The end of an extraordinary, exhausting 2010 brought a major reshuffling of Daily Show leadership. Lieb left, because he wanted more variety in his work life, and because he wanted to raise his kids in California (three years later Lieb would return to New York, taking “the only job better than the one I’d left,” as showrunner for The Tonight Show, where Jimmy Fallon was the new host). Javerbaum departed for the second time, and for good this time, to write musicals (his exit, like those of other Daily Show writers, was celebrated with a roast at Keens Steakhouse, where Lieb and Jill Baum, Javerbaum’s assistant, delivered the most witheringly funny shots). Steve Bodow, Jen Flanz, and Jim Margolis were named executive producers; Tim Carvell was promoted to head writer; and Pam DePace, who had the pivotal insight that The Daily Show should invest heavily in TiVos, was made a supervising producer.
The host remained the same. But Stewart was changing, too. Ingesting the bilious flood of political news and regurgitating it as satire was growing tougher after twelve years. The show’s tone became less ironic and more biting, never more so than when it jousted with Fox. “The Parent Company Trap,” for example, dissected a Muslim-mongering discussion on Fox & Friends about the Saudi money behind the proposed “Ground Zero mosque” without mentioning that Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal was the second-biggest shareholder in News Corporation, the parent company of Fox.
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] If we want to cut off funding to the terror mosque, we must, together as a nation, stop watching Fox.
Fox tells us the terrible thing about this Kingdom Foundation is where they fund, and he’s a very bad guy. But they never mentioned this fella’s name. And they never showed this fella’s picture. And they certainly never mentioned that the fella they’re talking about is part owner of their company. Did the gang at Fox & Friends genuinely not know the head of the Kingdom Foundation’s name, and the fact that he is one of their part owners? Or were they purposely covering it up, because it did not help their fear-driven narrative?
For more we’re joined by Senior Media Analysts John Oliver and Wyatt Cenac.
John Oliver: [wearing pale blue T-shirt with TEAM STUPID across the chest] I’m going to go with they didn’t know. Remember, things are hectic on the morning show. Plus Gretchen [Carlson] isn’t there, and she’s the only one who knows how to use Google.
Wyatt Cenac: [wearing pale blue T-shirt with TEAM EVIL across the chest] Look, I’ll give you [Brian] Kilmeade and [Steve] Doocy. But do you know who Dan Senor and Dana Perino used to work for? George W. Bush! And do you know who George W. Bush used to hang with? Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal! That’s some evil shit! That’s a level of knowing obfuscation that can only come from having a heart of pure evil!
Domestic, congressional-grade evil didn’t escape attention, with The Daily Show pushing into a wider range of sensitive subjects. A Kristen Schaal chat skewered a House bill restricting abortion funding to victims of “forcible” rape.
I was the Senior Women’s Issues Correspondent. The only subject that I was allowed to even talk about on the show was women’s issues, so I felt 100 percent responsible for representing women, and sometimes that would frustrate me. Women’s issues were sort of hard to get on the show, because they weren’t often making big headlines. That “forcible rape” story was one I read about on my own in Mother Jones. Jon could tell it would make a good piece because I was so angry. That’s the piece I’m always proudest of.
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] The bill seeks to undo a long-standing compromise that allows federal funding for abortion in extreme cases, like rape. Under the new bill, federal funding for abortions would be limited to cases resulting from what they call “forcible rape.” Which could possibly exclude cases where women have been drugged or women with limited mental capacity, or statutory rape.
Kristen Schaal: [sitting across from Stewart, grinning and raising her arms in triumph] Hallelujah! It’s about time! By proposing this legislation, Republicans are finally closing the glaring rape loophole in our health-care system. You’d be surprised how many drugged, underaged, or mentally handicapped young women have been gaming the system. Sorry, ladies—the free abortion ride is over!
Jon Stewart: [dumbfounded] Kristen, all rape, by definition, is forcible.
Kristen Schaal: Jon, I’m not comfortable with that word “all.” In truth, there’s a whole rainbow of rape covering a wide spectrum of gray areas. Like statutory rape. Something Whoopi Goldberg explained in the Roman Polanski case.
Whoopi Goldberg: [in video clip from The View] “He was not charged. I know it was not rape-rape.”
Kristen Schaal: See? Plying a thirteen-year-old girl with Quaaludes, alcohol, and a famous penis isn’t rape-rape. It’s just rape-esque, and shouldn’t be covered!
The important thing is, Congress is redefining rape to protect us from the worst kind of rape: money rape. That’s forcible taking of taxpayers’ money to pay for abortions. They have no say in the matter. They just have to lay back and take it while their bank accounts are violated over and over and over again!
Jon Stewart: [spluttering] How much money are we even talking about here?
Kristen Schaal: Well, in 2006 alone, federal funds helped pay for 191 abortions for victims of rape, incest, or when the health of the mother is at risk. So that works out to… [pulls abacus out from under desk, slides beads]… two-tenths of a penny per taxpayer.
The day after Schaal’s piece appeared, the Republican sponsor of the bill, New Jersey congressman Chris Smith, changed the language, if not all of the substance, of the amendment.
It wasn’t just the subject matter that was stretching—it was the actual show. Thanks to the wonders of modern Internet technology, Stewart’s third-act interviews could be allowed to ramble beyond the bounds of the nightly broadcast, with the extra material posted on Comedy Central’s website. Guests soon took it as a badge of approval for Stewart to keep them overtime.
Jon continually pushed to widen our range of guests, and to go after inaccessible people. The strangest one that’s never worked out has got to be Paul Ryan. He says he’s a fan of the show, but he’s always refused to come on. I’ve gone to amazing lengths to try to make it happen. One of my relatives was going to be at the same wedding with Ryan in Wisconsin, so I had him make a pitch for us. Still didn’t work.
We also spent a great deal of time trying to get Sarah Palin to be a guest. Tons of calls, e-mails. Jon may have even written her a letter.
I didn’t write her a letter. I cut out some letters from a magazine. Like a hostage note.
On the other hand, a guest who I never expected to really get was Pervez Musharraf. He came on twice, the first time when he was in New York for the United Nations and he was the prime minister of Pakistan.
That day was nuts. It was 2006 and Musharraf was fresh off of a couple of assassination attempts, and America was fresh off its paranoia overload. We had snipers up on the roof and AK-47s in the hallway and bomb-sniffing dogs in our building. It’s always a relief to the staff that it’s not drug-sniffing dogs. Nobody there had bombs, but man, would we have lost some people, had it been something else.
Musharraf got to wear a bulletproof vest and sit behind the Kevlar front during the interview. I was just out there. The security guys told me to duck in case anything happened.
Are you saying I should’ve read Musharraf’s book, as much trouble as he was going through to get there, is that what you’re saying?
Jon always read the books. He’s a freakishly fast reader.
You want the interviews to have a point of view, even if that point of view is, “I can’t believe I’m speaking to the guy.” There was a certain level of astonishment that Musharraf was there.
So I was trying to defuse a very real question, which is, “Where is Osama bin Laden?” by offering Musharraf tea and Twinkies. You have to find some way to disarm natural suspicion, and also, the job of the show is to still present something mildly entertaining. If not funny, interesting. If not interesting, at least somewhat smart, and if not smart, weird.
Any time you’re dealing with an autocrat, you generally take a slightly more wide-eyed approach, so that there’s an understanding that you know what’s going on, but there’s also a nod to the fact that he’s an authoritarian.
So the second time Musharraf was on, in 2011, after bin Laden had been killed, that’s why I asked him, “Wasn’t that weird, that bin Laden was in Pakistan all along?”
Do I worry that we humanize certain people? I don’t think a decent shot on The Daily Show is going to necessarily raise Musharraf’s rates in Pakistan.
Because Jim Cramer was beaten to a bloody pulp, the expectation became that anybody that came on would receive that beating and would roll over and show me their belly. It may be more satisfying for people to see someone strapped to a chair and be berated, but that’s not a sustainable, revelatory, or interesting model. I think it’s much more interesting to have an interview reveal itself of its own momentum and inertia.
After September 11 it had become fashionable to just associate, in a very lazy way, anything to do with violence with Muslim and call it Muslim terrorism, or Islamic terrorism. And I was wondering who is going to stand up and say, “Wait a minute, this is not how it is.” I’m writing about Muslims in America, and I need to also understand larger society, and in that larger society, the media is very important. So, I see media like Fox and I say, “Okay, where’s the counterpoint in American culture?”
Jon Stewart, almost single-handedly, changed the nature of the dialogue.
He got guests like Musharraf. He, later on, got Malala [Yousafzai]. He had me, but he also had people like Aasif Mandvi and people like Hasan Minhaj. So people are seeing, “Well, these guys are just like us.”
And it goes the other way, too. People are not looking at him, in the Muslim world, as a Jewish American, or even as an American. In Egypt, they’re saying, “This is Jon Stewart. Look, he’s reaching out to one of us.”
Because of that respect, I think Jon should have challenged Musharraf more. Musharraf was selling one kind of Pakistan, which didn’t exist. Appearing on The Daily Show did a lot of good for Musharraf. Jon allowed him to get away a bit too easily.
I can’t tell you how many times I was asked, “Why would you have that guy on the show?” Whether it was Musharraf or O’Reilly. My feeling is always, “Why would you not take an opportunity to find, within someone’s humanity, some understanding of why they’ve done what they’ve done, or why you believe so differently from what they believe?” I think there’s an instinct to want to two-dimensionalize people that have odious opinions, but maybe it’s a little more complicated than that.
The Daily Show had special resonance for viewers in countries where democracy was in its infancy, or was still a dream. One Chinese fan took the risk of illegally downloading the show, then spent several hours each day subtitling episodes so they could be quietly disseminated on social media. She enjoyed the humor, but she envied the free speech. “We’re not interested in your politics,” Maggie Chen told journalist Anand Giridharadas. “We’re interested in the style of the show, and the idea that you can use jokes to tell the truth.”
The Middle East had been a significant Daily Show subject for years, but the 2011 “Arab Spring” heightened Stewart’s attention to the region. Little did he know that one of his biggest fans was right in the middle of the action.
In Egypt, there were very few TV channels from the outside world—the German channels, the Polish sex channels, and CNN International. And of course, CNN is boring, except that it carried the Daily Show “Global Edition.” So, for me, Jon Stewart was not just another comedy show. He was basically my passage to American politics. And Jon was the best newsperson who ever covered the Gaza War. He was maybe the only person who stood against the oppressive actions of the Israeli government. Of course, they called him a self-hating Jew, but what he did was journalism. He didn’t go so deep, because that’s not his job, but he was fair about something that is totally untouchable in American popular culture.
I fantasized about having a show like Jon’s in Egypt.
At the time, though, Youssef was a heart surgeon. During Egypt’s eighteen-day revolution he treated wounded prodemocracy protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Then he would go home and see Egypt’s TV news wildly distorting the reality of what he’d just seen. So Youssef decided he would create his own satirical news show and upload it to YouTube. Three months and five million views later, Youssef was offered a weekly slot on an actual Egyptian TV channel, and with the help of puppets, mocking musical numbers, and Daily Show–like graphics, the doctor-turned-comedian was making jokes about the Muslim Brotherhood, the strongman Hosni Mubarak, and his successor, President Mohamed Morsi, in a genuinely dangerous environment. The military-backed Egyptian government started cracking down on dissent.
There were some moments that were very scary, with thugs putting the theater under siege. But when I was summoned for questioning under Morsi, I was thinking, “If they put me in jail, I’m a hero—but I’m not going to have time to finish the episode.”
He may have been a trained medical professional, but Youssef’s show business instincts were sharp: He made sure to mention Stewart whenever he was interviewed.
It worked—the first-ever English language article about me was called “The Jon Stewart of the Nile.” By the time I came to New York in 2012, he had heard about me and asked me to be on the show.
Bassem Youssef: There are new charges coming up [against me]: “Propagating and promoting homosexuality and obscenity.”
Jon Stewart: You know, we have a show like that. We call it Glee… Here’s why you have my undying support and friendship. You are doing what I take for granted all the time—you are carving out the space for people to breathe and express themselves. It’s incredibly admirable.
Bassem Youssef: The thing is, I get asked this so many times—“Aren’t you afraid? Aren’t you scared for your life?” And I tell them, “If I choose today to tone it down, if I choose today to shut up, tomorrow me and you and all of us will be forced to. And today what’s considered a luxury will be taken away.”
Jon Stewart: That’s incredible. And here’s the best part about it—for most satirists or comedians, they’ve been fired from every other job. You’re a successful heart surgeon as well. Talk about somebody that really makes my mother angry—a successful heart surgeon who has decided to be a comedian?
The threats against Youssef grew more serious as his show grew more popular and as the aftermath of the Egyptian revolution turned chaotic, with violent clashes and a backlash from the military. Stewart stayed in contact with Youssef, asking whether more Daily Show segments about him would help ensure his safety.
And I said, “Well, not really, because I don’t want people to get the idea that I’m being supported by the United States.” Because there was a story in Egypt that I am being trained by Jon Stewart, who is being recruited by the CIA to use satire against the country.
I know America has problems, but if taxpayer money is being spent to recruit Jon Stewart, things are worse than I realized.
It was a different kind of man of science who turned out to be one of The Daily Show’s most frequent and feisty visitors. The appearances by Neil deGrasse Tyson started out fairly conventional, usually centering on his newest book, but in 2012 they took an unusual turn.
When I came on to talk about Space Chronicles, I needed a tennis serve to send back Jon’s way if he got the better end of me in an exchange. But the interview was a lovefest, and I thought, “I’ve got to bring this up anyway.” I waited until the very end, and I said, “Oh, by the way, the earth in your opening credits is spinning backward.” He picked up the book with both hands, slammed it on the desk, and said, “Son of a bitch!” and then it fades to black.
Oh, yeah, we laughed about it when he went to commercial. But he never did change the rotation. I’m told by the Daily Show staff that when Jon takes questions from the audience, every single time someone asks, “When are you going to switch the earth?” So, it haunted him, surely, for the rest of the show.
That playful confrontation also encouraged the Daily Show writers to make use of the theatrical Tyson as a character in ever more elaborate scripted bits—wearing a silk robe and bedroom slippers to dissect the magnitude of China’s pollution problem, and using a flashlight and a spooky laugh as he allowed for the remote possibility of extraterrestrial undead in “Neil deGrasse Tyson, Buzzkill of Science.”
Jon Stewart: Space zombies! I knew it! You are afraid of space zombies!
Neil deGrasse Tyson: No, not at all. I’m afraid of real things. [studio lights dim; Tyson shines flashlight on his own face as in a cheap horror movie] Like how trillions of years from now, the irreversible increase in entropy in our asymptotic descent to absolute zero will leave the universe as nothing more than a cold, inert wasteland. Devoid of life, movement, and even the very concept of energy. Bwwwahahaha!
Jon Stewart: You’re freaking everybody out, dude. Listen, you know I can just turn the lights back on? [studio lights come up]
Neil deGrasse Tyson: Oh, so you have the power to do that, but not make the globe in your opening credits turn the right way?
Jon Stewart: Motherfucking Tyson!
Between the jokes, Stewart always wanted Tyson’s appearances to explore complex scientific concepts—which helped underscore The Daily Show’s defense of facts and reason. Tyson appreciated the underlying seriousness.
Jon was a guest on StarTalk, my radio show. I asked him, “What was your college major?” He said, “Oh, I majored in chemistry,” and that he later switched because he realized that chemistry was hard. But I could still ask him the geek question: “What’s your favorite element?” He said, “Carbon, because it’s the slut of the periodic table, because it combines with everything.” You don’t make that joke unless you’ve thought about science and you embrace science.
That was a huge gift to late-night television. If I were the only scientist Jon interviewed, then I’d say, “Okay, he likes me,” but since he had scientists on the show frequently, even scientists you’ve never heard of, that told me the interest is real.
Sometimes, though, even years of passion and preparation didn’t pay off in the moment. Since 2003, Stewart and The Daily Show had become experts in the political and military conduct of the war in Iraq, and the show had done dozens of segments lacerating Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s first secretary of defense and a chief architect of the war on terror. So in 2012, when the retired Rumsfeld came on as a guest to promote Known and Unknown: A Memoir, all the conditions appeared to be in place for a classic Stewart cross-examination, a chance to deliver some liberal righteousness directly to a pillar of the misguided conservative establishment.
What’s it called, Stewart’s program?
That was one of those things where people’s expectation of wanting blood is not realistic. Right off the bat, I said to Rumsfeld, “When you guys sold that war…” And Rumsfeld said, “Well, presented our case.” “Well, you sold it. You didn’t present a case for war, like, here are the positives and here are the negatives. You presented the positives. That’s what we call sales, actually.”
That should have been the focus of the whole interview, because it was the crux of their deception. But I was so concerned with all the preparation we’d done that I blew past that gift Rumsfeld gave me at the beginning. I was not happy with it.
I enjoyed the interview. I told my wife, Joyce, after the program, that I think had we been in high school together we would have been friends. I mean that as a compliment.
Several months later at the memorial service for Betty Ford in Grand Rapids, after saying hello to the Ford family, President Bill Clinton made a beeline over to me, shook my hand, and said, “You went on the Jon Stewart program.” I said, “Yes, I did.” He said, “Good for you. I saw it and it was very good.”
I worked on the preparation for the Rumsfeld interview, and that’s definitely one that you wish Jon would’ve gone in harder. Ultimately, Rumsfeld is such a slithery guy that it probably would’ve been to no effect. But I think Jon was so tired by that point in his run.
I remember Jon feeling like he blew it. I remember saying to him afterward, “Look, dude, it’s hard. You’re sitting across from an old guy. You felt bad.” Do I think he could have wrecked Donald Rumsfeld? Yes, I do. Jon was pretty soft on him. I don’t know, man. You’re going to pitch a shitty game sometimes.
It was far more common, though, for Stewart to challenge his right-of-center guests, many of whom treated the experience as a validation of their fair-mindedness and made multiple appearances on The Daily Show.
For people like me, one, it was kind of fun to go on The Daily Show, and two, it was a little bit like being invited to the cool kids’ table. It was a kind of a mark—“Hey, you’re a player, you’re somebody that Jon is sufficiently interested in that he wants to have you on his show.”
I don’t want to exaggerate the importance of Jon Stewart. Roger Ailes has never talked to me about going on Jon Stewart, nor do I know if he ever watched it. But I don’t think my kids have ever been as impressed as when I did The Daily Show. They’d have a swag bag, you know. Not an Oscars swag bag but a little swag bag, and whether it was my kids or my producers, they would just go through it like raptors looking for the spoils.
Jon and I seemed to get along, and they invited me back a total of five times. So then Jon comes to DC and is a guest on my show. I was surprised at how touchy he was throughout that interview, because I saw it as trying, in my own way, to kind of do to him what he did to me and does to other people. I came away feeling that he dished it out better than he could take it.
The interview runs, and I remember I went to the Huffington Post and in red letters that were in a font only slightly smaller than you would announce World War Three, in quotes it said, “You’re insane,” which is what Jon said to me at one point.
And it became a much bigger deal than I thought it was going to be. Jon went on the air to kind of call me out and to sort of do a truth squad of the interview, and then I came back that Sunday and did a truth squad of his truth squad.
The second week, after I had done my thing, he called me, which I was surprised but pleased by, to basically say, “No hard feelings, this has gotten out of control, and I just want you to know this isn’t personal.” And I said the same thing back to him, and that was that.
Whether you agreed with Jon or not, I think that he was very much an idealist and really wanted the system to work well to help people in the ways that he thinks that government should help people. His show was done out of a spirit not of cynicism so much as frustration or dashed hopes. And that was actually one of the things I always liked about Jon’s show, is that, yes, he mocked you, but it was mocking in a kind of disappointed way, like we should do better than that.
Why didn’t I accept his invitation to go on the show? First of all, I grew up in an alcoholic family and I was the peacemaker in the family, and I hate conflict, believe it or not. I also am smart enough to know when I’m going to lose a fight. I’m going into Jon’s house and whatever I would say, he would win. No thank you. He would’ve gone for the comedy, and you’re not going to win when comedy is involved.
In January 2009, the Republicans, in a spasm of tent broadening, had chosen Michael Steele, a black, conservative former lieutenant governor of Maryland and a commentator on Fox News, as chairman of the Republican National Committee. Steele soon talked his way into a series of kooky controversies. The Daily Show, though, was eager to bring the unpredictable, independent-minded Steele on as a guest. When that failed, the show went to the felt in a segment called “Steele Crazy After All These Years,” with Wyatt Cenac providing the voice of the jive-talking puppet.
I tuned in one night after an incredibly long day in a hotel somewhere in the Midwest and there was this blue thing called me. I was like, “What the hell is that?” It really struck me as this 1970s, Superfly, Shaft kind of period speak. I forget what I was being pilloried for, but I just remember being amused by the whole thing.
Real Michael Steele: [in videoclip, at a fund-raiser] “What you don’t do is engage in a land war in Afghanistan. This is a war of Obama’s choosing. This is not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in.”
Jon Stewart: Okay! Forget about the fact that we’d been in Afghanistan since before Obama was even a gleam in the Senate’s eye… This is the head of the Republican Party going against one of his party’s core principles: blowing shit up in other countries… We go now to our good friend, Republican Michael Steele.
Puppet Michael Steele: [wearing a bright yellow polo shirt and a chef’s apron, voiced by Wyatt Cenac] Fourth of July at the cribble, baby! I’m feeling the thrill of the grill, ’cause you know I likes to chill!
Jon Stewart: I must say I didn’t expect you to be so upbeat. Your comments about Afghanistan are very controversial.
Puppet Michael Steele: I nailed it! I hibbled that bibble like a jibble on the dribble!
Jon Stewart: I’m not sure what that means, but people in your own party are blasting you. Here’s Senator Lindsey Graham.
Lindsey Graham: [in video clip, on Face the Nation] “Dismayed, angry, upset. It was an uninformed, unnecessary, unwise, untimely comment.”
Puppet Michael Steele: [frowning, wounded, wiping eye] Lindabale Grahibble?
They said they did the puppet because I canceled an appearance. The request never came to my office. I wanted to do the show but the RNC communications shop was very nervous about it, because I was one of these guys who didn’t stick to the script. They like you to go on TV and wear the uniform and say the words.
It was a comedy show, but Jon was asking a question that a lot of people, rank-and-file folks within the respective parties, ask themselves—why can’t we compromise? You have the extremes animating and driving the discussion—Bernie Sanders and the progressives on the left, Ted Cruz or even more Donald Trump and Ben Carson on the right. It’s a sort of standing-in-the-corner fight. Jon spoke to the frustration that the fight never ends. There is no room for actually starting to get things done.
Ultimately I did go on The Daily Show once I left the RNC. I got to confront the Muppet and Jon. Before the show Wyatt Cenac stopped by and we shook hands and he said, “It’s a real honor to meet you. I’ve enjoyed playing you for the past two years.”
I have the puppet. He has his own chair in my office. Sometimes I meet people and they’re disappointed I don’t speak like Puppet Mike Steele, you know, “That’s how we do it on the street, lunch meat!”
Jon and I had our disagreements. But look, when we focus on that one bad interview I had with Jon—I was so grateful later when he supported me on the issue of torture. That’s far more important, frankly, than any real or imagined slight that I might’ve had from him. I was very grateful for that, because that’s a seminal issue about what America’s all about. It meant a lot to me, and he wasn’t just talking about me. Jon was explaining to these young Americans why torture was such an important issue. That’s what I really appreciated.
He is like Mark Twain or Will Rogers. He is a modern-day humorist of that genre, of that level.
Absolutely, I took the gift bag every time I was on the show. Absolutely. It was one of the nicest bribes I ever got.
Puppet Mike Steele, Puppet John McCain, Gitmo. Oh, there’s a lot of puppet subtext to The Daily Show.
No. I can explain all that pretty easily. You run out of ways to skin cats, and so all you can do is try puppets, try cartoons, try whatever you can get your hands on to make it a little different.
Democrats certainly weren’t immune from prop humor and rough treatment. Stewart and the show had closely chronicled the battle over creating a new national health-insurance program. Three years after winning the legislative war, in October 2013, with great fanfare, the $800 million Obamacare website was finally launched… and immediately crashed.
The website opened and it was so shitty. I came in the next day fuming. Jon came in and didn’t see it at first—“I don’t know, websites are hard, they’ll get it right.” I laid out all the reasons this was such a big problem, in policy and reputation and messaging, everything the White House was trying to fucking do. Within a couple of days we waded in; by the time the Sebelius thing came around, Jon was way angrier than me.
The stakes, and the ugly mood, were heightened by the tactics of Tea Party Republicans in Congress. Led by first-term Texas senator Ted Cruz, they had refused to fund the federal government in a bid to cripple Obamacare, halting food-safety inspections and closing national parks for sixteen days in October 2013. Or, as the attempted extortion was billed by The Daily Show, “Shutstorm 2013.”
Six days into the ongoing website fiasco, Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of Health and Human Services, arrived at the Daily Show studio for a previously scheduled interview. “I anticipated taking a beating,” she says. She was right, but Sebelius’s tangled attempts to answer Stewart’s questions were perceived as a public relations disaster.
Jon Stewart: Nice to see you. We’re going to do a challenge. [reaches under desk, pulls out laptop, opens it as Sebelius gamely tries to maintain her smile] I’m going to try and download every movie ever made—and you’re going to try to sign up for Obamacare, and we’ll see which happens first.
Let me tell you why it may seem I’m a little bit hard on this. For those of us who are somewhat believing that the opposition in Washington right now are crazy people, it is imperative that this government, the government that basically says the federal government has a role to play in people’s lives, it feels like it’s frustrating to have to defend something that is less than ideal, or is functioning at what seems to be a level of incompetence that is larger than what it should be… So this is a system that’s been jerry-rigged to deal with the crazy people. By bending over to deal with the crazy people, we now face default. Has that taught a lesson?
I do remember very clearly leaving the stage feeling that there had been a bit of a mugging and not one that I understood. This tech-savvy administration having a major tech glitch—I own that and was accountable for that. But the line of questioning about the mandates and using our administrative authority to delay one and not delay the other was so sort of bizarre that I felt it was not only out of left field but it didn’t make any sense. The part of the interview that was a bit baffling to me then, and still is, is the note on which it ended, with the suggestion that I might be lying to people.
I know Jon was always accused of having a biased presentation tilting way left, and of certainly being an ally to the president. So it is quite possible that this was to even the score. It’s possible that he, like a number of people who we had engaged early on in the dialogue to be supportive of this effort, felt they had gone out on a limb and now we really screwed up and they had egg on their faces.
And by the way, I’m a huge fan of Jon Stewart. Always have been. Always will be. Got most of my news from him over the years when I just stopped watching news in Kansas. I watched him have a huge impact in 2010, with the 9/11 bill. We were pushing it from the inside. But he helped galvanize enough people to put enough pressure to really get that bill over the finish line.
Congressional press secretaries used to come in and have meetings with us: “What do you think would be good for our client? How do you think they should approach a Daily Show interview?” And I would say, “Well, you could have them speak what they believe. Just have them stop being so managed, and cautious, and weird. Then maybe we’ll have an honest conversation about an area we genuinely disagree on.”
But that’s not generally what occurs, and that’s what I think bothered me about Secretary Sebelius in that interview. They’re looking for safe harbor with high upside, not for anything real. We exist to expose the space between the press secretary and the politician.
Way back in January 1999, when Stewart was starting as host of The Daily Show, Anthony Weiner was beginning his first term in Congress. The two had met in 1985, through mutual college friends, and gotten to know each other better in the early nineties, when Weiner dated a New York friend of Stewart’s. Weiner attended standup shows to support Stewart; Stewart wrote a check to support Weiner’s first run for New York’s city council.
We were late-at-night-arguing-about-Israel kind of friends. Jon was smart and opinionated, funny, genuinely interested in politics, and we both had a wiseass Jewish guy sensibility.
It’s fun to get drunk and get in an argument with Anthony Weiner. But there is, I think, a real serious character flaw there: He has to be in the spotlight. When we would hang out and I would be funny, that’s when he would generally pick a fight with me.
When I ran for Congress, he did an event for me. But no, we didn’t stay particularly close, and I wasn’t crazy about what he was doing on the show, to be honest. The formula of educating the audience about an issue just enough to whack at it, like a form of tee ball—it seemed a little bit too easy and was accelerating the cynicism around politics. He might’ve had a serious point underneath it, but what he did, every night, was just basically portray politicians as buffoons, politicians as idiots, politicians as, you know, fools. It accelerated the downward spiral of young people kind of engaging in politics on a serious level. What Jon also served to do—probably correctly—was discredit other outlets who are trying to cover politics, like Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN.
I was in Congress during what I think we’ll look back and see as kind of a transition time, when senior guys, working on issues, were supplanted by glib guys, working on TV, as the significant players in Washington. For better or worse, I’m a pretty good example—I care very deeply about issues, but I realized I could short-circuit twenty years of waiting around on the Energy and Commerce Committee by being good at talking about those issues on TV. The rise of split-screen television was happening during those ten, twelve years I was in Congress, and that also mirrored the time that Jon was making hay mocking the era of split-screen TV.
I never asked Jon to go on the show. I went on as a guest once, during the height of the health-care thing. I think that was in February 2010.
Jon Stewart: [after introducing Weiner and sitting behind desk] I’ve known Anthony for many years. We knew each other in the eighties, we used to go to the beach together. And I could—let’s face facts—destroy your political career.
Congressman Anthony Weiner: That’s funny. You know the concept of mutually assured destruction, Jon?
Jon Stewart: You believe you have pictures of me as well in compromising positions?
Congressman Weiner: Ohhh, I’ve got stuff.
Turned out he did an excellent job of destroying his own career.
Slightly more than a year after Weiner’s only appearance as a Daily Show guest, the congressman tweeted a photo of his erect penis, somewhat disguised in a pair of gray undershorts, to a Seattle-area college student. At first Weiner denied the junk shot was his. Then he claimed his account may have been hacked.
When the story first broke and it wasn’t entirely clear if it was real or not, we played the clip of Weiner’s nondenial in the morning meeting, where he said something like, “Well, there’s lots of pictures out there.” Jon immediately said, “Oh, I don’t like that. This is not going to end well for him.”
Stewart initially felt a bit conflicted, but holding back would have been comedic malpractice, and The Daily Show quickly made the Weiner scandal a nightly highlight. There was an (animated) appearance by “News Angel Tom Brokaw,” urging avoidance of juvenile gossip, and by “Comedy Devil Don Rickles,” urging allegiance to laughs (“Comedians don’t have friends! They have ex-wives and irritable bowel syndrome!”). An R. Kelly impersonator sang “Whip out the truth!” There were segments titled, “Distinguished Member of Congress,” “Anthony and Cleopenis,” “The Big Wang Theory,” and “Circumcision 2011.”
As additional salacious Weiner texts appeared, life started imitating art—or at least imitating bad porn.
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk, next to over-the-shoulder head shot of Weiner captioned, THE WANGOVER] One of the newly released texts did catch my eye. [reading, as screenshot of Weiner texts appears] Anthony Weiner: “Make me an offer I can’t refuse.” Lady in question: “To get us in the mood, first we watch back-to-back episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.”
What mood are they going to get into?
Unfortunately, they continued: [screenshot of woman’s text] “Or if this is not your thing, we can just get drunk and have mad, passionate sex!” Anthony Weiner: “Why choose? With me behind you, can’t we both watch The Daily Show?”
[Stewart fakes retching as the studio audience howls, then points at the camera in mock anger] First of all… is this what you people are doing at home when our show is on? I mean, we spend all day writing and producing this thing! If it’s just going to be background noise for your amorous—are you people fucking right now!? Hey, Chuck, hit the button that lets me see them! [springs out of chair] Oh, my God!
A week later, Weiner tearfully resigned—holding a press conference that Stewart and Oliver gleefully parodied with a bit involving a blender of margaritas. They even managed to keep laughing as Stewart dropped the prop and sliced his hand on broken glass.
No, I didn’t see a lot of the stuff he did about me at the time. I just had my head somewhere else. But I heard about a segment about me where Jon cut himself. So I called him to see if he was all right. Which, in retrospect, was kind of weird. I’m in free fall, he’s pummeling me, and I’m calling him to see if he’s all right. He might’ve called me another time and said some encouraging words—“Listen, you’re going to weather this, it’s always bad when you’re in it,” or something like that.
As the time has gone on, and more people have said to me, “Boy, your friend Jon can’t be much of a friend, he was really killing you,” you know, my view is, with everyone—reporters, colleagues, donors—you know, that I brought this all on myself. I’d never blame anyone else for how they reacted. Seriously, I mean, can you imagine a comedian not making fun of a guy named Weiner, who took pictures?
At one point Jon told me, “You can’t confuse what we’re making of you and what you really are,” or something like that. “We have a piñata that we’re whacking, but don’t think it’s you.” That’s easy to say, except I’m inside that piñata. I think that that is the way he gets through this. If you know someone who you’re beating up on, I guess you have to objectify them rather than personify them.
I told him, “We have created a character of Anthony Weiner and that’s who’s being dragged through this process, and while I’m sure you cannot take any solace in that separation, the level of vitriol and jokes is not necessarily commensurate with what happened, and for that I’m sorry.”
Jon was conscientious about his willingness to destroy the life of practically anybody who really deserved it. He knew, to his credit, that he couldn’t possibly go easy on Weiner.
I think the most valuable thing that Jon instilled in everyone on the staff was, “If it makes you uncomfortable, that’s not necessarily an impediment to what you’re trying to say.”
So if we were working on a piece where we were confused about something, Jon would say, “Write that confusion into this piece. If you’re upset about this, fall into whatever is keeping you from writing this.”
That’s part of the challenge that keeps it exciting—making yourself uncomfortable.