John Oliver’s “replacement” as Daily Show correspondent was a very different type: tall, blond, and middle-American Jordan Klepper. He’d come to New York after performing with Chicago’s Second City.
With Jordan you had this kind of manic strangeness behind a very bland facade—which is an insulting way to put it. Behind this super-nothing-special face that nobody would comment on—not good, not bad, just kind of fades into the background. That’s better.
So the first chat that Jordan did was the one about Putin moving into Ukraine. It’s Jordan’s first day as a correspondent. He’s getting increasingly flustered because he’s making mistakes. He walks from the green screen to the desk and at one point he calls Jon “Dad.”
That was the first joke I got on the show. I did it in the writers’ room beforehand trying to figure out, “How much of this am I supposed to pitch in? How much are the writers in charge?” And it was such a communal place. We’re riffing and ripping and running and I ended up calling Jon “Dad” accidentally. I played it in the room and Elliott says, “This is a fun bit.” So we kept it.
What I also really remember from that day is standing in the wings as Jon did his preshow Q&A with the audience. Then “Born to Run” kicks in, as it did before every taping started. But Jon comes over to me before he goes behind the desk and says, “Hey, if you don’t absolutely destroy it tonight, we’ll leave you in a fucking ditch. Have a good show!” and walks back out. I felt like the tears started in my toes and built up. I was like, “Oh my God. This is a big moment for me right now. But I could destroy it.”
Jordan, that was urine. Those were not tears.
That was a big night for me. The bit went well. I felt like a million bucks. I had friends who’d been on SNL, where you do a show and then you go and party with Paul McCartney. So I walked offstage and turned to people, saying, “Where do we go out? What do we do?” People are turning off the lights and they say, “Well, you do it again tomorrow.” The Daily Show, you do a show and then you wake up at seven o’clock and you read the newspaper and you come up with something again.
The next new correspondent had grown up in a Lower East Side housing project. Michael Che was hired away from Saturday Night Live, where he had been on the writing staff. In June, Che made his debut “from” Aleppo, Syria, “reporting” on the ruinous civil war and the rise of ISIS.
Hiring distinctive new correspondents was one sign that Stewart didn’t intend to coast his way to the finish. In July, Hillary Clinton came by for just her third visit, ostensibly to sell her new book about her years as secretary of state, Hard Choices, but also to begin selling herself as Obama’s successor. And Stewart found a sly way to mount the elephant in the room.
Jon Stewart: This [book] is, it’s an incredibly, I think, complex and well-reasoned and eyewitness view to the history of those four years, and I think I speak for everyone when I say, no one cares, they just want to know if you’re running for president.
Let me ask you a question: Do you like commuting to work or do you like a home office?
Hillary Clinton: You know, I’ve spent so many years commuting, I kind of prefer a home office. That’s where I wrote my book, it was on the third floor of our house, so that worked.
Jon Stewart: Do you have a favorite shape for that home office? Would you like that office to have corners, or would you like it not to have corners?
Hillary Clinton: [laughs] You know, I think that the world is so complicated, the fewer corners you can have the better.
Having gotten Clinton to laugh, Stewart proceeded to make her squirm.
Jon Stewart: These talking heads, sitting around, picking out every little thing, making fun of it, it’s just not right. [looks archly at camera]
Hillary Clinton: Could I say that I agree with you completely?
Jon Stewart: What was the one that caught you most off guard? Was it the “We were dead broke—”
Hillary Clinton: Well, you know that was an inartful use of words, obviously. You know, Bill and I have worked really hard and we’ve been successful and I’m really grateful for that. But what I worry about and I talk about this in the book is, I’m worried that other people and especially younger people are not going to have the same opportunities we did…
Jon Stewart: You know what was kind of awesome, it says to me you’re running for president, how easily you pivoted from that to income inequality in America.
Then Stewart himself pivoted, from domestic to foreign affairs, with a wonkish question that produced an intriguingly political answer.
Jon Stewart: You see very small groups who are able to sow a great deal of destructive force, and is America—we are a large imperial power and the idea that we can exercise that power in the same manner, you know, what is our foreign policy anymore?
Hillary Clinton: You know, well, that’s really why this book is something that I put my heart and soul into, because we can’t practice our diplomacy and define our foreign policy as leaders talking to leaders anymore, because that’s not the way the world works anymore, exactly as you said. People are empowered from the bottom up. What I found when I became secretary of state was that so many people in the world, especially young people, they had no memory of the United States liberating Europe and Asia, fighting the Nazis, the Cold War, you know, and winning. That was just ancient history. They didn’t know the sacrifices they had made and the values that motivated us to do it.
We have not been telling our story very well. We do have a great story. We are not perfect by any means, but we do have a great story. About human freedom, human rights, human opportunity, and let’s get back to telling it, to ourselves, first and foremost, and believing about ourselves and then taking it around the world. That’s what we should be standing for.
I thought that was nuts. Because the problem with America’s story is it has to be told honestly. It’s not that people haven’t heard about it. Does she really think that America is a relatively obscure nation? You know we’re not Liberia or the Marshall Islands. All we do is project our awesomeness.
I’ve always felt like what America has to do is act with integrity, and if somebody tells a different story, you can try and correct it, but more importantly, it’s what you do, not what you say.
But all politicians are essentially salespeople. Some are more adept at concealing it. Others truly don’t have the stomach for it and wear that part on their sleeve. I always get the sense Obama had a disdain for that part of the job. I still don’t get the sense that he really likes anybody down there, in Washington. Hillary has the stomach for it, but more importantly has the ambition for it. And you’ll stomach a lot when you’ve got the ambition.
She is very comfortable in the world of the establishment. So, the inauthenticity is not her affecting a drawl or not being a great campaigner. It’s adopting a mantra that you know is not hers. Like, you don’t give those speeches to Wall Street and then talk about how economic disparity is a terrible problem. The sense I get from Hillary is that she says, “Oh, they’re liking this economic policy, so then I will stand and be Braveheart.” I do think her passion is real and admirable with women’s issues around the world. She’s worked on that her whole life. But I think because she’s been ensconced in the world of power and influence, when she takes the position of the champion of not that, it feels somewhat hollow.
Two days after Hillary Clinton’s appearance came the chokehold death of Eric Garner, a black man, at the hands of a white New York police officer. It was, unfortunately, merely the first in a string of high-profile racial tragedies in 2015. Across sixteen years, The Daily Show had become adept at trying to make sense of madness through comedy. But often the weight of addressing a crisis fell directly and drainingly on Stewart. After Garner’s death, he dropped the jokes for raw emotion, much as he had done after 9/11. Yet the years in between seemed to have sapped his optimism. “I honestly don’t know what to say,” Stewart told the audience after a grand jury brought no charges related to Garner’s death. “If comedy is tragedy plus time, I need more fucking time. But I would really settle for less fucking tragedy.”
I was in Los Angeles, working on Black-ish, where I was executive producer, when I heard about the police in New York killing Eric Garner with a chokehold. I remember thinking, “I have to leave and say something about this,” and calling The Daily Show, and they were thinking the same thing.
It’s always a collaboration between all of us. Usually the writers have an angle and I’ll have a point of view as well, and we’ll get on the phone and talk. When I come in the first thing I’ll do is meet with Jon. “How do we really feel about this? What do you think, what do I think?” And we get that point of view down first, and then the comedy comes out of that. I came up with the idea that it wasn’t the cops that were racist, it was the benefit of the doubt itself that was racist. Then you write toward that point of view.
I’m in the writers’ meeting and somebody said, “Look, man, the only thing Garner was brandishing was his blackness,” and I said, “Yes, that’s it. That’s what the piece is.” That’s the crystallizing line. Those lines come out of talking about it.
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] You really think police aren’t as quick to choke out a white person as a black person?
Larry Wilmore: [across from Stewart] Well, let’s compare. Eric Garner was unarmed, holding his hands up, and politely asking the cops to leave him alone. Here’s a white guy in Michigan last month. [video clip of rifle-toting angry guy] Here he is threatening the cops with a rifle—oh, and now he’s waving his dick at them! [video clip of crotch-grabbing angry guy] Oh, shit, they’re gonna fuck him up bad! [video clip of cops whispering in angry guy’s ear] Or… they’re gonna sit and have a chat. You gotta be fucking kidding me! Jon, he was asking for a chokehold!
This guy could have shot his way out of Fallujah. The only thing Eric Garner was brandishing was his blackness.
That August, Michael Brown gets shot in Ferguson, Missouri, by the police. The show was on vacation, but I’m always keeping up on things. At the time the ALS Bucket Challenge was big, and so on the plane back to New York I cooked up the Ferguson Protest Challenge, where I get maced and tear-gassed.
I watched the Fox coverage of Ferguson and their defensiveness about it and “maybe that cop felt threatened.” I thought what they don’t understand is, it’s not just that these individuals live in a town where they feel the fragility of their safety with the authorities. It’s a system, and I don’t understand why we can’t acknowledge that. I don’t think people recognize how exhausting it is sometimes to be black.
So we also did a longer piece partly about how Fox was “outraged” that Ferguson was being cast in racial terms. And I talked about how we’d recently sent a producer, Stu Miller, who was dressed like a homeless elf with a week’s worth of five o’clock shadow, and a correspondent, Michael Che, dressed in a tailored suit, out to do an interview—and how it was Che who got stopped by security. The point being, here’s how ubiquitous racism and indignity is. To Michael, this wasn’t “You’re not going to fucking believe what happened.” It came up in the course of the conversation about other things. That’s what I meant in the piece when I said, “You’re tired of hearing about racism? Imagine how fucking exhausting it is living it.”
There was an Andrea Tantaros clip, from Fox, where I think she says something to the effect of, “Why do we keep having to make everything about race?” And Jon and Jo Miller and I were talking about it in my office, and that line about how just being black in America is exhausting came out of the conversation.
It’s sad I can’t even tell you which shooting it was about. But I was just so fucking happy we got to that place. As an African-American, as a creative person, it felt really good to know that I was a part of something that millions of people would see and hear. As a civilian, you can feel so helpless. But because I knew Jon was a person who drove conversation, I felt like I contributed at least in some way to getting people closer to where I thought the conversation should be.
I spent a good portion of time talking to Jon directly about race, because he would come to my office. He cared about it a lot and wanted it to be done right.
Che was a Daily Show correspondent for only four months, before jumping back to SNL to coanchor “Weekend Update.” But it was long enough for him to star in a haunting segment called “Race/Off” that was stylistically reminiscent of Steve Carell’s “escape” from Baghdad during The Daily Show’s early days.
I was in San Jose, California, working on a field piece, and Jo Miller and Travon Free had written a piece about Ferguson and other police killings. A lot of them I hadn’t even known about. So much had happened while we were on break. Everybody at the show was kind of licking their chops to do a piece saying, “What the F is going on?”
I took the red-eye back, and they sent me the script while I was on the plane. Got to New York, into a car, into wardrobe at The Daily Show, onto the set. That’s one of the exciting things about The Daily Show that you miss out on at SNL—because it’s daily, you get first crack at everything.
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] We turn to Senior Missouri Correspondent Michael Che. Michael, what’s the mood on the street right now in Ferguson?
Michael Che: [in front of green-screen photo of St. Louis Arch] Beats me. I’m not there. There are too many white cops with itchy trigger fingers in Ferguson. I’m staying right here in St. Louis where it’s safe.
Jon Stewart: I’m pretty sure in St. Louis the police shot and killed a black gentleman three days after the Ferguson shooting.
Michael Che: You mean like in a different St. Louis?
Jon Stewart: No, I’m pretty sure it’s the one in Missouri.
Michael Che: That’s… interesting.
Jon Stewart: But this is good, because I can ask you about the St. Louis County Police and—
[Che reappears on-screen, standing on a beach]
Jon Stewart: I’m sorry, Michael. Where are you?
Michael Che: [cheerfully] Jon, I’m as far away from the Shoot-Me State as you can get. Southern California! Nothing but sun, surfers, and palm trees—
Jon Stewart: Ummm… the LAPD recently shot an unarmed twenty-five-year-old black man to death.
[Che “runs” down a highway as city welcome signs fly by—CHARLOTTE, MACON, LITTLE ROCK, NEW ORLEANS, DAYTON—and lists recent shootings as he does so; then Che reappears wearing a cheap plastic space helmet and “floating” weightlessly]
Michael Che: Relax, Jon. I’m not even on Earth anymore. Nowhere safer for a black man than the infinite blackness of outer space.
[Red lights flash; police siren howls]
Police Voice: That’s a pretty expensive-looking space helmet. You got a receipt for that thing?
It seemed like there was a run of really high-profile racial incidents not long after I started at the show. I didn’t feel exactly like I was representing black people, but being twenty-two and new, it was a lot of pressure. It means a lot to me to work on a show where we do dick jokes, but we could still make a point about Ferguson.
I did a stop-and-frisk bit that I really loved, when John Oliver was hosting, about how the cops should be in high crime districts like Wall Street. And do you remember the young black girl from McKinney, Texas? She and her friends were at the pool and the police officer totally jumped all over her and sat on her, and she was a fourteen-year-old girl in a bikini? Well, I did a piece where I had on full armor, with the bikini on top of it. I’m really proud of that bit. That was the first piece where I was like, “Oh damn, this feels good to do—and it feels important to do.”
That fall, as Black Lives Matter protests filled U.S. streets and shopping malls, The Daily Show’s exploration of racism broadened and intensified. A Jason Jones field piece generated controversy when a group of Washington Redskins fans claimed the show had tricked them into a confrontation with Native American activists angry about the team’s nickname. Back in the studio, Bill O’Reilly made a guest appearance to promote his latest bio-cidal book; Stewart spent twelve minutes trying to get O’Reilly to admit that white privilege exists.
Bill O’Reilly: If you want to say it’s white privilege because whites didn’t have it as bad as blacks, fine. But that’s not what’s happening here in contemporary society!
Jon Stewart: Yes it is!
Bill O’Reilly: No it’s not! Yes, it’s harder if you’re a ghetto kid. Yes! But can you do it? Yes!
Jon Stewart: You can also win the hundred-yard dash on one leg!
Bill O’Reilly: Oh stop! Every fair person acknowledges—and I’ve said it many times on the Factor, the highest-rated cable news show in the world—
Jon Stewart: Somebody hasn’t seen Megyn Kelly yet!
Bill O’Reilly:—that African-Americans have it harder!
Jon Stewart: So we’ve come to agreement. You admit that white privilege exists, and while it’s not an excuse, it is a reality.
Bill O’Reilly: It doesn’t exist to any extent where individuals are kept back because of their color, or promoted because of their color! Look, you and I are lucky guys. We made it, we worked hard. It’s not ’cause we’re white! [turning to yell at a booing audience member] Oh, you think I’m sitting here ’cause I’m white!? You moron! I’m sitting here because I’m obnoxious, not ’cause I’m white!
Jon Stewart: My point is this: Women face this, and minorities face this. They have to make strategic calculations in their lives that white guys never have to make. We never have to worry about walking down certain streets because somebody’s gonna catcall us.
Bill O’Reilly: What you’re doing is promoting victimhood.
Jon Stewart: You know what I’ll call it? And it’s a word I think you’ll understand: It’s a factor.
Bill O’Reilly: I’ll give you the “factor” business.
Jon Stewart: This was a historic moment. Your humility has moved me. You are like Pope Francis, that has taken the Catholic Church into an era of acceptance and humility. You, Bill O’Reilly, can lead the flock of the Fox fearful to a better place.
Why was it so important to press him on white privilege? Because the community where O’Reilly grew up, that he’s so proud of as being the roots of his virtue, is so steeped in systemic racism. Levittown was a whites-only community, and so much of its wealth was a GI bill creation. That experience was so crucial to his view of himself as a self-starter, and the work ethic that he learned. That’s why I felt like it was imperative to at least have that argument.
Stewart’s conversation with O’Reilly only touched on the subject briefly, but as issues like gender pay equity and violence against women became a larger part of the cultural dialogue, the increased number of female staffers helped The Daily Show tackle those subjects with greater authenticity.
Here’s a big example of how the show’s topics changed over the years but how important parts of the process didn’t—writers collaborating and not being precious about their ideas, and Jon not giving into the temptation to just pump stuff out.
We had an idea to do a piece about campus sexual assault, for Jessica Williams. As head writer I assigned it to J. R. Havlan and Daniel Radosh, because they were free. Great writers, but what they came up with was not really the right perspective for this piece, and Jessica wasn’t comfortable with it. Jon was decisive: “Okay. If you’re not comfortable with this let’s go with that feeling. We won’t do this piece.” We scrapped it the night we were supposed to shoot it.
It didn’t feel quite right. We didn’t want to be making fun of the victims. Jon respected me enough to say, “Okay, go back and work on it.” And it was getting down to the wire when the piece was supposed to run.
There are shows where the writers would have said, “We worked on these jokes for days. You have to do them. You’re not going to do them?” But that wasn’t the Daily Show style. So I went to Jo Miller and Lauren Sarver and asked them to get in a room with Sara Taksler, the producer, and Jessica, and think about different ways to do it.
I got teased, playfully, because I pitched a lot of stories about abortion and rape. The show, when I started, was more resistant to covering certain things, because the feeling was “We don’t know how to make this funny.” I think Jon always cared about these issues; I don’t think his feelings changed. Part of it was you get bored covering the same stuff all the time. Women’s issues were becoming more of a mainstream news story, which made it easier for us, if people are already talking about it. And as the show became more and more successful, there was a confidence that we can make anything funny. Any story that’s important to tell, we can figure out a way to tell it.
There’s usually a catharsis in whatever piece we do on the show, where we might try to find a solution for something, and in talking about this topic, we couldn’t just stay focused on the campus stories themselves because it’s actually a global cultural problem.
We’re talking about rape, and we can’t do a piece about how to get rid of rape. That’s absurd. So we were all really upset and sharing our own experiences in college, and then that expanded just to feeling unsafe in New York and exchanging stories about walking to work and not feeling safe.
The conversation became about how women run this obstacle course in our daily lives and it’s crazy to realize my brother or my boyfriend doesn’t know about it.
We ended up with a piece where Jessica is talking about self-defense strategies for women, and Jordan Klepper is clueless.
What was awesome was that Jordan said, “I don’t think I’m enough of a jerk in the piece. I need to be more ignorant.”
It was Jessica who came up with the perfect line about men on the street saying they wanted to lick her back. I had wanted to pitch something more vulgar.
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] Clearly universities want their campuses safe. So Jordan Klepper and Jessica Williams have come up with some campus safety dos and don’ts.
Jordan Klepper: [in preppy polo shirt with upturned collar, standing in front of green-screen photo of college dorm] Okay, bros! Party commandment number one: Beer before liquor, never been sicker!
Jessica Williams: [standing next to Klepper in sleeveless T-shirt and jeans] Ladies, never lose sight of your drink! Ever! Don’t be a doofie, watch out for the roofie!
Jordan Klepper: Um, bros before hos, and um, don’t text your junk. Nowadays, potential employers will check your social media—
Jessica Williams: [shoving Klepper aside] That reminds me! If your crazy ex won’t stop texting you pictures of his junk, save all of them! Also any angry voice mails, weepy voice mails, threatening tweets and Tumblr posts, and surveillance footage of him standing outside your window watching you sleep. Save it all! The college and the cops won’t do anything, but maybe it will help you with your civil suit.
Jordan Klepper: Come on, Jessica. You’re telling me women spend their whole day navigating an obstacle course of sexual menace?
Jessica Williams: Pretty much.
Jordan Klepper: Oh, wow. Shit. Sorry. But hey, men aren’t all bad. [proudly points to self] Some of us are gentlemen!
Jessica Williams: Okay, thanks. I’ll keep that in mind the next time a guy says he wants to lick my back when I’m walking to work at eight in the fucking morning.
College students comprised one of the most enthusiastic segments of The Daily Show’s audience throughout Stewart’s time as host. Other viewers proved harder to reach, even as current events prompted not just more segments about racial issues, but some of The Daily Show’s most memorable ones.
Nobody at the barbershop ever knew what The Daily Show was. Well, I would say three black people at any given time watch The Daily Show, and if I’m watching it that reduces it down to two. In fact I was going to start an organization called One of the Three. I even did a bit on the show where I said, “Black people watching The Daily Show, the three of you need to listen to me very carefully,” while I was convincing them it was time to let O.J. go, where he couldn’t be a symbol of black anger.
My experience has been a little different. I get a lot of beautiful, older, affluent, Alfre Woodard–type women saying, “Great job.” And they also say, “That white boy Jon Stewart? He’s a cutie!” All the time.
When I first came to the show the notion was that my character would be a black conservative commentator. I didn’t want to do that, because for one thing I didn’t want to suggest that conservatives were, by some reason, wrong just because they were conservatives. My nature is to be contrary, so I thought I would go against the grain of what you would expect from a black commentator. I like to think we weren’t just preaching to the choir, that we surprised people sometimes.
Jon always deferred to me when I had an insight that he knew was genuine and was from my point of view. I would say, “Jon, I’m telling you the brothers don’t care about this,” or, “As a black person I would think this,” and we always had that kind of relationship where he wanted to know what that was.
Early on, we were going to do something on Black History Month. The typical joke is that the black person is upset that February only has twenty-eight days and they feel robbed. I said, “Guys, I can’t do that joke.” I said, “I’ll tell you my honest point of view on this is: Brothers are bored with the history.” So then the piece became, what really would be valuable instead of a month of trivia, especially for four hundred years of slavery? Not twenty-eight days of trivia. I’d rather we got casinos.
One of The Daily Show’s smallest demographics, however, was also one of its most attentive: official Washington and, in particular, beginning in 2009, the White House.
They are very different men, of course: a soccer-playing Jewish comic from New Jersey; a basketball-playing Kansan-Kenyan Christian pol from Hawaii. Yet Stewart and Obama, born fifteen months apart, shared a wised-up, postmodern sensibility and a core optimism. And for all their basic agreement on liberal policy ideas, what they had most in common was a more fundamental conservatism: a desire for the country’s politics to return to the mythical good old days of rational argument and functional, if messy, compromise.
Jon played a role in the elections that I was involved with Obama, in 2008 and 2012. I’m sure we did viewership research at some point. There was a measurable number of people who said they got their news from The Daily Show, which probably would frighten Jon, but I remember in 2005 Obama did a remote into The Daily Show during the campaign. It was really a good hit, but Jon was ribbing him for being on this celebrity platform, and Obama said, “Yeah, Jon, I think the only person who’s more overhyped than me is you.” And Stewart almost fell off his chair. But those kinds of interactions were helpful to us, because we were galvanizing particularly young people. The Daily Show audience was sort of right down Broadway for us in terms of reaching people and defining Obama as a kind of new-generation candidate.
In the early part of our administration the progressives, and I consider Jon among them, didn’t feel we were moving fast enough on different fronts or we were too willing to compromise. My first appearance on the show, in June 2010, basically Jon’s message was, “You guys believe in government, so why don’t you do it better? Because if you don’t do it better, people won’t believe in it.” So it was an interesting conversation. For me, there was an element of, “Oh, yeah, well, why don’t you come over here and do this, funny boy?” Because it’s a lot harder than people think to get stuff done. But nonetheless, Jon’s prodding was heard.
It was important for us to engage with Jon Stewart, because he was influential and the president wanted to get his point of view across. So we invited Jon to the White House twice, in 2011 and 2014.
I think that nobody in government ever talks to you unless they have a reason. It is an agenda-driven life. And not to say that most lives are not somewhat agenda driven, but not necessarily as relentlessly so as it is in politics. And so that aspect of them inviting me to the White House was not lost on me.
The whole pomp and circumstance of it is crazy. I mean, you’re going to the White House. You go through a portico. You get searched. You go through the gate. Somebody comes to meet you and takes you to the Roosevelt Room. Like, it’s crazy. You wait there, and then the Oval Office door opens, and there is the president in the office that Nixon had his tape recorder in, that Dolley Madison would bring the ice cream.
It feels like a movie set, unfortunately. I kept thinking Dave was going to show up. I’d turn the corner and there’d be Charles Grodin in a little visor, with a little calculator going, “He’s with the president. Here’s where we can save some money.” And you go in, and there’s an attachment to the Oval Office that’s his office, and then beyond that is a little small dining room, and you sit in that little dining room. And they bring you maybe the best salmon you’ve ever eaten, and a salad, and a little dessert, and you try not to gawk.
Obama wanted to talk about whether or not I was making everyone in the world cynical. And if I was, for me to stop doing it.
Where the president may have been zeroing in in those conversations was that he was working pretty hard to get some significant progressive things done, and for Jon to convey a sense that somehow he was less than serious about it because it wasn’t happening at the pace some people wanted is not fair or realistic. If you’re president and you can’t get a public option even though you want one, and the choice is no health-care bill or a health-care bill, being called a dipshit for not getting a public option isn’t very satisfying. It does add to cynicism.
We had a little disagreement over what the show represented. But that’s the first ten minutes, and then the next fifty minutes you get to have a really interesting conversation about government and its function, and philosophy, and history, and media with the president. And you get to question him about, “Why doesn’t the VA work?”
Obama is emphatic and somewhat stentorian. It’s intimidating. I can’t tell you that it’s not. He’s the president of the United States. You figure there’s a drone following somewhere.
Jon had a big megaphone. The thing about him was when he decided to deal with things directly—how 9/11 victims were treated, the condition of the Veterans Administration—because he is a comedian they almost had more impact, because it was sort of “I’m not even going to dress this shit up. I’m just going to lay it out here because it’s so irksome and concerning to me.” I say this affectionately—he was kind of a pain in the ass, which I think he wanted to be.
I think a public service program is a really good idea—make college three years, pay for some of it, and give kids one year of public service. This is where the president and Axelrod would start yelling at me: “You can’t get it through! Where’s the money? You’re an idiot!”
I’m not suggesting that the president is a magic unicorn. But if something is a priority, there are extraordinary levers of bully pulpit power he can bring to it.
I pocketed two boxes of M&M’s with the presidential seal. You open it up and you really are expecting the best M&M’s you’ve ever eaten in your life, and it’s just fucking M&M’s. You’re like, “Well, these are the same M&M’s I got at the train station.” I thought president M&M’s would somehow be like, I don’t know, the chocolate on the outside and the candy on the inside, something different. But they’re just M&M’s. Pretty interesting.
Even as he was growing more certain that he was nearing the end of his run, Stewart kept tinkering with the process. Maybe it was his weariness with artifice in general, maybe it was a reflection of the baldly partisan times, but in Stewart’s later years more Daily Show pieces threw more direct punches.
In the field department we used a formula, not on purpose, but it became sort of our default where we would lionize the villain and we’d villainize the hero. It was all done ironically, and it worked well.
But then Jon says, “Hey, this formula we’ve been doing for six, seven years, you don’t always need to do it.” It was a sea change. If you watched the last several years of Jon’s show, you’ll see there’s a point where the correspondent drops the POV and just starts going after the interview subjects earnestly. A good example of that was a piece I did with Jason Jones about Google Glass. There is no irony in his reaction at all. His point of view was, “Are you fucking kidding me?” It’s an amplified version of Jason, but it’s him being angry and pissed off at these nerds wearing these ridiculous glasses and he calls them out on it the whole time, and it’s such a satisfying piece. It’s more satisfying than had Jason been like, “Wow, those glasses are great!” ironically. It would’ve taken the bite away from it.
In October 2014, the show spent a week in Austin, Texas—ostensibly to cover the midterm elections, but mostly because Austin is a fun town full of Daily Show fans. Stewart hadn’t yet told the staff he had decided to leave. But when he made a rare appearance at the Daily Show staff karaoke night, those who’d known him longest were thrilled to hang out with the boss outside the office, but were also suspicious that the end was near.
That was one of the best nights ever. Jon even talked about it on the show the next day. He did not get up and sing karaoke. He just watched all of us stupid people perform. He thought it was hilarious. I’ve never seen him just chill. But I think he knew he was leaving.
In November, Stewart hired his last correspondent: the rail-thin, pompadoured Hasan Minhaj. At twenty-nine, Minhaj was part of the generation of comedians that had grown up watching The Daily Show most of their lives.
I’d been watching since I was five, six years old. Then, yeah, I was part of what Bill O’Reilly called The Daily Show’s slacker-stoner demographic. We would watch it at 11 in the college dorm room. The show had such a deep impact on us. It was this merging of comedy with intellectualism that none of my professors at UC Davis could seem to touch. It was like, oh, my history professor is trying to be funny—it’s not working.
The dream was to work with Jon, because it would be like playing with Michael Jordan, and because you get to do work that intrinsically moves the needle forward culturally in the national dialogue.
I’d shot a pilot for E!, but then Michael Che leaves The Daily Show to return to Saturday Night Live to do “Weekend Update.” I get an e-mail from my manager, subject line, “Hey, do you want to audition for The Daily Show,” with a question mark. Which is not a question mark e-mail. That’s a statement e-mail. That’s an exclamation point e-mail.
The Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack occurred not long after Minhaj was hired, so he quickly got to participate in the type of Daily Show piece he’d always admired, one with both cultural and personal resonance. The takeoff point for the bit was a Rupert Murdoch tweet asserting that moderate Muslims “must be held responsible” for the acts of Islamic extremists. So Stewart convened a trio of “senior condemnologists” to try to out-blame one another.
Jason Jones: I wholeheartedly condemn these acts and those responsible for them.
Jessica Williams: Yeah, and so do I. I definitely condemn them as well.
Hasan Minhaj: And Jon, yes, I, as a Muslim, of course, absolutely 100 percent, unequivocally condemn these actions.
Jason Jones: [shaking head dismissively] Uhhh… yeah. I gotta be honest. I just did not feel that last one, coming from him.
Jessica Williams: [rolling eyes] Yeah, I don’t know, Hasan’s wasn’t as condemn-y as I’d like.
Jason Jones: You’d think it would be a little more shameful.
Jessica Williams: Right. Or denounce-ier.
Jon Stewart: [earnest bordering on unctuous] Look, maybe it’s not necessary for each individual to have to own the worst actions of the people in their community. Maybe that’s not necessary.
Hasan Minhaj: Oh, shit! Look who’s trying to get out of this! [pointing at Stewart] Yeah, Mister Insider-Trading!
Jessica Williams: Mister Crash-the-Economy!
Jason Jones: Captain Bail-Me-Out!
Jon Stewart: I don’t work in finance! Okay, okay! Actually, you know the last guy they nailed for insider trading was Raj Gupta.
Hasan Minhaj: [indignant] Oh, so I gotta double-apologize now?
Evil terrorists have done this horrible thing. The backlash is that all brown people now have to pay, and that’s a really, really awful thing to feel. Every time I turn on the news, every Facebook article I see, someone is asking, “Can you trust the brown guy next door?” And a lot of the media is involved in some level of scapegoating. But Jon, because he was a sensitive, critical thinker, comes up with a bit to humanize that experience, and do it in a satirical way. It meant a lot to me to be part of that piece.
At the end, when Jon was getting very tired, he would say, “You know what? Tomorrow let’s just have fun. We’re just going to have a fun day tomorrow.” And we would be like, “Okay. We’ll do something really silly on the show.” And then that morning Jon would come in and say, “Did you see what Megyn Kelly did? We’ve got to get these guys.” So we were like, “What happened to fun?” And he’s like, “Well, this will be fun, too.” It’s a little bit like your dad saying, “Tomorrow we’re going to Disney World.” Then, “No. Your teeth are terrible. We need to go to the dentist—but it’ll be fun! We’ll have a fun time at the dentist!” Those shows would come out really well, but we’d all be like, “Awww. We were going to have fun today.”
Jon said, “You know when you’re on the highway and you miss your exit, and you have to go around to get back to your exit? That’s what I feel like I’m doing.” That’s how he described it to us when he was making the decision to leave. You knew he was tired. When he went to do the movie, we knew he had creative urges and creative ideas he wanted to pursue… and he’d been doing this for a long time.
There was a point, after Stephen left, where we have to know. So we started to sort of nudge him a little bit. Jon is very interested in the legacy of the show, what was going to happen to the staff. So he understood that his decision had a lot of impact for Comedy Central, a lot of impact for all these people.
He finally got back to us in November 2014: “Yeah, I think this is going to be it.” I mean, you’re like, “Holy fuck!” And then we were unable to do anything. We couldn’t start looking for Jon’s replacement, because Jon didn’t want to announce it until after Stephen’s last Colbert Report show, which was at the end of 2014, and until we launched The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, which was going to be in January 2015. So we just sat on the announcement for several months. Yeah, that was hard, especially when you’re just panicked, like, “Who’s going to be the next Jon Stewart?”
As Stewart was finalizing his decision to leave The Daily Show, Oliver’s new show, Last Week Tonight, was off to a smashing start on HBO. But Oliver’s contract was for only one year. So Stewart called Oliver before the news of his exit broke, just in case Oliver would consider coming back to The Daily Show.
I always thought John had demonstrated an ability to run The Daily Show joyfully, to take it to another place, to make it interesting. So he would have been the most obvious choice for the health of the show and the health of the people who had already worked with him, were comfortable with him. And knowing that, when I did finally decide I was leaving, I reached out to him to tell him.
And we had a conversation. And the conversation was basically, “I think you would be amazing, but I cannot recommend that you do it. I cannot in good conscience. I would love for you to take over as the host of The Daily Show. As your friend, I cannot recommend it.” Because he had done the thing that everyone strives to do, which is, to utilize your experience and your background and then take it to another place, and evolve it, and make it your own, and create a singular thing for your voice.
And he had done that, and he’d done it on HBO, which is maybe the greatest environment you do something on. I knew that it was a long shot.
His reaction was, “That’s very flattering, but I can’t. No, no, no, no, no, I’m not good at all. I’m a mushroom. I’m a mushroom underneath a log, underneath a pig’s anus.” But that’s always John’s reaction. He’s a very humble guy, and genuinely so.
I think it ended up being a better situation for John, and The Daily Show has an opportunity now to grow with another person, and that’s great, too. But it was absolutely Comedy Central’s weirdness that facilitated any of that even being an issue.
Meanwhile, the December 2014 debut of The Daily Show’s newest contributor went largely unnoticed. Most American audiences had never heard of Trevor Noah, but he was a major comedy star on several other continents, and it had taken Daily Show producers nearly two years to get him onto the set.
I was in a great place. I really was. You’re selling tickets around the world, people are coming out to see your shows, you’re making a good living. That’s the dream. I was in London and I got a call: “Jon Stewart wants to speak to you.” He said, “I have a little show called The Daily Show and maybe you’ve heard of it.” I said, “Of course I’ve heard of the show.” And he said, “I saw your stuff and I’d love for you to come in, hang out, see if we could do something,” and I said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t have the time.” I realize now how ludicrous it was to say that, but at that time I was too busy.
In 2013 we were looking for correspondents and we were really interested in Trevor. Jon saw less than a minute of Trevor’s Letterman set, and Jon says, “That guy’s going to take my chair.” I remember me, Tim Greenberg, Jocelyn Conn, Bodow, Lowitt, we were all in the room, and we were like, “Wait, is Jon leaving?”
This was a long time ago. I saw a tape of Trevor, and I’d say within thirty seconds it was like, “Oh, that guy could do my job.”
It was very clear he had a great deal of presence, a great deal of confidence, but also a really nice manner of thinking, of breaking down material in a way that was not rote, and it was unusual, and it was unique and thoughtful. And beyond that, the fact that if you put him in my clothes he somehow still looks like he should be in a magazine, whereas when you put me in my clothes I look like I should be selling oranges out on the highway.
That’s what’s annoying about him. Trevor can get laid in many different avenues, he doesn’t need to be funny. I wouldn’t be surprised if he can also play guitar.
Stewart’s movie, Rosewater, had its premiere in November 2014. After he was done with promotional appearances for the film, and Colbert had sung his way out of the Report, and the new year had passed, Stewart was ready to make his Daily Show farewell official.
It was a Friday in February. Jon told a few of us together that he was leaving. Me, Lowitt, Steve, Kahane was in there, Jill, Tim Greenberg. We were in a meeting in this glass room, and Jon’s telling us, “Don’t make a face, because everybody’s going to be able to see you.” My eyes are welling up. Jon just said, “I’m tired. I’m done, and I’m going to try and make sure you guys are all okay, and I told the network that the most important thing about this place is how it’s run and the infrastructure and you guys.”
Jon told the staff the next Tuesday.
There’s a thing called an all-hands meeting. And when it comes over the PA, “There will be an all-hands meeting in fifteen minutes in the studio,” it’s usually right before rehearsal, it’s some big deal. Sometimes it’s a cool announcement like Jon saying, “I decided to give everyone $1,000.” Or it’s a big thank-you to everyone for making a convention week happen. But all-hands meetings always make you think, “What’s up?”
It was dead quiet. People were crying. It was pretty emotional. Then it became really, really stressful for about a month and a half. People were freaking out that they were all going to lose jobs that they’d had for a very long time.
Poor Hasan Minhaj. Oh my God, he looked like someone had just run over his whole family in front of him. He had just moved here and started on the show. And we were making jokes, and he had that it’s-not-funny-guys face on.
My heart just stung. Jessica was crying. For me, for three months it had been, “Hey, welcome to the team.” Now it became a countdown to good-bye. No, dude, it wasn’t because Jon realized he didn’t want to work with me—I didn’t make Dad leave the family. At least that’s what Jon told me.
I went over and drank with the field department in the field lounge. And I think the writers drank in the writers’ lounge. But by this point a lot of the writers were newer and had just finally gotten their dream job a year, two years, three years before. So the writers’ room was a bummer, and I didn’t want to be there. Over in the field lounge things were a little more humorous, and the liquor was better.
The next day, in another sign of how far the media universe had shifted during his time as host, with a basic-cable satirist becoming more credible than a major-network news anchor, Stewart’s departure “at a high point in his career” got equal, front-page New York Times billing alongside NBC’s decision to suspend Nightly News anchor Brian Williams for embellishing the facts of stories. Meanwhile, Comedy Central’s search for Stewart’s successor took on new urgency, and the speculation machine nominated tantalizing, if implausible, candidates.
Amy [Poehler] and Tina [Fey], and Chris [Rock] and Louis [C.K.]—if any one of those four had said, “Give me the reins,” wow. That’s amazing. But they were not my suggestions, because I never thought they would do it.
For selfish reasons I was hoping that it would be more of an in-house choice. Amy Schumer was someone who rose to mind immediately. She and I had pizza one night, just talking about her hosting The Daily Show. Trainwreck hadn’t come out yet. But even at that point she had an enormously successful career, and purely for the purposes of The Daily Show, her career took off at the wrong time. Now it almost seems silly that we thought we could’ve gotten her.
Michele and I were sitting in Jon’s office, just kind of shooting the shit, and I can’t remember whether Jon said it or we said it: “By the way, I think Trevor can do this.” So yeah, he was in the initial conversation.
Around the time Jon was making the announcement that he was leaving, I was meeting with the bosses at Comedy Central. We were just having a conversation about other things—life, plans, ideas, and so on. Did I think I would be in the running? No. No, no.
I suggested Wyatt to the network, yeah. I think that the show needs somebody who has a fire in their belly and has a lot of things to talk about, and Wyatt does. I thought Key and Peele should do it, but they have other things they want to do.
Someone like Amy, someone like Wyatt, someone like Trevor—someone that Comedy Central and the Daily Show staff really knew, then the transition would be a little easier. I’d be hard-pressed to think Jason Jones didn’t think it should be him, and Sam, too. I don’t think Sam would necessarily feel this way, but Jason would think like, “How come I’m not the guy that ever gets stuff?” And I don’t begrudge him that.
I went to Jon and I said, “Hey, what are your thoughts on this? Do you know that they’re considering me? I can’t do this thing—or can I do this?” And he said, “There is no ‘this thing,’ that’s what you have to understand. I’m doing my show. The host is what makes the show come alive. You have to make your show.” But it was still very much up in the air, and I knew I was a wild card.
No one’s smarter than Jon, no one knows the show better than Jon. Jon’s track record for picking talent’s pretty great. So that was a dialogue, and Trevor’s was the second name that came up. At the end of the day the final vote was going to be Comedy Central’s, because it had to be, right?
I’m sure Jon had a lot of weight in the choice. He doesn’t like to hold that over a person, though. He’s never made it, “Don’t forget kid, I chose you!” He’s like, “I recommended you.” It’s enough for me to know, and little enough for me to not overthink it.
Why would it bother me if John Oliver was his first choice? My first choice would be John Oliver. Well, everyone’s first choice would have been Stephen Colbert. That makes complete sense. Then your second choice would be John Oliver. I’m not bothered by that, because—you do realize the Wachowski brothers’ first choice for The Matrix was Will Smith? I’ve never struggled to enjoy that movie with Keanu Reeves. And had you told people it was between Will Smith and Keanu Reeves, before the movie came out, I’m pretty certain everyone would have voted for Will Smith. Sometimes you need to be in that position to get the thing. I think it was David Oyelowo who said he’s told his agents, “Every script Denzel Washington turns down, give it to me.” You can go, “Woe is me, I wasn’t somebody’s first choice.” But I don’t know if anyone has noticed how relationships in the world work. Most of us are not someone’s first choice. But that doesn’t mean we can’t end up being the best choice.
The March 2015 announcement of Noah as the new host—he was in Dubai on a standup tour when Comedy Central called to offer him the job—provided some clarity and calm inside The Daily Show’s offices. The need to keep creating four shows a week was a welcome distraction from the impending regime change; the run of bad news in the world wasn’t.
The same process that created the Wyatt argument moment created that Charleston moment on the show, which is, you come in raw, and you put it to the room. And you have enough respect and trust in the room that someone is going to be insightful or corrective.
This one, I came into the morning meeting and said, “I know that our process is, to take this feeling and transform it into something.” It was sort of an apology to the room, saying, “Look, this can be a function of knowing I’m not going to be doing this much longer, but I don’t have the energy to open a refinery today. I can’t process the raw materials into rum. Cannot open the joke book on this one, unfortunately. I just got to do this on my own.”
With South Carolina, I was with him the whole day, because I was an EP by then. Jon’s monologue, it never got written anywhere. He’s just like, “I’m just going to go out there,” and I remember being like, “What, really? Like, that seems like a bad idea.” Me and Steve and Adam are looking at each other. He’s going to go out there with no script, with no nothing? Seems crazy.
Indeed, the entire “script” that was loaded into the teleprompter was merely a short series of enigmatic phrases: “Once again,” “Racism is wallpaper,” “In a state where the Confederate flag still flies, streets named for generals that would keep black people slaves, and the white guy is mad.” Stewart turned those notes into five minutes of eloquent, angry soliloquy. “I honestly have nothing other than just sadness,” he told the audience, his tone both mournful and furious. “Once again, that we have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other and the nexus of a just-gaping racial wound that will not heal yet we pretend doesn’t exist.”
I also had Malala coming up as a guest that day, so I thought, who better to help in a time of this kind of uncertainty and unfortunate tragedy to just talk to? So the show basically was, I’m just going to set it up, and then we’ll talk to Malala, and that’s the show. And that’s what we did.
The horror of the massacre itself was, of course, the main impetus. But Stewart’s sermon added a fraction more clarity and attention, and less than a month after the shootings, South Carolina finally removed the secessionist’s battle flag from a pole in front of the state capitol.
I think Jon had a bigger voice on policy than a lot of people would give him credit for. After the church shooting in Charleston, when nine people were killed—Jon took the country by the collar and talked about it and about the Confederate flag. He grew from the guy that everyone laughed at to the guy that everyone listened to and would rally to his call.
It got hard. People were putting a lot of pressure on him. Every time there was a national tragedy or global tragedy, it was like, “What’s Jon Stewart going to say about this?”
After the Charleston shooting or on the day we covered the Charlie Hebdo thing—so much of it was in the moment, trying to figure out what to say. Jon became such a beacon in those moments. He’s going to hate the word “beacon,” but…
It’s hard to describe to people who don’t do that type of work, but if you’re going to write comedy about your opinion about the Charlie Hebdo massacre, you can’t do it unless you really understand exactly what happened. We see the results, which is comedy, but when you have two hours with your staff talking about the different ways people hurt each other, that’s depressing.
I’m kind of relieved I don’t have to say anything on TV about tragedies anymore.
As the next iteration of The Daily Show was beginning to take shape, the current one had some unfinished business to attend to. Stewart had devoted hundreds of segments to the Iraq War, and what he saw as the media’s complicity in the Bush Administration’s selling of it. He had been scathing about a 2002 front-page New York Times “aluminum tubes” story, cowritten by Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller, that laid out the White House case that Saddam Hussein was hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons. Gordon and Miller wrote, in what became an infamous turn of phrase, “The first sign of a ‘smoking gun,’ they argue, may be a mushroom cloud.”
Thirteen years, thousands of war deaths, and zero Iraqi weapons of mass destruction later, Miller came on The Daily Show to promote her new book and try to explain that she hadn’t been used by the Bush Administration.
For a long time I think I was sort of Jon’s anger translator, you know? I was the one on the show who’s allowed to yell about shit. And then he started to yell more.
The days when I’d come into the office to do “Back in Black,” I would never see Jon until the taping. But the day of the Judy Miller interview, he was showing up everywhere I was in the building. It was really interesting. He’s pacing down hallways, talking to researchers and producers, literally going, “Is this that?” and, “Check on this fact,” and “Make sure that cross-references…”
It was the angriest I’d ever seen him before going on, before doing an interview.
Jon and I knew our stuff here. We’d hit that issue time and time again—the manipulation of the Iraq intel and of the media in the runup to the war, Miller’s front-page story in the Times on Saddam supposedly having aluminum tubes to make nuclear weapons, and how Cheney was on TV the next day citing it as justification.
I’d read Miller’s book and her explanation for that. Jon had great ideas for slicing through her with counterexamples. So, yeah, that was a really intense one, and it was toward the end of the Jon run. It felt sort of like the culmination of all we’d been doing on Iraq.
Oh, I watched the show a lot. It changed nighttime television. It was a great contribution to helping get people, younger people in particular, interested in foreign affairs and domestic policy. I mean, it was an important contribution and Jon’s a serious guy, which is why I was doubly disappointed, especially compared to Bill Maher, the interview I had there. I don’t think Jon had read the book.
No, I read the whole thing. It’s amazing to me how many people she throws under a bus in that book and how little responsibility she takes for anything. She’s not being honest with herself.
He wanted somebody who was going to say, “Oh, my, gosh, we were all wrong, wasn’t this terrible, it was all our fault.” And he wasn’t going to get that, because that’s not what my book is about. My book is about how these stories occurred and how intelligence reporting is done and how a narrative is formed and why we have to be careful about narratives.
I accept great responsibility for the fact that I was unable to do more to check out the reports that I got, but you’re dealing with highly classified information here. I just think people don’t understand what we do, but Stewart should’ve.
She was a tool used by a group of people who said they were trying to sell a new product. So it’s not that I didn’t listen to her. It just sounds like hogwash when you look at the evidence. I can see how she was uncomfortable. I was uncomfortable, but she was spinning horseshit.
Do I think Jon contributed to the cynicism about politics? Oh, I don’t think you can get too cynical about politics.
There are people that I believe shouldn’t like me, and if they did, I’d be sad. She shouldn’t like me.
Jon knew this was something big, the Judy Miller interview. This was like a final boulder.
The assessments of Stewart’s Daily Show legacy, pro and con, started pouring in. David Remnick, the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer turned editor in chief of the New Yorker, had a uniquely multifaceted experience of Stewart and The Daily Show. Remnick was a guest on the show three times, talking about everything from the intifada to his biography of Obama. But he also conducted public roundtables with Stewart and with ten Daily Show writers.
As Stewart’s hosting run neared its end, Remnick wrote a New Yorker essay in which he connected Stewart’s work to the performance tradition of Molly Picon, the great Yiddish theater actress, and with the media criticism of A. J. Liebling, who wrote for the New Yorker from 1935 to 1963.
I mentioned Picon because there is a huge element of Jewishness in Jon’s comic voice, in his gestures, in his vocabulary. I’m not suggesting for a second that he’s a Talmudic scholar or a Hasidic sage. But he has fluency in a tradition that’s becoming increasingly attenuated in American culture.
And like Liebling, Stewart, with the help of his incredibly astute staff, was combining reporting with commentary, pointing a finger at stupidity and hollowness, and devising a creative hand grenade. All of it had political purpose and direction. It wasn’t strictly ideological, although he’s obviously left of center. And he was fearless, not in the sense that anybody was going to make him a political prisoner. But he punched up. He punched up, and the shots landed.
I don’t think the world is any more absurd now than it’s ever been, or more tragic, or more beautiful. But Jon took advantage of these new ways of seeing the world and took out his magic marker and drew circles around the idiocy. He set out to be a working comedian, and he ended up an invaluable patriot. He wants his country to be better, more decent, and to think harder.
There were times where Jon was absolutely right to shine a spotlight on silly or stupid things that all organizations do, including ours, and there were times where he was being needlessly silly and ridiculous because it was funny but not that pertinent.
But right before he was leaving The Daily Show, I tried to hire Jon here at CNN, because I thought he had a keen, sharp, insightful, great political mind. Listen, I also tried to hire Jon to come to NBC, when I was running NBC Entertainment, to do a [five-night-a-week] strip show at eight o’clock back when—2001, 2002. They at least took the meeting and I had dinner with Jon, as opposed to this last time. I think they just thought because Jon had been making fun of CNN for so long that it wouldn’t be a good home for him.
Did Jon have an effect? Are you kidding me? Huge effect. His effect on culture and politics will be felt in the next generation.
He was able to teach liberalism, progressivism, in a way that Edward Bernays would be thrilled. He had a point of view about people and parties and different philosophies. He made those points in a bite-size way that everybody wanted to eat, and they were eating it because they thought it was a chocolate chip cookie, but it was not just that, it had bodybuilding vitamins and minerals inside.
John Oliver’s departure to HBO would prove to be an enormous missed opportunity for Comedy Central. But it was also a major step in spreading Stewart’s greatest television legacy, the creation of what would become a comedy district on Manhattan’s West Side, comprised of Colbert’s Late Show, Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, and eventually Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal, as well as The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Stewart’s influence could also be seen indirectly, in the “Closer Look” segments by Seth Meyers on NBC’s Late Night, and in the way Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update,” with Daily Show alumnus Michael Che as one cohost, began using extended runs of jokes about a single subject.
News satire was always a floating idea in the comedy world, and people struggled to achieve it for a long time. There were shows like Not Necessarily the News; The Wilton North Report was a famous failure. Jon invented a form, just like Steve Allen did with The Tonight Show. People will take it and expand it and do different things with it, but Jon laid the groundwork. He’s had a massive influence on how everyone talks about the news.
But inside the Daily Show offices it was the series of staff farewells, and the impending big finale, that consumed the most emotional energy and tissues.
The one thing I’m most proud of was Samantha Bee’s last big segment, called “I Watch The Five.” It was the result of my obsession with a Fox television show called The Five. Lauren and I would watch it, we would start imagining the show as a soap opera at large. The characters were all so well defined, and we started adding backstories and relationships to the characters—Andrea Tantaros, Dana Perino, Bob Beckel, Eric Bolling, and Kimberly Guilfoyle.
I eventually started writing e-mails to the Daily Show listserve—it’s a pitch list that everybody in the show is on—about The Five. Some of the responses would be, “What the hell are you talking about?” and others would be—
Psychiatric referrals.
We would occasionally be in Central Park with our dogs—
And hope to see Dana Perino and her dog.
And hope to see her. Yeah. “Stalking” is a highly exaggerated term.
I would say it’s a slanderous term.
I would say it’s absolutely libel. Eventually Jon said, “Why don’t we just put this on the air, this obsession, in this avant-garde style, with Samantha Bee doing it?”
Travon Free, who was one of the newer writers at the time, and Jimmy Donn and I rewatched as many episodes as we could. We put PAs on it, interns on it, to go through and find any patterns, and initially it was a twenty-minute segment that went into the backstories of every single character and how they interrelated.
We worked on that for the better part of six months. It kept getting pushed back because of how complex it was to actually execute.
It went through twenty-five drafts, which is almost 1,000 percent more than any other draft in the show’s history. Ultimately, the only story line that made it through was the one that dealt with Greg Gutfeld and Dana Perino’s torrid love affair and the other characters interacting with that.
I can’t remember a specific joke I wrote for it. The Kill Bill–style red-eye flare thing Sam does, I added that.
At first I was really reluctant to do it. I just didn’t understand how it would work. The Daily Show has a very, I don’t want to say, rigid format, but it definitely has its patterns and its style. And it exploded the style of the show. Everyone said, “Okay, this is like a theater black box, and you’re just going to be really dramatic.” We rehearsed it a bunch of times, far more than we usually did things. And I was like, “Well, if I lay down here…” The camera people thought I was crazy. But I did it with a full heart, and then people did like it because it was so unusual. I was happy. I was very gratified. I gave Dana Perino my heart that day.
Samantha Bee: [standing on empty, dark stage to Stewart’s left] Jon, please don’t compare The Five to other panel shows. The Five is so much more than just a panel show. It’s life itself. It is… everything. Jon, perhaps you’re unacquainted with my one-woman show inspired by The Five. I shall now perform it for you.
Jon, The Five is the storyboard of the human condition. [wearing black leggings and black turtleneck with the THE FIVE logo on her chest] It’s a story as old as time. A story of… love. One that rivals the works of a Shakespeare… or a Nicholas Sparks.
It’s a tale of a winsome blond ingenue, Dana Perino. [prances and skips] A young girl new to the city, with big dreams and a heart so pure she makes Mary Poppins look like a disgusting whorebag. [montage of Perino saying things including, “There is a certain word that rhymes with ‘truck,’” and “It’s not because they’re not having s-e-x”].
Now nobody falls for a good girl harder than a bad boy! [puffs on lit cigarette as George Thorogood riff plays, followed by clips of Greg Gutfeld saying, “I was on Percocet for seven days, best week of my life,” “I’ve been drinking since two,” and “I gave three people hepatitis.”]
A pill-popping afternoon drunk who is riddled with hepatitis? [shrieks in delight] There’s gotta be a catch!
Samantha just completely killed it. It really defines the hallmark of our tenure of the show, I think.
I mean, it should be the subject of the entire book.
You got to me, I’m crying. That show, it’s a huge part of my life.
I was at The Daily Show for twelve years. Jason and I got deals for our own shows on TBS before Jon announced he was leaving. For both of us it was time to take ownership of our own projects.
When I left The Daily Show in April, they did a big good-bye piece. I begged everyone not to. I’m such a crier, as you can see. And I really ghost from parties. I don’t like to say good-bye.
No, it was a really great moment. Because at the end, I think maybe I felt like we were peers. I felt less like Jon was my boss and more like we were in the same… I felt like all of that training… and I felt just ready to leave.
Off-campus outings built the staff bond at The Daily Show, and over the years there’d been a wide variety: karaoke showdowns, a summer excursion to a Long Island winery, a “denim night” dance party. Stewart, being the boss, usually didn’t participate. But the 2015 Daily Show summer fun day was one he couldn’t miss.
We wanted it to be Jon’s dream come true, and he’s a diehard Mets fan. So we took over Citi Field for the day. I did most of the booking and arranging. We had batting practice on the field and all our names on the scoreboard, we’re drinking beer. It was perfect—and I’m a Yankees fan.
Jon showed up with his glove. He’s just very real. If he’s angry that Trump ate pizza with a fork on camera, he’s angry that Trump eats it with a fork off camera. He comes into the office like, “What the fuck is Trump thinking?” Jon actually doesn’t curse. That’s more me. But if he feels something off camera, he’s going to put it out there and he’s going to stand by it.
One of my jobs when I worked in studio production was to collect material and bring it to the morning meeting. And one morning I noticed there was some footage of Donald Trump showing Sarah Palin around the city, and the place he took her was Famous Famiglia—which was the first strike against him. If there’s literally nowhere else to go, you go to Famiglia. It’s a convenience slice. Then there was footage of Trump with one slice on top of another slice. Which just creates a whole steam situation. The third thing, which was the most egregious offense, was eating the pizza with a fork.
I showed the Trump pizza footage to Rory, and I remember the two of us just shouting at each other. Like, “He can’t eat the fucking pizza with a fork! What the fuck is this guy doing?”
And then Jon comes in to the meeting, and we show it to him, and it just kept escalating. The volume got louder and louder, where we’re basically all doing the bit that Jon ended up doing on the show—that kind of visceral anger: “How could you? You offended me! You offended my family! You offend everything I stand for!” The energy of that bit really came out in the room that morning.
Everyone chipped in to create the seven-minute “Me Lover’s Pizza with Crazy Broad,” with head writer Steve Bodow’s foodie tendencies really coming in handy this time. And for all the over-the-top laugh lines, the piece presciently explored Trump’s phoniness, ending with a jab at how the reality-show star had been pandering to the Obama “birther” wackos.
Jon Stewart: [after clip of Trump and Palin at Famous Famiglia] Are you eating it with a fork!? A fucking fork! Ah, Madonna! Noooo! La forketa da satanica! [guttural sounds of pain and disgust] Ahhh! El tool de diablo! [shouting now] When you invite an important visitor to our house, our town, and you eat your pizza with a fucking fork right in front of us! You know what? Why don’t you take a shit in Fiorello LaGuardia’s hat and feed it to Joe DiMaggio’s crying ghost on Liberty Island, you son of a bitch!
It became the first of the three big pizza rants—the other two were about Chicago deep dish, and then Mayor [Bill] de Blasio eating pizza with a fork. And they were funny and really silly. But they were also great illustrations of the show’s process.
Jon was all about the passion. He always said, “We need to make sure we’re channeling our emotions. What do we find joyous? What makes us have a strong emotional reaction? If something makes you angry, why? Bring that to the idea. If something’s just purely fun, let’s just have fun with it.” He wants us to be writing to, and pitching to, that strong feeling. Plenty of times it’s outrage about something serious. But we don’t need to do the congressional takedown every night.
Actually, my favorite Daily Show pizza story wasn’t even something on the air. Justin Bieber was in the studio to do some bit, and he was hungry, and backstage he asked for Hawaiian pizza. And Rory Albanese just says, “No, that’s not happening.” Bieber’s people must have been shocked. But pineapple and ham on a pizza?
It took a while for Trump to return fire, but when he did, it was in a flurry of tweets that were weirdly amusing at the time, but which turned out to uncannily foreshadow Trump’s rise as Republican presidential candidate. A random Twitter user pleaded with the thin-skinned billionaire, “Please run for president, Jon Stewart would destroy you!” Trump responded, “I promise you that I’m much smarter than Jonathan Leibowitz—I mean Jon Stewart.”
There’s this tweet saying, “If Stewart is above it all, why did he change his name?” At first we didn’t realize it was actually Trump. We thought it was a parody account. But he kept going with it, tweeting, “Why run from who you are?” So that’s when we decided to go back at him, saying Trump’s real name was Fuckface Von Clownstick.
It’s very easy to figure out Trump’s ideology. He’s not racist and sexist to this incredible degree. He’s Trumpist. He views the world through the prism of, “How do they view Trump?” If you view Trump positively, you’re good people. “Putin, hey, he likes the Trump, I like the Putin.”
That’s all he is. His doctrine is the Trump Doctrine. If another country is nice to him, he will be nice to that country. If the country thinks he’s an idiot, “Fuck them. That’s a pussy country. They don’t know shit about anything. That country changed its name from a Jewish name.”
Stewart’s rejoinder to a longer-running nemesis was a ten-minute segment called “Better Call Foul.” On the surface, the bit was a tour-de-force response to Fox’s most recent criticism of The Daily Show. But it was also an emphatic restatement of purpose, and a display of how far The Daily Show’s methods had evolved. The “Bush v. Bush” montage had been created in the stone tools days of 2003; now the show unleashed a Vine, “50 Fox Lies in 6 seconds.” The segment also incorporated eternal Daily Show touches, including Stewart’s cartoony, Gone with the Wind–ish affronted-foppish-Southern-gentleman voice. Most telling, though, was the rare on-camera cameo by Adam Chodikoff, The Daily Show’s fact-checking secret weapon.
Rich Lowry, Conservative Commentator: [in Fox News clip] “What he added to the political discourse was largely sarcasm, insults, and dishonest editing.”
Howard Kurtz, Media Critic: [in video clip, from The Kelly File] “You know it’s clearly selective editing of clips.”
Megyn Kelly, Fox News Anchor: “And I can speak personally to a lot of the attacks that were levied on me, had no foothold in the facts.”
Jon Stewart: [at anchor desk] The little game they play here is, “The only reason we look bad is that these guys are unfair liars.” By the way, that sentiment is brought to you by Arby’s pig anus and cheese. [graphic reading ARBY’S: PROOF JON STEWART CANNOT DESTROY A BRAND BY TELLING PEOPLE WHAT’S IN IT.]
My point is: We don’t lie. We don’t distort. We actually have a fella here who used every fiber of his being to prevent us from doing so. Moral bastard!
Adam Chodikoff: [standing to the rear of Stewart’s desk] Jon? Actually my parents were married, so technically I’m not a bastard.
Jon Stewart: I know. It was a figure of—fine. I’ll miss you, moral compass.
But the point is: On the right, they’re pretending that our “truthfulness” is what’s really important to them. Which, ironically, is not true. What matters to them is discrediting anything that they believe harms their side. That is their prime directive. And unlike Kirk, they fuckin’ stick with it. They don’t just drop the protocol any time they feel like humping a green girl in a unitard. [video clip of Captain Kirk, pursuing a green girl in a unitard]
And this, this, is their genius. Conservatives are not looking to make education more rigorous and informative, or science more empirical or verifiable, or voting more representative, or the government more efficient or effective. They just want all those things to reinforce their partisan, ideological, conservative viewpoint.
That jeremiad was the unofficial kickoff of a farewell tour. The coming months included plenty of quick-turnaround bits about a given day’s news. But interspersed were “look backs” at The Daily Show’s greatest “questionable” graphics (“our new segment, ‘Jon Stewart Looks at Kids’ Junk’”), and Stewart’s most extravagant “impressions” (turtle-talking Mitch McConnell, Redd Foxx–meets–Jerry Lewis Charlie Rangel). President Obama made one last appearance as a guest, as did a string of Stewart’s comedian friends: Colin Quinn, Richard Lewis, Denis Leary, Louis C.K., and Amy Schumer. It was all, though, a warm-up act to August 6, 2015.