aasif really reflected the new, sharply satirical tone. We were mirroring the stridence of the Bush Administration.
As Bush’s second term wore on, he gave The Daily Show plenty to be strident about, besides the war. There was the brief, embarrassing Supreme Court nomination of presidential crony Harriet Miers; the firing of seven U.S. Attorneys by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, to make room for the appointment of “loyal Bushies”; the indictment of Cheney aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby for lying about his role in the leaking of the identity of CIA covert agent Valerie Plame; and the revelation of ongoing warrantless wiretapping in the name of antiterrorism.
All was not joyless, however: “The Dow hit 11,000 today, first time since 9/11,” Stewart said in January 2006. “So I’m just gonna say this to the world—we’re back, bitch. Is there any indicator of a society’s health more important than its stock market. Oh-ho-ho… I guess all of them.” And with the Democrats expected to regain control of Congress, things were looking up, for the country and for The Daily Show. Right?