The August 2006 skirmishing over the Daily Show writers joining the Writers Guild turned out to be minor compared to the hostilities during the winter of 2007–2008. The Daily Show was really a bit player in the issues and forces driving the strike: how television and movie writers should be paid for content distributed through new technologies, including DVDs and the Internet. (In one side battle, YouTube, whose creation had been propelled in part by the popularity of video clips of Stewart’s Crossfire appearance, was fighting what would become a seven-year court war against Viacom, The Daily Show’s corporate parent, over copyright infringement.)
Twelve thousand Writers Guild members went on strike nationally. Yet the three-month walkout became a disproportionately emotional test at The Daily Show—because of the business and political issues involved, but largely because of the personal bonds that existed between Stewart and the show’s staff.
It was tense. All one hundred people in the building had always been working together, and now this was something where this group, the writers, is separate. It was unavoidable, and people intellectually knew that, but emotionally it’s difficult. I was the fairly new head writer at the time, and that sucked.
The strike, that felt like the worst time at the show. Definitely the low point of the whole thing.
I suddenly had ninety people, the staff that wasn’t writers—and in a lot of ways were as vital to the show as the writers—that had nothing to do with this fight and that could be out of work. Those people were really worried about their livelihoods as well, and I’m responsible for them.
We got to a point where Comedy Central stopped paying the nonwriting staff, and I went to Conan’s office, and all the late-night hosts got together. The five families got together, and we all talked about pulling the shows. The other guys—Kimmel, Leno, Stephen—we talked to on the phone. Letterman was the linchpin. When he said he would do it, that was it. We all went off the air.
The Daily Show went dark after its November 1, 2007, episode. Several months earlier, Stewart had agreed to follow up the best-selling America with Earth (The Book). Work on the new volume had barely begun, but the timing of the book deal turned out to be fortuitous.
I refused to take any producer credit during the strike. I went on strike because I’m in the Writers Guild and I think everything you do as a producer is writing. I wasn’t happy to go on strike. I had to fucking break my lease. I had to move my family down to goddamned South fucking Carolina. I had a new baby.
Jon decided to give the writers their advances on Earth (The Book) the day we went on strike. We all went into the office of his manager and got our checks for our advances, which we all needed. I mean, put this in your fucking book. I needed that fucking money and there was no reason for Jon to give it to us then. Jon hadn’t been given his money then, from the publisher, but Jon gave us our advances—out of his pocket, to keep us alive during the strike. The strike, certainly on our show, was at least more comfortable because Jon Stewart went out of pocket for hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay us our advances on this goddamned book that was a year away from being done.
Jon and I were in communication. We knew that for whatever resentment there might have been, he was also really actually working on our behalf to resolve this thing, at least for The Daily Show, and so we weren’t mad at him. We weren’t mad at the people who worked in the building, certainly.
Jon was put in an impossible position. We were on strike for a while and the crew and everybody was still getting paid. At some point, the network goes, “Okay. We’re not going to pay the crew,” and Jon is very much the guy that people think he is. It’s going to bother him if Charlie the cameraman isn’t getting a paycheck because, by the way, little Ivy League–educated writer isn’t happy with his residuals.
I already respected the man, but this deepened it. All of us on the crew were home for two months and we still got paid. I don’t know how Jon did it. I assume it was out of his pocket.
It was a wrenching decision to go back on the air. I was miserable. But I couldn’t keep paying them, you know? I paid as much as I could and I’d given the writers money as well, but there’s only so much you can do.
David Letterman reached a deal with the union and went back on the air January 2. Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno came back that same night, but without their still-striking writers. Stewart’s return on January 7, though, drew more controversy: How could a liberal icon break solidarity with the union strikers? In some ways it was a compliment, but one Stewart would have gladly done without.
When he went back on the air it was as the host of A Daily Show, to further distance the bare-bones production from the real thing. The title change was hardly necessary. The only thing viewers needed to see was Stewart’s doleful expression during the twenty-two writer-less episodes.
What stayed hidden were the bitter feelings behind the scenes. The strike divided friends—not over the need to pay the writers fairly, but on whether their loyalties lay with Stewart, the show, or the cause, and over the best means to achieve an equitable end. Javerbaum and Lieb, for instance, friends since college, had both built their careers as writers, and were members of the Guild, but they were now producers at The Daily Show. Javerbaum worked during the strike; Lieb didn’t.
As a writer, I was technically on strike, but as a producer, I had to be there, at the show.
If your union goes on strike, I don’t care if you’re Mahatma fucking Gandhi and it’s the Union of United Hitlers of America, you go on strike. That’s how unions work.
To everyone’s relief, a settlement seemed to have been reached at the end of December. Only to have the rancor be heightened and extended.
Letterman made a deal with the union and went back before everybody else did. Jon was able to get Viacom to agree to the same terms. Obviously, the Daily Show writers were fine with it. Jon worked hard on that, and he stuck his neck out—and the Guild wouldn’t go for it. Letterman owned his show. Whereas Comedy Central owned The Daily Show. So, the Guild had a legal reason for being willing to do a carve-out with Letterman, a one-off show, but not with one of the main signatory companies, Comedy Central.
That was an awful time, and I don’t like being the bad guy, and I felt like the bad guy. I felt the writer staff looked at me like the bad guy, and that hurt a lot because I didn’t feel like it was fair. I felt like I had really worked very hard to protect their interests and also protect the interests of the other people that worked on the show, and had done it and had lost not because Comedy Central was being ridiculous, but because the Guild decided for some reason to say no.
I don’t think it was about money for Jon. I think it was about control. The same creative instinct that drives him to go over every word in the script and redo it if necessary is why he wanted to have complete control of how the show works. He wanted to have The Daily Show be his thing from top to bottom. And also he felt that he was really taking care of everybody, that he was sort of the father figure.
I think that’s a false analysis. Jon is a naturally benevolent person, and it bothered Jon to be told you’re not being fair to the writers.
I remember walking up away from a picket event of some kind with Jason Ross and saying to him, “I don’t know what it’s going to be, but when we get back after this is settled, there’s no way that things are going to be the same.”
I think some of the writers never forgave me. I think some of the staff never forgave the writers.
After the strike, there was a meeting at Busboy, my production company, with the writers and the producers to clear the air. And it took some clearing. You know, people were upset. Like, it was no bueno. Feelings were really raw. Honestly, I think we all felt betrayed by each other in a sort of a profound way. Where unfortunately everybody thought they were doing the right thing.
I gave them all money, the writers. And not one of them sent me even an acknowledgment. I remember when that came up in the meeting after the strike was settled. I was like, “Not even a word?” and one of the guys going, “Well, you know, we don’t have your e-mail.” All right.
That was a rough meeting, and then we all went out and got drunk.
The writers strike had a big effect on the show, beyond the personal stuff. A lot of the shows during the strike came through production. There was a lot more looking for a certain videotape, just to kind of bolster the show. Before the strike, we didn’t lean on the video to drive the content. The content would drive the video. During the strike, the video started to drive the content because there supposedly was no written content.
When the writers came back, it seemed as if the producers thought, “This is working very well, actually. I like the way we’re attacking the stories now.” More power had been given to the production wing. Maybe out of some spite for the writers strike. But also, if you can just step away from how something affects you personally, you can say, “That’s a pretty good idea.”
Two weeks after the strike ended, Jon was hosting the 2008 Oscars. He took the whole writing staff to LA. It was a pretty crazy trip, and just what we needed.
Stewart had hosted the Oscars once before, in 2006. That year he delivered a bunch of funny moments that poked at the self-seriousness of the awards ceremony. There was a written-on-the-spot joke about the winners of best song (“For those of you who are keeping score at home, I just want to make something very clear: Martin Scorsese, zero Oscars. Three 6 Mafia, one”) and a laboriously preprepared montage of gay-ish cowboy clips from classic westerns like John Wayne’s Red River that played off the best picture nomination for Brokeback Mountain. Reviewers were not kind, however. MEMO TO JON STEWART: KEEP YOUR “DAILY” JOB, read the Washington Post headline. “It goes to prove that there’s still a big, big difference between basic cable and big-time network television after all,” critic Tom Shales wrote.
So inside The Daily Show, there was considerable ambivalence when Stewart was offered the 2008 job.
I remember thinking, “We probably shouldn’t be doing this, because if your gig is deflating bullshit, then hosting the Oscars is inherently problematic.”
Yeah, it was weird, the Oscars trips. It’s always weird when talented writers are exposed to natural light. It’s not a healthy environment for comedy writers. Comedy writers should grow hydroponically.
The second time, in 2008, Jon went in with the attitude, “Let’s do the show we want to. We hope they like it, but maybe we don’t care if they like it.”
That was the year with the saddest group of movies nominated for best picture. What was the oil one? “My Milkshake”? The Daniel Day-Lewis one. And it was No Country for Old Men. Every movie was dark and sad and dark and sad.
We had written up a bit for Javier Bardem to open the show, as that character from No Country.
He agreed to do this whole bit with us, with Jon and him and the cow gun. They would do the coin flip and Jon would say, “And so I get to host the Oscars?” This was a big thing for us, and Bardem bailed on it.
It was very last-minute, so we had to scramble. And as part of a sincere apology they sent a fruit basket. It was more like an edible arrangement. An edible arrangement is never not a joke. If you send an edible arrangement and it’s not a joke, you should really up your game when it comes to gift giving or apologies.
We come into the writers’ room one day and it looks like someone went to Associated and there’s like nine pieces of cheese and it’s sweaty and it’s got toothpicks in it, and there’s a card, “I’m so sorry I couldn’t do the bit. Javier Bardem.” Really cool, Javier. So that became a running gag the whole week.
During the Oscars broadcast, Stewart again landed some good lines (“Normally, when you see a black man or woman president, an asteroid is about to hit the Statue of Liberty”). Yet after the searing writers strike, the Oscars show itself became secondary to the chance it provided to repair relationships inside The Daily Show and start fresh on “Indecision 2008.”
On that Oscars trip, it’s the Japanese dinner that’s the classic story.
Oh, the sushi place. Well, Steve Bodow, who’s a total foodie kind of guy—
Right. So… it’s not my fault. We’re out at the Oscars. The night before the actual event, Jon decides he wants to take everybody out to dinner, which was great. We’d been working together real hard. It was going to be the first time when we’d all been out, since the strike, in any sort of celebratory way.
Jon knew that I was restaurant guy, and so he came to me and he said, “Where do you think we should go?” I was like, “What do you feel like eating?” And he said, “I don’t know, maybe sushi. That’s supposed to be good in LA, right?” I said, “Yeah, I think it is.” And I had a friend who was an editor at Bon Appétit out there.
I think the restaurant was on Melrose. We get there, it’s incredibly over-chic LA. It’s all white leather banquettes, and rococo lighting, and it’s a bunch of comedy writers from New York, and Jon in particular is very down-home, in his T-shirt and khakis and boots. We’re all dressed like the writer slobs that we are.
Even by comedy writer standards, Jon dressed disgustingly.
Jon really likes to be comfortable. For his fiftieth birthday, we got him the same exact outfit that he wears every day. Khakis, gray T-shirt, and the boots, the whole thing. I call it his cartoon character outfit, because in a cartoon, the character wears the same thing every single day.
The restaurant starts bringing food out, and it is the most haute silly parody of what fancy restaurant food could be, with portions all the size of thimbles, sushi and sashimi cut up into little tiny pieces, weird little vegetable stuffers. It’s course, after course, after course.
We were eating, like, garnishes.
Jon’s style is to go to a hoagie place and eat a hero and go home. I used to have arguments with Jon about yellow mustard. Like, “How do you eat French’s mustard?” He’s like, “It’s the best mustard!” and we go, “It’s not even mustard! It’s a yellow liquid! Mustard has to have grain in it. You’re a Jew! Eat deli mustard!”
It was like a show—a fish show. They bring out sea urchin delivered on a sloped plate. Here’s how you eat it: You go down the slide with your fingers, grab the urchin, flip it twice, and just lick it.
The capper is when the waiters bring, for everybody at once, these glass domes with smoke in them. You see the smoke swirling around, and maybe in there, somewhere, at the bottom, is a little bit of food. Maybe. And then the waiters all coordinate and they lift everyone’s dome at the same time… it’s tuna sashimi that has been smoking in hickory hay or something like that. You’re supposed to inhale the smoke and then eat the sushi.
The room fills with all this smoke. Everyone’s coughing and trying to find the little filaments of food that are in there.
It really looked like memorabilia from a fire more than it did anything else. We laughed our balls off at that place.
Everybody in our car was still hungry after the Japanese meal, so we went to an In-N-Out Burger drive-thru on our way back to the hotel.
I wasn’t in the In-N-Out car. I was too full of hay-smoked designer sushi and shame.
After the strike people were mad at Jon, people were mad at me probably, the producers were mad at the writers, the writers were mad at the producers. And that trip, it felt like all it took was Jon lifting that glass off the smoke, and we’re laughing, and we’re all good now, right?
Maybe not completely. But good timing once again came to The Daily Show’s aid.