There was and is no more uncomfortable subject in American life than race. Stewart’s run as host coincided with a period of remarkable progress—the first black American president, unprecedented ethnic diversity in major cities—and spasms of ugly backlash—bitter battles over immigration, the deaths of unarmed blacks at the hands of police, the demonization of Muslims as terrorists.
For Stewart, diversifying the Daily Show staff and the cast wasn’t primarily a matter of better reflecting modern American life—it gave him different ways to be funny, and more tools to address racial issues in more nuanced ways. So Larry Wilmore explained how he’d “rather we got casinos” than the twenty-eight days of platitudes that make up Black History Month. Aasif Mandvi traveled to Tennessee to interview opponents of a proposed mosque—or the “Community Center of Death,” as The Daily Show framed the segment, with clips of mushroom cloud explosions and a talking skull straight from a horror movie.
I’m not a Muslim who goes to the mosque or is praying and fasting during Ramadan. But I realized, through the Daily Show experience, that I had a dimension of experience to pitch that I really hadn’t thought about before. I almost felt like it radicalized me. I started to realize that I was at a madrassa of comedy run mostly by Ivy League–educated Jews, and it started to feel like I was able to find a voice around being Muslim, around being South Asian, that I hadn’t even realized was something I wanted to do. And it turned out to be very important to people, other American Muslims, to have a brown guy on The Daily Show represent them, to have a voice. Iraq was going on at that time, and people would thank me for talking about it.
One of the pieces I’m proudest of was in Tennessee, where there was opposition to building an Islamic cultural center. I was sitting across from this person who’s basically telling me that one out of five Muslims are terrorists, and that there were terrorist training camps behind every mosque in America. Her misinformation about Islam, and the arrogance with which she spoke about this stuff, was hard to sit across from without getting genuinely angry.
But here’s the crazy bananas part of it, an example of how much Stephen Colbert was correct when he said people get a lobotomy when you put a camera in front of them. Originally I said to her, “You know that I’m Muslim,” and she said something benign like, “Yeah, I kind of figured you were.” We had to stop tape for a couple of minutes to change camera batteries or something. Her husband was off to the side, and he fancied himself to be a standup comic. He said, “Honey, when he said to you, ‘You know I’m Muslim,’ you should’ve said, ‘Nobody’s perfect.’”
And she said, “Oh, that would’ve been really funny. I wish I had thought of that.” Personally, I was incredibly offended, but then professionally, as a Daily Show guy, I was also, “That’s gold. I don’t need to be personally offended here, because she is going to basically die on her own sword.”
So, we started rolling again. “You do know that I’m Muslim, right?” And she said, “Well, nobody’s perfect.” That’s the one that we used.
But for all of the show’s public, on-air grappling with race, it was a private, inside-the-office episode that illustrated just how thorny the topic remains. In June 2011, Congressman Anthony Weiner’s first sexting scandal was consuming nearly all the media oxygen. After indulging in a week’s worth of crotch shots himself, Stewart wanted to point out that there might be a few more important things going on in the world—oh, say, a secret U.S. bombing of Yemen. To illustrate the idea he spun a game show wheel, built by prop supervisor Justin Chabot, that was divided into serious topics. The wheel’s pointer, in classic Daily Show style, was a ten-inch dildo. The rubber rod’s final choice seemed harmless at the time.
This was during the Republican primaries, and the bit included a video clip of Herman Cain talking about how congressional bills were too long, and how when Cain became president they wouldn’t be longer than three pages. And then Jon, at the desk, does an impression where he says, “I am Herman Cain, and I do not like to read.”
So I’d done the Herman Cain voice. And I’m not sure where it came from, but then there were people saying that I was a racist. It might have been amplified by my friends over at Fox. You know how they do the graphics in the lower third of the screen, we call it “the Cavuto,” where they basically slander people and throw a question mark on the end of it: “Are Democrats terrorists?” So it was, “Jon Stewart, racist?” And they don’t answer the question. They’re just asking. “Your mother a whore? No disrespect intended.”
And those moments, you don’t take them lightly.
Jon would usually come in fifteen minutes, twenty minutes after the morning meeting started. There were many times when Steve Bodow would say, before Jon arrived, “Okay, here’s this thing that happened on Fox. Please don’t mention it. Let’s just see if Jon didn’t catch it.” And Jon would come in and say, “You see what they said on Fox & Friends?”, and we’d be like, “Oh, here we go. I guess we’re doing it.”
When people call Jon out personally, it gets his blood up and he wants to go back at them. I usually want us to not go back and revisit things. And have often been proven wrong. My first instinct is usually, let it go. But it’s not my name getting dragged through the mud. If it’s important to Jon, of course we should do it. Nine times out of ten, Jon’s got a really great way of doing it.
The morning meeting is where we make our bones, and that’s the rawest part of the day. And I felt I wanted to make the case, because I found Fox’s response to it so egregious. But it definitely probably had me off a little bit. When you’re under that spotlight, it had some weight. So I’m probably not at the top of my game emotionally, and I certainly don’t think I handled it well.
What happened? In the morning meeting we’d been watching video of people saying Jon was being a racist. He’s not a racist, so he was very upset about being called that, especially by Fox News.
Even though Jon knew that this was a cynical game Fox was playing, he still took it personally, both on his own behalf and on behalf of the show. It was like, “We can’t let them get away with that.”
He wanted to go back and prove, “No, I’m not racist—I’m an asshole to everybody.” Here’s the proof: a montage of the all-time stereotypical impressions he’d done. We were throwing that idea around the room in the morning.
In the morning meeting there can be twenty-five or thirty people. There were quite a few people there.
You work with people every day, you get in a fight. Here’s the thing you’ve got to remember: The conversations we’re having in the Daily Show writers’ room aren’t about how many farts we can light. We’re talking about real shit. So real opinions are going to rise. Hostilities are going to mount. I got in an argument with people about guns. I got into an argument with a bunch of the writers one time about voter ID laws. And one time with Jon about pink nail polish on boys. You’re talking about passionate issues and not everyone agrees. Shit pops every now and then.
My basic point was, I understand why Fox wishes to discredit our bits, and I would view it differently if we had approached it with any different methodology. If it hadn’t been (A) clearly riffing off of a rhythm and piece of tape that we had. And (B) we thought this caricature is something that kind of stretched across every boundary.
So that was the general sense, to put together me being horrible like that to everybody. If you can’t say that this was approached differently than it’s been approached with other people, it’s not racist. You’re dealing with a horrible person who tends to do this to everybody.
Jon might have said, “Does anybody have an opinion about this?” And Wyatt said, “Well, actually, I was in a hotel room and saw the bit and it made me kind of uncomfortable.”
I said this thing about the Herman Cain bit and, to my mind, out of nowhere someone raises their hand and goes, “Well, you are a little racist.” It’s conversational, but it felt like an attack. And so I respond defensively, which in the moment I do sometimes.
It seemed like Jon was genuinely surprised, one, that Wyatt had said that; two, that someone could’ve thought that about Jon, especially in the room; and three, that Wyatt didn’t bring it up with Jon before.
Wyatt says, “I’m not saying you’re a racist, but the impression reminded me of Amos ’n’ Andy, of Kingfish.”
And Jon fucking exploded.
Wyatt started with, “It was Kingfish, and there’s a certain thing…” I said, “What about Jewish caricature, that’s different?” So we were going back and forth about that.
So Jon turned his fire—not argumentatively right away, but making his case, the case he was going to make on TV, that, “I do this to everybody, it has nothing to do with race.” And Wyatt is trying to make the case that, “I understand, but there’s still a history of people who look like you using this kind of voice about people who look like me.” It starts on an even keel but escalates pretty quickly, and Jon is getting angry.
It wasn’t about Wyatt. I don’t think Jon would’ve acted that way in another context, but he was feeling incredibly attacked. Fox had dug in on him for a week or more.
I didn’t think it was a very good impression. It did not, at the time, strike me as an Amos ’n’ Andy type of voice. However, we’re in a room with nineteen people, and when the only black guy says, “It sounded that way to me,” whether you agree or disagree, he’s the one who gets to say it. It took courage to stand up, as the only black guy in the room, and to say how it sounded to him.
I think Wyatt was probably in an incredibly hard spot. He could’ve swallowed his opinion, and that would’ve left him in a great deal of pain, and it would’ve left the show weaker for not having heard that point of view expressed by somebody who we love and respect.
Wyatt had the freedom at The Daily Show, and the courage, to bring it up with Jon. I’m pretty sure Jon acknowledged Wyatt’s feelings and interpretation of it and said, “You know, I get where you’re coming from. Now, let’s let it go.” And Wyatt did not, and that’s where the innocence that accompanies Wyatt’s later retelling of the conversation doesn’t match up with what happened. And I like Wyatt. Let me just put it this way: Jon got pissed off at Wyatt well after I would’ve gotten pissed off at Wyatt, if I was Jon.
So the conversation gets a little more prickly, a little more prickly, then it gets heated, then I go, “Fuck this,” which seeing now I think was interpreted as, “Fuck you, and I’m done with you,” rather than “I’m done with this.”
Jon got up and started to walk out of the room. He said, “Fuck it, I’m done with this,” and I believe, to this day, Wyatt thinks he said, “Fuck you, I’m done with you,” and that is not what I heard. Jon started to walk back down the hallway, toward his office, and Wyatt followed him, and they yelled at each other all the way down the hallway, into Jon’s office.
There was definitely screaming and heat, and it continued, the argument, well into the morning in Jon’s office. It upset some of the dogs.
When Jon and Wyatt were yelling, the dogs were going crazy. They hated it. Parker loves Wyatt.
I don’t remember the dogs. The dogs went crazy for much less stuff, so…
It kind of died down, and then an hour or so later—and this has never happened—Jon asked us to round everyone up and go to the writers’ wing so he could apologize for losing his shit.
He cried.
Yeah. He apologized and he apologized, and he said he had already apologized to Wyatt privately.
And he said he didn’t want to give that impression that we weren’t allowed to challenge him. But he was human, too, and he had this really emotional reaction.
I don’t think Wyatt was at the second meeting. I think he took a walk for a while that day. That whole day with Wyatt, he was so sad, and hurt. He’s like, “Jon’s done with me,” and I was like, “No, he would fire you if he’s done with you.”
It was not a great day. Occasionally there would be a perfect-storm moment, frustrations from other days all building up to one thing, looking for a moment to come out, and that was probably one of those moments. But I don’t get to sit as the jury on that one.
Wyatt had been a really good friend to me always, and I understood why he felt really down, and that it is a weird thing to work in an office that’s almost completely white.
I could say, as a woman, it’s hard to work with a lot of men. There are points in time where it was like, “Wait, we work in an office with all white men. Let’s start trying to diversify the staff.” Wyatt was part of the evolution of the show.
Let me be clear. The Daily Show is probably one of the least diverse places you can possibly work, or at least it was. I mean, white dudes wrote the fucking thing for years. When I started working there it was a bunch of white guys sitting on chairs writing jokes white guy style. The executive producer originally was a woman and then the head writer was a woman, Lizz Winstead, but it was a boys’ club like you’d never believe.
I think Wyatt was absolutely right to feel that that he was the one dude who represented black people in the whole building. I think Jon was really hard on him. But Jon has done that to me. He’s done that to other people. You’re calling a dude out in a meeting in front of all the other writers. He’s your boss. He’s obviously feeling sensitive about it. Probably not the best way to do it. I don’t think either of them handled it properly, but I don’t think Wyatt is a good dude.
That was the uncomfortable moment in my six years there. The fact that it was such an exceptional incident in our writers’ room tells you something.
I don’t remember Jon going over the line in his impressions, going, “Well, yassuh. I believes…” I don’t think he was doing that. I know what Amos ’n’ Andy was, so I know exactly what that sounds like and I don’t think Jon was doing that.
If you know Jon you know he would not have a malicious intent to do that type of thing. So I think at some point you have to give somebody the benefit of the doubt. He’s done more offensive things about other races or ethnicities.
Look, as a minority myself, I can understand where Wyatt was coming from, in terms of probably feeling something and wanting to share it. I think he was the only African-American writer in that room, at that time, and so he probably did want to share something about how he felt and about how African-Americans might relate to this thing, you know?
I actually really liked Wyatt and still do. We had some really interesting conversations about life and about family. But he’s kind of a dick at the buffet line, always grabbing for that fried chicken.
That blowup happened before I got to the show, but knowing Wyatt and Jon now, he probably just chose the wrong time to bring it up. I had similar shit happen. Rory Albanese wanted to put tequila in my hand and have me wearing a taco bandolier. And I said no, gracias. I just said it privately.
The correspondents were very white prior to Mandvi and Wyatt and Larry coming in. But yeah, it’s comedy, man. Comedy has always been for white guys, and it’s just now changing. I think Jon was aware of that and made a conscious effort to bring different people in.
The voice wasn’t offensive to me. That was him being a satirist. Okay? I mean, I’m a learned man with a couple of degrees, so if I wasn’t comfortable in my own reading skin then I would have been offended, but I’m comfortable in my own intellectual reading skin.
There is a line you can cross, and I’ve seen situations like that. What Jon Stewart did, that didn’t bother me, not at all. The fact that Jon Stewart concluded you can’t write a bill in three pages was offensive, because I happen to believe you can write three-page-long bills.
I did voices and caricatures that were way more over the top than Herman Cain. But I also think, though, that in Wyatt’s mind, this is a special circumstance. I personally as a Jewish guy disagree with that pretty wholeheartedly, knowing the history of Jewish caricature.
If I can have anything to take away from the entire episode that could be constructive in my mind, it’s learning the pressure you put on people in that situation, and to be cognizant of that. And I thought being cognizant of that meant getting people’s input, as opposed to how their input may be in some ways shaped by the pressure and responsibilities they may feel as representing something. It’s not enough to ask somebody’s opinion. You also have to understand the context and the atmosphere with which they’re giving that opinion, and the power dynamic that’s involved. I think I did not take that into consideration, partially because I think I was ignorant of that dynamic. Because that’s unfair, to ask somebody to represent a people. And it’s a conversation I wish Wyatt and I had had a long time ago.
Cenac left The Daily Show a little more than one year after the argument. In between, Stewart and Cenac performed a number of Daily Show segments about racism—segments that are even more remarkable in retrospect, given how recent and raw their dispute had been at the time. For example, when stories surfaced that the family of Rick Perry, the Republican presidential candidate, had owned a Texas hunting camp referred to as “Niggerhead,” the pair made a larger point that was both funny and scalding in a piece called “The Amazing Racism—Geographical Bigotry.”
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] For more now, we go to Wyatt Cenac, coming to us live from Texas. Wyatt, I know that you grew up there. It must be so hurtful to be reminded of the racial insensitivity that has long marred the state.
Wyatt Cenac: [in front of green-screen backdrop of two-lane road running beside a serene mountain lake] Actually, Jon, I’m not in Texas. I’m in your state. I’m standing in front of Nigger Lake, New York. The state even listed it on its website until recently.
Jon Stewart: Wow, Wyatt, that, uh, I guess it takes a while for name changes to go through.
Wyatt Cenac: How long do you need? You could call it anything. Cat Shit Lake. Fart Swallow Lake. The point is, everybody’s rushing to condemn Texas. And sure, there’s a lot of racist shit that goes on in Texas. But guess what? There’s Niggerhead Rapids, Idaho. Niggerhead Point, Florida. Niggerhead Pond, Vermont. Niggerhead Creek, North Carolina—good fishing. Did you know there are over a hundred places that have been called Niggerhead in this country?
Jon Stewart: What does this say about America?
Wyatt Cenac: [shouting] It says there aren’t enough black people making maps!
You know, it’s not just about insulting black people… there’s places like Chink’s Peak, Dago Peak, Squaw Tit Mountain, Jap Road, Spook Woods, and Mexican Gulch.
Jon Stewart: Wow, this is embarrassing for America.
Wyatt Cenac: I disagree, Jon. While America may have a legacy of intolerance, it’s also shown that it has the capacity to learn from its mistakes and transform those ugly feelings into expressions of our highest ideals… It reminds me of that song “America the Beautiful”—the lost verses.
[sings] Oh beautiful for rivers wide, and Strong-Like-Darky Creek / For Half-Breed Hill and Dago’s Nose / The snow upon Chink’s Peak! / America, America, God shed his grace on thee / And keep the blacks across the tracks / [Stewart joins in] From sea to shining sea!
The piece was funny, it was pointed, and it was awkward to perform, in ways that only Daily Show insiders understood. Yet the blowup would stay a secret until three years later, when Cenac talked about it in a podcast interview with Marc Maron, with whom Stewart had long feuded. In the meantime, The Daily Show occupied itself with minor conflicts, like the one between the United States and Iran.