The past decade had transformed the American media industry. Corporate mergers and restructurings weakened the news divisions of ABC, CBS, and NBC. Newspapers and magazines were reeling as the information-wants-to-be-free Internet destroyed advertising revenues.
One of the few outlets to thrive in the chaotic new landscape was Fox News. It surged into the cable news network ratings lead in 2002 and, behind personalities like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Megyn Kelly, stayed there for more than a decade.
The Daily Show’s hand-to-hand combat with the fair-and-balanced cable network had been intensifying since the 2000 election, but in 2010 it ascended to levels both politically revealing and creatively surreal. O’Reilly, impish and pugnacious, had been an inspiration for Colbert’s Report character; he had also been a Daily Show guest five times, beginning in 2001. In February 2010, Jon Stewart visited enemy headquarters for an hour-long interview on the Factor. He delivered probably the stiffest criticism of Fox News ever to appear on Fox News.
Jon Stewart: Here’s the brilliance of Fox News. What you have been able to do, you and Dr. Ailes, have been able to mainstream conservative talk radio.
Bill O’Reilly: Why wouldn’t John McCain come on this program during the last campaign? Why did he dodge us and not come on if you—if we’re in business to help the GOP? He wouldn’t come in!
Jon Stewart: But you’re not in business to help John McCain. He is not GOP enough for you. You’re in business to help Sarah Palin.
Bill O’Reilly: Dick Cheney! Dick Cheney is to you Mr. Republican! Wouldn’t come on the program!… I just gave you two examples you can’t refute with your propaganda outlet!… John McCain running for president on the GOP side; Dick Cheney, Mr. GOP. Neither man would come in here because the questioning is too tough. So don’t give me I’m a Republican shill. That’s bull.
Jon Stewart: You have become the most reasonable voice on Fox… You have become in some ways the voice of sanity here, which, as I said, is like being the thinnest kid at fat camp. So let’s just get that straight. Here is what Fox has done through their cyclonic, perpetual emotion machine that is a twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week—they’ve taken reasonable concerns about this president and this economy and turned it into a full-fledged panic attack about the next coming of Chairman Mao. Explain to me why that is the narrative of your network.
Some of the tougher exchanges, however, were cut before broadcast.
Jon Stewart: You’ve taken a cyclonic, narrative-driven news organization—a media arm of a political party, of a political wing, and you’ve sprinkled it, you’ve cut it, with a little bit of objectivity, a little bit of Chris Wallace asking a tough question…
Bill O’Reilly: You think that the Fox News Channel is set up solely to provide aid and comfort to the Republican Party and the conservative movement? Nothing else.
Jon Stewart: That’s right. That’s right. And to make some money.
That testy conversation, though, was tame compared to what came next, spontaneously and off camera. After Stewart left O’Reilly’s studio, he was told that Fox News chairman Roger Ailes wanted to see him in Ailes’s second-floor office.
As soon as we walk in Ailes points at the inbox on the corner of his desk and says, “Hey, Jon. See that? You should put your paycheck in there.” Jon says, “What?” And Ailes says, “Because you owe me money for making a career off of taking shots at us. You should be thanking me. You owe me.”
Actually, the first thing Ailes said was a casual pleasantry that read like a threat: “Hey, how you doing? How are your kids?” And he said their names. And I was just like, “They’re… good. Why?” It was a very weird intimate pleasantry that sounded somewhat more ominous coming from him. Did he have a camera on my kids?
It was contentious from the start and it just kept rolling. Two obviously brilliant political minds going at it. They weren’t screaming, but their voices were raised.
Yeah, it was heated. Ailes is saying, “You’re a Communist asshole. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” I’m saying, “You’ve mainstreamed this bile in a way that people can take without it blistering their skin. You found a way to insinuate it into polite society. Kudos to you for poisoning people while they don’t even realize it.”
Jon’s sitting in a chair in front of Ailes’s desk, and I’m on a couch with Bill Shine, Fox’s programming guy. The two of us, me and Shine, just looked at each other, like, “Holy shit.” It was incredibly uncomfortable and fascinating—the two most influential media people on their sides of the spectrum going at it for probably a half hour.
All my points were just that I get what he’s trying to do. That there is nothing more cynical in this world than the slogan “Fair and Balanced.” And I know that what he is doing is tactical and not journalistic.
What I came away with from the meeting was that the anger and resentment and victimization of that network is all broadcast out of the back of that guy’s head, verbatim. His response to me is something like, “You have no idea how liberal these people are—the rest of the media, the world. They’re steeped in it. They control everything. They indoctrinate the youth. The only people in this world that are persecuted are white males”—that kind of thing. The way that he views the world is how that network is programmed.
Ailes truly believes what he truly believes and I truly believe what I truly believe, and I don’t think either one of us was going to soft-pedal that.
I will say there was an immense amount of mutual respect, as contentious as it got. Rarely have I ever seen someone go toe-to-toe that effectively with Jon. Not that I agreed with what Ailes was saying.
None of what’s going on with Ailes and Fox now surprises me. They carried themselves like thugs.
In April, a Daily Show segment juxtaposed clips of Fox pundits criticizing irresponsible overgeneralizations of the Tea Party with clips of Fox pundits making irresponsible overgeneralizations about the left. The piece ended with Stewart telling Fox and Bernard Goldberg, a former CBS reporter who had become a conservative media critic and Fox contributor, to “go fuck themselves.” Goldberg responded in kind on O’Reilly’s show, ripping Stewart for going easy on liberal Daily Show guests.
This time Stewart didn’t just answer with a few good lines from behind the desk, including, “I have not moved out of the comedians’ box into the news box. The news box is moving toward me.” There was also an appearance by the tuxedo-ed Toppington Von Monocle claiming to quote Catullus, in Latin (“I will sodomize you and face-fuck you”), to refute Goldberg’s slagging of the Daily Show audience as “unsophisticated.” It was the over-the-top ending, though, that made this rebuke a classic: Stewart singing and shouting his scorn while backed up by a gospel choir and breaking into a dance that was part Jewish vaudevillian, part tent-show-revival preacher, to declare Fox “the lupus of news.”
He started out, as I recall, saying something like, “Bernie, I don’t want to fight with you.” And then he used a black church choir for twelve minutes to tell me and Fox to go fuck ourselves, which I thought was hilarious. It raised my Q rating. I saved it on my DVR for years, and then I got a new DVR, and I almost wept that I had to give up that.
The fuck-you choir? Yeah, that was my idea. A lot of those came from me being up at night.
The idea that Jon Stewart is above it all, and he sees hypocrisy and goes after it in an even-handed way is ridiculous. He doesn’t. He lets his ideology trump his intelligence, because if he didn’t, he’d go after liberal hypocrisy with the same gusto that he does when he goes after conservative hypocrisy and stupidity.
At the very mention of the word “Fox,” Jon’s eyes would roll around in his head and he would foam at the mouth, and that’s fine for a comedian, but it’s not fine for a media critic. Jon would say, “But I’m not a media critic, I’m a comedian.” Then fucking do jokes about horses that walk into bars and ask for a scotch and soda. I think Jon desperately wanted to sit at the grown-up table, so he did social commentary. No problem. But please, please, don’t fall back on “I’m only a comedian” when you get caught saying something that is not fair or completely honest.
Is Fox fair and balanced? Well, I didn’t come up with the slogan. Okay? But that’s a pretty thin branch to go out on.
Goldberg, though, was mild-mannered compared to many on the right. It was a boom time for panic mongers, for the everything-is-bad-and-Obama-is-to-blamers, for the Eric Cantors and the Ted Cruzes and the Rush Limbaughs and the Laura Ingrahams. The apotheosis in conspiratorial thinking and performance style was a mercurial reformed alcoholic and Mormon convert with a gift for manic historical storytelling. At his peak in late 2009, Glenn Beck was averaging around three million viewers each night on his 5 p.m. Fox News show.
Glenn Beck seemed like he was this new thing on the scene, and he seemed very dangerous. And he provoked a big response from us.
Beck at the time was the extreme expression of the crazy, paranoid stylings going on at Fox News in the aftermath of Obama’s election. Beck was the best expresser of this histrionic drama which they created about how the country was being destroyed. It was just amazing and fascinating to watch because it was this long, sustained effort promoting a view of a reality that did not exist, but was still going out on the highest-rated news channels in the country every day, which is to say with some authority.
What drew us to Beck was less the antics where he brings out food and stuff, although we did enjoy that. It was his alternate history, which always went all over the blackboard. He and a guy called David Barton, who is a regular on TheBlaze, concocted an alternative history of the United States. It was a coherent one, and it was compellingly articulated by this guy—and it’s entirely false, and misleading, and insidious.
And of course Beck is such a performer. Beck is emo. That level of drama is good for us, because our show is fundamentally about an emotional reaction to current events.
The man is gold, and I mean gold at the level that gold was when Beck was touting it, not the level it is now. It’s one thing when the content is unhinged. But when it’s also delivered with such theater, that’s when it becomes truly fun to build an entire program around. You can really chew it up.
But none of us had planned for those segments to become the fifteen-or sixteen-minute arias that they became. Jon had done smaller flashes of a Beck impression at the desk. And then as Beck had gone along he started to get grander in the way he was producing his show, and would occasionally do these hour-long fucking episodes with his grand unified theory of how Woodrow Wilson had put fluoride in the water and that was making us all into Obama slaves or something. He would do it with blackboards and charts and props. I was like, “Okay, we should do this.”
When we discovered that we had something huge instead of just big was the first time that Jon got on his feet and did it and surprised everybody, maybe including himself. It showed a range of Jon’s performance that had not really been on view before.
The first time we did a big Beck piece—in November 2009—it played off Beck having his appendix removed.
The difficulty with that type of thing is, how do you create it? The original, Beck, is so off the rails, it’s difficult to embody it at a higher pitch than it already is. You have to find ways to emphasize the insanity of it without it just being a studied impression. So in that first one, we’re talking about Hitler stealing Beck’s organs to prevent him from speaking the truth.
The second Glenn Beck piece, “Conservative Libertarian,” got huge. It was like an eighteen-minute bit.
Beck had been referring to progressivism as a cancer on democracy and a cancer on the Constitution. So Jon wanted to start the show with a cold open saying, “I just found out I have cancer,” and then cut to the opening credits. We were like, “You can’t do that!” He was going to give people heart attacks.
Glenn Beck: [in video clip, dusting chalk from fingers after drawing progressive conspiracy time line on his blackboard] “China is the goal. Why do you think there are so many Maoists hanging around the White House?”
Jon Stewart: You don’t see it, do you? You still don’t! Follow me, America! [dashes and hops to his own blackboard, which shows large circles leading to a swastika and a hammer and sickle] I’m going to show you something that is going to blow your mind! Why am I the only one who is saying it? Am I crazy or—okay. Look at the ovals of progressive folly! Look! Look! Look! Ovals, getting larger. And isn’t it interesting that they go to China. It turns out that progressives advocating for government regulations on toxins in water and our children’s toys turns us into China, the very country that has been putting toxins in water and our children’s toys. It’s so ingenious it almost doesn’t make any sense whatsoever!
So, how do we get our country back? How do we stop the cancer from “progressing”? Do you see?
Glenn Beck: [in video montage from his Fox show] “Look back to our founders, because they left us messages.” [sticks drawings of Washington and Jefferson on his blackboard] “This is an original document from Thomas Jefferson.” [holds up old-looking piece of paper] “‘On the twenty-fourth day in the year of our lord, Christ, 1807.’ Signed by Thomas Jefferson.”
Jon Stewart: [jumping and shouting and waving his arms] Then Thomas Jefferson signed, “Year of our Lord Christ,” licked the envelope, put a stamp on it, and gave it to one of his slaves to take for a couple of weeks to get it to Maryland!
The Glenn Beck pieces felt like Jon exploiting the possibilities of this forum in a way that we hadn’t before. It’s a little bit like… well, I was going to make a very labored Judas Priest analogy.
Judas Priest started out very bluesy and then got more operatic as time went on. Then in the ’80s they were trying to bring in more synth-type sounds, and it didn’t quite work. It was clear they were trying to break open their sound. They had these albums Turbo and Ram It Down—not so great. Turbo has one really good song.
But then they came back with an album called Painkiller, on which they said, “Okay. We can still sound like ourselves but we’re going to bring in much faster, harder metal sounds, more like speed metal and death metal. It can still sound like us, but we can do a lot more with what we’re doing.” That’s what it felt like with Jon and Glenn Beck: “I’m going to take these elements from other types of performance and I’m going to bring them to what we do and it’s going to make our argument that much stronger.”
We were not doing what SNL would do, but we were doing Jon impersonating a person rather than just commenting on them. And it was amazing considering most of Jon’s impersonations are Jersey guy; other Jersey guy; French guy; very Jewish guy. So the Glenn Beck episodes were to us what Painkiller was to Judas Priest.
What a dumb analogy.
I make fun of myself. So somebody else making fun, I took it as flattery.
If you’re going to do what I do and you can’t handle that, you’re in the wrong business. The problem that I had, and one of the reasons why we moved out of New York, is Jon painted a picture of me that people took—and I’m not saying he was ever responsible for any of this—but some people took that and then made me into the absolute enemy. And we had an incident at a New York park where people were just vile to my children, my family, and to my wife.
I probably talked more about Gandhi and Martin Luther King than anybody on television in the last twenty years and I was always trying—and the media always missed it—but I was always trying to preach peace, peace, peace.
To be honest I think one of my favorite Beck things ever wasn’t even one of the big performance pieces. Beck has a big Walt Disney fetish and was going to create a town. Independence USA. He did a whole presentation about it—and it was all about the rules that were going to exist in this town. At Independence USA it was all about, “There won’t be any backyards. Everything will face front because the people will have to be there, and there won’t be any chain stores.” And you’re just like, “You do realize that that’s state control over every aspect?” Stalin would blush at that kind of control over a community. In the name of freedom you’re going to ban Applebee’s. Okay.
I think that was one of the greatest pieces we did. It struck to just the heart of the contradiction of all these so-called constitutional-freedom fetishists who are, at heart, authoritarian. Who believe not in freedom and democracy—what they believe in is freedom and democracy for my idea.
There’s nobody that you will find on the right, outside of people like Penn Jillette, that is a bigger freedom guy and libertarian. I am not a guy who wants the government to make any rules—except that I believe in the Constitution. I’m not a French libertarian. I am libertarian that bases everything on the Constitution. It’s up to the people to decide, not to the federal government and, certainly, not up to nine people who sit on a court.
I live in a gated community right now. I can’t put up a flagpole. Do I want a flagpole? Yes, but I bought in there knowing what the rules were. There’s a reason why everybody loves to go to Disney—because it has real strict rules. Is that the way you run a country? No.
When you listen to these guys on talk radio there’s a relentlessness and an urgency and a call to action and it is all 24/7, “You are losing your country. It is being taken away from you by all these people and you can sit there and do nothing or you can listen to me.”
I don’t mind divisiveness. What I mind is divisiveness for its own purpose and without good, sound argument behind it. I don’t mind conservatism, with argument, but when you listen to the radio, that’s not conservatism. I don’t know what that is. That’s angry nativism.
Do I feel any responsibility for creating the conditions that led to [Donald] Trump? Oh, none whatsoever. That is the dark side that I warned about in 2008. If Barack Obama is elected and if he isn’t everything he says he is, if he’s a typical politician in the end, a gravy-stained guy who’s just got a fat mouth is going to come out. I said to the left, “Please don’t push the pendulum so far to the left because the pendulum always comes back and it’s going to come right, and whether it’s our side or your side, some fascist wannabe is going to grab it in times of strife.”
I thought it was going to come from the left… I had no idea it would be Trump… He says, “I’m going to build a wall.” If he doesn’t build a wall, what do you think his supporters are going to do? How disenfranchised will they be? And then what comes after Donald Trump? Who then has to step up and say, “I’ll fix it”? Good God, we’re on this slope to hell.
One of Fox’s great accomplishments was to mainstream that truly out there, urgent, paranoid style of broadcasting and make it much more palatable. They took a little bit of the acid out of it, a little bit of the stridency, and they packaged it in a much more, “I’m just asking these questions” way. They packaged it in a much more nonconfrontational tone and mainstreamed it.
The Daily Show’s ability to package video material had been painstakingly honed over the years. The production department had stockpiled hundreds of hours of clips and grown more adept at logging the contents and accessing them to build montages. But the process still required a half-dozen researchers watching footage, and searches often needed to be supplemented by the prodigious memory of Adam Chodikoff. In 2010, though, The Daily Show’s methods took a quantum leap forward.
We would have four producers standing in front of a wall of TiVos, trying to grab four separate things from Fox and CNN at the same time. And everyone’s shutting off everyone else’s TiVo with their separate remotes. It was ridiculous.
When we were upgrading the taping from standard to high-def, one of the consultants said to me, “There’s this piece of technology that looks really interesting for what you do.” SnapStream was originally meant for the advertising industry, and it couldn’t do what we wanted. Pat King, a Daily Show producer, was key in working with SnapStream to design what we needed in terms of search. It took months and months to get it right.
What we invented was a unit that connects to a company’s computer servers. One of them can record up to ten television shows at a time. The recordings you make can be watched on the network, from any desktop inside an organization, by multiple people at the same time. But for The Daily Show, the point is not really about watching TV. We translated the TV audio into text, and made it possible to search inside shows.
Say you need to find out who said, “good guy with a gun.” Suddenly, instead of blindly searching through hours of clips, you can put in quotes, “good guy with a gun,” and it pulls up the last ten different things on Good Morning America, the Today show, CNN, and you can just put them all in a little playlist.
It turned out to be an incredibly expensive investment, but I really saw this as a way of changing everything that we do and reducing so much of the legwork so we could spend more time being creative.
It absolutely changed the way we produce. It could take hours to find the clips we wanted, and then it used to take ten or twelve minutes to get a clip into an Avid editor. SnapStream cut our production time down by about 60 or 70 percent.
The technology had finally caught up with The Daily Show’s needs. Stewart, meanwhile, was intrigued with a very different experiment in altering the show’s form and process—for a one-time-only extravaganza.
Beck started doing rallies, and I just thought that was a really funny idea. I can’t remember what his was called. Something ridiculous. “Restoring Honor.” He was going to gather people to restore something that hadn’t been lost.
Glenn Beck had decided he was going to go down to Washington and hold a rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial, because he was so inspired by Martin Luther King that he was going to go down there and do it right where Martin Luther King did it. Sure. Such an analogous situation. Take a nonoppressed people and show the nonoppressed people they could use this area, too.
I was always looking to find other structures to fill. In many ways we are a Mexican restaurant that’s run out of ideas. We take cheese, beans, and meat and wrap it this way. We’ll call it a burrito. I got an idea: Why don’t we fold it this way and call it a taco? So we’re sort of using the same ingredients but finding new constructs you can sell it with, to give it new inspiration. So America (The Book) was that—how do you re-create the false authority of the show in written form? And I thought we could do the false authority in a live context.
So I called Stephen to see if he’d go in on it. He said, “Yeah. Let’s get in trouble. Let’s have fun.”
A permit for the National Mall was reserved under the name of Craig Minassian, a media strategist who had worked for Bill Clinton in the White House and then at the Clinton Foundation.
We sort of back-channeled the idea to see if it was feasible. For all the Parks Service knew, we could have been Girl Scouts.
The original idea was, we didn’t want to do it on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. We wanted to do it on the Lincoln Memorial. We wanted to do it flat out standing in Lincoln’s lap.
The rally? I said, “Don’t do this.” I hated that idea so much. I feel like it stood against everything we thought—we never thought we were anything but a TV show. Why the fuck are we doing this? I appreciated the motivation behind it. I agree that we only listen to the two extremes, and it’s a disservice to the country when most people are actually very reasonable. I just didn’t like it.
For several months, we said, “Don’t do it. Don’t do it.” And then Jon said, “I’m going to do it.” Stephen is great, and he’s just as much of a lunatic as Jon is. Neither of these guys are people you want to play chicken with, because they’ll beat you. They will fucking go all out.
The original notion was to stage dueling rallies, with Colbert leading “The March to Keep Fear Alive.” Instead it was merged into a single event, “The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.” What never changed was the intention that Stewart announced on The Daily Show, to put on a pageant for noncrazy, non-book-and-flag-burning, nonscreaming America: “Not so much the Silent Majority as the Busy Majority.” In other words, a plea for rationality in an increasingly irrational political and media landscape, a reminder that there’s a distinction between “political” and “partisan.” Plus Colbert in an Evel Knievel jumpsuit.
We’d never asked anything of the audience before, but now we’re asking them to show up somewhere. One of the reasons it appealed to me was it had the scent of demagoguery. That’s what you’re playing with. You’re playing with this idea of, “Let’s go down there and get a bunch of people, but then not have them do anything.” In essence the rally was, as the show was, the frustrated expression of impotent rage.
We didn’t think it would be that hard to design a program, because obviously we were naïve and had no idea what we were doing.
Adding to the degree of difficulty was that The Daily Show was preparing the rally at the same time that the show was in Washington as part of “Indecision 2010: Midterm Teapartyganza.” Three nights before the big event on the Mall was a big event in the temporary studio: President Obama was the guest.
The president, that dude, he came bouncing up the stairs like Fred Astaire, and just as he did the elevator doors opened and Jon came out doing his preshow Robert De Niro in Raging Bull impersonation, throwing punches. The president says, “So, you’re here to restore some sanity?” And Jon, still using his De Niro voice, says, “You bet we are!”
The interview turned out to be a prime demonstration of the merits of Stewart’s conversation-instead-of-interrogation style. He wasn’t “tough” on Obama by the standards of network TV sitdowns—grilling him about gaffes or the midterm horserace—and yet the eighteen-minute session was, in the evaluation of the president’s top aides, the toughest one Obama endured that fall.
Jo Miller and I worked on the prep for that, and we broke down, “What are the big foreign and domestic policy things we want to do?” We found all these specific things that we wanted to get him on.
And Jon looked at the notes, and he just starts laughing at the idea that this is going be the interview that he was going to do with President Obama. He says, “What we really want to do is create a narrative, and we’re going to tell a little story. What’s the big picture, rather than all the details that we can nail this person on?” And the interview Jon did ended up calling Obama on stuff better than asking about all the details.
Jon Stewart: You ran with such, if I may, “audacity.” So much of what you said was, “Great leaders lead in a time of opportunity,” “we’re the ones we’re looking for.” Yet legislatively it has felt timid at times. I’m not even sure at times what you want out of a health-care bill.
President Barack Obama: Jon, I love your show, but this is something where, you know, I have a profound disagreement with you… This notion that health care was “timid”: you’ve got thirty million people who are gonna get health insurance as a consequence of this… It gets discounted because the presumption is, “Well, we didn’t get 100 percent of what we wanted, we got 90 percent of what we wanted, so let’s focus on the 10 percent we didn’t get as opposed to the 90 percent that we did.” And right now there is a woman in New Hampshire who doesn’t have to sell her house to get her cancer treatments because of that health-care bill. And she doesn’t think it’s inconsequential. She doesn’t think it’s “timid.”
Jon Stewart: The suggestion was not that it’s inconsequential or that it doesn’t help—
President Obama: The suggestion was that it was “timid.”
Jon Stewart: Timid. And I’ll tell you what I mean… it’s that you ran on the idea that this system needed basic reform—
President Obama: Yup.
Jon Stewart: It feels like some of the reforms that have passed, like health care, have been done in a very political manner that has papered over a foundation that is corrupt.
President Obama: That, I think, is fair… There are all kinds of things that happened during the course of these two years, in terms of process, that I’d like to see changed… If the point, Jon, is that overnight we did not transform the health-care system, that point is true.
Jon Stewart: [laughs] When you put it that way, it seems so petty!
President Obama: When we promised during the campaign, “Change you can believe in,” it wasn’t, “Change you can believe in in eighteen months.” It was, “Change you can believe in, but you know what, we’re gonna have to work for it.”
The studio audience erupted in cheers and applause, and Stewart admitted, “It’s a good point,” but he’d elicited a fascinating amendation from Obama.
That Wednesday night, after shaking hands with the commander in chief, Stewart went back to frantically figuring out just what he and Colbert were going to do onstage for three hours on Saturday.
No, I didn’t sleep. Except when I took Xanax. Shuts it down pretty good. Pretty, pretty, pretty good. But no, I was a mess.
We were booking bands up until that last weekend. I had the dumb idea that I was going to be “Peace Train” because I’m representing sanity, and Stephen was going to be “Crazy Train,” representing fear. We wanted it to be almost like a battle of the bands. And the O’Jays would settle it all with “Love Train.” So most of our time went into trying to figure out how you get Cat Stevens, Ozzy Osbourne, and the O’Jays in one place.
We were told, “Call this guy, he’s the manager of the O’Jays.” So we call and the guy says, “Listen, can I call you back at five o’clock? I’ll be done with my UPS route then.” This is a couple days before the rally.
The night before the rally, I remember working with Hillary Kun. We’re trying to figure out how to send a jet to pick up a variety of O’Jays. For some reason I had this stupid idea that the O’Jays lived together in the O’Jay house. They all wore the same outfit every day. They did their moves at the breakfast nook. It was a little more complicated than that.
Security was a big deal. We were working with Gavin de Becker, who is great, and they wanted Jon and Stephen to wear bulletproof vests, because not everybody is a fan. But they weren’t interested.
Look, I’ve got a hard enough time singing. With a bulletproof vest on, my range is cut down. I’m an alto-tenor-soprano, so I’ll lose that high C if I’ve got the vest. And at that time I was fat enough that I was well protected.
Stewart did indeed fill out his red, white, and blue fleece when he took the rally stage on Saturday, October 30. Otherwise he and Colbert were an excellent fit for the jittery moment in American politics—a moment very much in need of a few laughs and a dose of civility. The economy was still reeling from the financial meltdown, with unemployment at 9 percent. The growing belief that the system was rigged for the elites was stoking genuine populist anger on both the right and the left. There was plenty of contrived anger in the air, too, including the controversy over a “Ground Zero mosque,” with a fringe Florida pastor grabbing TV time by threatening to burn a Koran.
In June, congressional Republicans, determined to obstruct Obama, had stalled an extension of unemployment benefits, and Democrats had passed Obamacare without a single GOP vote. The ripples of McCain’s desperation move in 2008 of putting Palin on the ticket were becoming more visible: In the fall, the Tea Party wave was cresting, with candidates including Delaware’s Christine “I’m not a witch” O’Donnell winning primaries. Democrats were bracing for a beating in the midterms and begging Stewart not to hold the rally three days before the vote, because they were worried it would distract campaign workers. Oh, and then there were the rumors flying around that the rally was really a launching pad for Stewart 2012.
I remember the craziness of people saying, “Jon’s going to announce he’s running for office,” and people so desperately wanting it to be serious and not satire.
Although The Daily Show had a definite political slant, there was also this element that developed that was simply about being a voice for comity. There was this old-fashioned streak in Stewart, which I think he shares with Obama in a way, where he misses this time where maybe there wasn’t bipartisan consensus on everything, but at least there were spaces in the middle where people could meet and agree to disagree and get things done. And through the Obama years, it’s important to note that this sometimes got the show in trouble, especially with the more strident part of the left. A lot of progressives really hated the Rally for Sanity. They wanted him to hold a rally that would try to influence people to vote for Democrats in the midterm, and that was not a role that he wanted to embrace.
The momentum of the industries that surround politics and surround governments are so self-fulfilling and self-driving that they can’t fathom the idea of going down and having fun and putting on a show. They immediately assume that there must be, for every single moment, something calculated as a political campaign, not as entertainment.
But for me, there’s very little that’s better than sitting in a trailer on the National Mall the morning of a rally, of the thing you’ve never done before, rehearsing with Questlove and the Roots and Ozzy and Cat Stevens and the O’Jays. You’re saying to Cat Stevens, “Okay, so you’re going to do ‘Peace Train.’ You’re going to give me twelve measures.” He says, “Twelve measures? Why? What do you mean?” “You’re going to do twelve measures and then Ozzy’s going to come in and cut you off.” And Cat Stevens says, “But it’s a beautiful song!” “I understand it’s a beautiful song, but the bit is—” “Look, I flew in from Dubai!” “No, I get it. You’ll get a chance to play.” And then you explain to Ozzy that Stephen is the guy coming out of the Chilean Miner capsule wearing an Evel Knievel suit. All right.
The rally was probably the toughest show I ever directed, because it was three hours without a commercial break, and it was also 100 percent unrehearsed. Jon did not want any information getting out to the press that week we were down there doing the midterms. So even the night before we were to do it I hadn’t seen any scripts. And then the script came in that morning, and it was so thick I didn’t have time to go through it.
That morning I was thinking what I think before most live events: Is anybody going to show up? And then to see that sea of people, to see Jon and Stephen trading off on a stage like that and sort of capturing the zeitgeist of the country again—it really was just a sensational day in every way.
Some of it was so brilliant, and some of it was so wacky. I’m standing backstage with Sharon Osbourne and Cat Stevens and Jeff Tweedy? Even backstage, there was a feeling of, huh? It’s not Woodstock, and it’s not a convention. What the hell is this?
It was a surreal thing to walk backstage at the rally. What sticks out is how much I was like a hobbit, in a burrow, next to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. And also how little interest Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had in talking to me.
I know Jon meets a lot of people, but he probably doesn’t meet them at Arlington National Cemetery. In 2009 Jon was being honored for the work he did with the USO. I’d been volunteering for the USO for several years, and Jon and I really bonded over a mutual friend, a young service member who’d been severely burned, named Rick Yarosh. I said “Jon, I just want you to know, I’m a big fan. But I’ll be honest, I was a little hesitant to actually meet you because I was afraid you might be—” And then he filled in the blank: “—an asshole?” And I said, “Yeah, and I thought that might take away from my ability to enjoy the show.” But I saw the way he interacted normally with the service members. He was looking for no special treatment whatsoever.
A few months later Jon had me on the show as “senior ass kicker,” in a segment where I stuck up for a kid who was being bullied at school. And then Jon gave me a medal at the rally.
I mean, I wasn’t around for Woodstock, but the rally felt like my Woodstock, you know? It was really a very peaceful time, no troubles, something I was very proud to be a part of. And it’s always fun to see Kid Rock.
It’s hard not to react emotionally to this feeling of standing in front of the Capitol. It’s incredible. The lawn in front of the Congress, and you’re having a goofy rally and there’s thousands of people there who are having a good time. People said to us, afterward, “Did that work out for you guys?” We’re like, “Hell, yes!” It was awesome. We had an amazing day. And then they’re like, “Well, but you didn’t increase Democratic voter turnout. You failed us.” Oh, okay. I didn’t know that.
There was the Rally to Restore Sanity and there was the March to Keep Fear Alive. To me, that wasn’t just a fig leaf for both of our shows to be there. They were about two different things. You can ask Jon what the Rally to Restore Sanity was about, because I had no intention of restoring sanity. And I think I won.
What I was making fun of is the commoditizing of other people’s fear. Using other people’s fear for your own self-aggrandizement or your own enrichment and your own ego. Fear, anger—those are generally not your real feelings. They’re a reaction to the other feelings you’re having.
Did Jon and I try to point that out—the commodification of fear, the division into camps? Sure. That was a source of a lot of the satire. It was everywhere.
I don’t want to speak for Jon about what the Rally to Restore Sanity was, but fear is the mind killer. I think Jon was encouraging people to calm down and think rather than feel all of the time.
Stewart’s speech concluding the rally—corny as it may have been, with its imagery of cars peacefully merging to enter the Holland Tunnel—was a welcome, hopeful appeal to Americans’ better nature, and a borderline-prophetic warning that things could get worse if sanity didn’t make a stand.
The rally was on a Saturday, after we’d done a week of shows in Washington. That was about as messy as I’ve gotten in terms of loading things up and having a deadline and being a little stressed out and then having to write that stupid thing the night before. That whole little soliloquy at the end of the rally.
You’re always trying to balance the satire and the subtext and the pratfall with the sentiment. Sometimes it’s completely in sync and you hit that sweet spot and other times it’s overly sentimental or overly earnest or too ridiculous.
Afterward, some critics argued he’d missed the mark. “Stewart’s rally,” wrote Jamelle Bouie, Slate’s chief political correspondent, “[made it seem] as if Washington gridlock were a case of bad manners and not deep-seated ideological differences about government and its place in the world.”
I certainly understand how much of the problem is about ideology. But what got people so mad at us is that the rally didn’t seem to have any real point other than “He says we’ve got to be nice to each other.” That’s not in any way what we were saying. The point, for us, was about, “If you’re going to have an argument, have the actual argument. Be precise. Don’t call people racist if it doesn’t rise to that level of offense.” Not “be nice,” but if you are at the same level of outrage over everything, then I guess you’re not really outraged about anything.
Salman Rushdie had a different, highly specific complaint. The Satanic Verses author called Stewart, angry that the former Cat Stevens, who’d endorsed the fatwa against Rushdie, had been featured. Stewart, who had been unaware of Stevens’s statements, apologized.
Death for blasphemy is kind of a nonstarter, especially at what you call your sanity rally. Should have known more about it earlier. Point Rushdie.
The more common effects and memories of the rally—even if it didn’t immediately transform DC’s partisan standoff—were stirringly hopeful, especially for many Daily Show staffers.
I just remember Jon walking offstage at the very end of the rally, after he delivered his speech, and a bunch of us were backstage, and he saw Tracey and just started crying. I think that he was so overwhelmed by that rally. It had a life of its own that surprised all of us.
I remember walking through Washington at eight o’clock at night, after the rally. Everyone had gone home, but all of the garbage cans were filled with signs that people had made and materials that they’d carried, and it felt like Times Square an hour after midnight on New Year’s Eve. You still had the remnants of how amazing this thing had been, and how much it had meant to so many people. Our in-studio audience, when they come in, they sit down. They clap when they’re supposed to clap. The rally was the one time that we really felt connected with our audience and with the country. As cheesy as that sounds.
Later I saw this video on YouTube, “Jump Rope with a Muslim.” A Muslim woman had gone around the rally and made a video of herself jumping rope with different people. It was an incredible acknowledgment of what this rally meant. It was just so overwhelming.
I sincerely believe that while using fear and anger is still effective in politics, our country is increasingly sickened by it. I think that there’s a diminishing return for that game. You had ten years plus of America quite naturally responding to the attacks of 9/11 through fear and anger. That manifested itself in a lot of different ways. I think people were happy to pick sides, like a sport, in a way. I don’t think people are as happy about picking sides as they used to be.
I went right from the rally to the airport and flew home because Halloween was the next day. We had to go trick-or-treating with the kids.
After the rally, Jon couldn’t stay for the after party, but we took everybody to the Old Ebbitt Grill in DC, and I stood up on the fountain and the first thing I said was how proud I was to once again be working on The Daily Show. I love that show and I love him.