Planning for Jon’s final show started as far back as March, once we knew his out date. It was only in the last month or six weeks that we were really heavy into it, and we sort of divvied it up. My part of the show was to put together the first act, where all the correspondents would be coming back and they’d all be commenting on their time on the show, or their relationship with Jon. Once we knew it would be the same night as a Republican presidential debate, then we knew that’s how we’ll get into it.
You know what? The show was August 6, right? And August 5 was our twentieth wedding anniversary. We combined that with a trip to New York. We wouldn’t have missed that for anything.
Rob Corddry was going to be on a family vacation in the woods somewhere. He was going to just send a pre-tape over. “I’m so sorry, I’ve made these plans already, I didn’t know.” And then, a few weeks later, he’s like, “If you guys could help me get there, I will get there.” We had to get him a helicopter to take him to an airport, but he came.
Olivia Munn came down from shooting like X-Men, Josh Gad came in from London from shooting a movie. Everyone wanted to be there. Helms was coming off a film set.
I was disappointed that I wasn’t invited to the final show. I asked and they said, “Jon just wants people from his years.” And I said, “But I was from his years.” And they were like, “Well, people that he found.” But he didn’t find Carell. There was kind of no reason to have me—except that I did a hundred episodes and about fifteen half-hour specials. Jon is revered, and he deserves to be revered. So for me to say, “Oh, he was shitty to me in this way,” it doesn’t do me any good. It doesn’t do anybody any good.
Wyatt knew at that point that I had recommended him for the host job after I left, as one of the people that I thought could be really good. He’s passionate, he’s smart, he’s funny. And so he wrote me a note explaining why he was noncommittal. I wrote him back, he wrote me back thanking me for that. I thought it was insightful, and cathartic, and helpful. And then the Maron thing developed.
Two weeks before Jon’s final show, Wyatt gives that podcast interview with Marc Maron where he talks about the argument with Jon over the Herman Cain impression. I was so mad that one of my last Fridays with Jon, where we were planning for the end of the run, I spent on the phone with the New York Times, dealing with press about the Wyatt thing. It was such an unnecessary thing.
Maron always wanted to know shit about Jon, and Jon wouldn’t go on his podcast. I’m like, “Jon, just go on his fucking podcast. He was a dick to you in 1987—whatever!” I don’t understand how Jon is still mad at Maron but not mad at Wyatt.
At least Wyatt’s coming from a good place. Maron, on the other hand…
It’s all relative to the person, and if Wyatt felt offended by the Herman Cain bit, he was totally valid in feeling that way. But I felt really bad for Jon—that this dude, who I knew, was being called a racist, because he’s such a great guy.
I’m very protective of Jon, because Jon was very good to me and very good to everyone in that building for a very long time. He employed a lot of people and put a lot of kids through college. He kept a hundred-plus people working and even paid them out of his pocket during dark times and strikes and shit. So for him to be lambasted in the media as some racist, ignorant asshole to me is fucking absurd and unacceptable.
Wyatt wrote me a note a few days after the Maron thing. Because I was sort of blindsided by it. We wrote a couple of notes back to each other and tried to, I guess, clear some air. But as I said to him in a note I wrote, “I would love you to be there because this show is a celebration of everybody that helped make it what it was, and you had a big role in that. You earned it.” I very much wanted him to be there. That being said, if he was not comfortable with that I completely understand, and I would not feel slighted.
Wyatt was very, very reluctant to do it. It took a lot of talking. We had a hard time in our friendship because of it. I think he couldn’t separate me as a show producer and me as his friend.
I was a guest on the show the same day the Wyatt Cenac story had happened, where Jon caught some flak from Wyatt. It was a real coincidence. I didn’t know about it before the taping. And I don’t know if Jon had that in mind or what when we were taping the interview. I can’t say that was why his questions were really, really probing. But Jon had clearly taken the time to read my book.
He’s a great interviewer. I was nervous as hell, I’ll tell you that. We ended up in this deeply philosophical place of, “Do you actually think it’s possible to construct a system that’s not one person stepping on another?”
When I heard about the Wyatt thing later, it didn’t change my opinion of Jon. Not at all. There’s this notion that when race or racism is any sort of factor between two people in an environment, that that necessarily means that the person is, like, a child molester. It must mean everything else about them is awful. I’ve seen some very, very good people, good, good people, people I’d leave my kid with, struggle with diversity.
The fact that the Daily Show cast got more diverse over the years, that’s the thing that would happen to somebody that’s struggling with it. I mean struggling in the best way.
I guess I considered him a force for good in terms of race, but I didn’t really go to Jon Stewart for that, you know? I wasn’t trying to get my black on watching The Daily Show. You know? I mean it was hilarious, but I also like Seinfeld.
It’s really important that Jon Stewart was using his platform to talk about race, but it’s probably more important for white people than for black people. If there was value in that, it probably was the value of telling other white people.
Jon is either not racist—because he passed the baton to me and gave me all the tools and the support necessary to do the show—or maybe he was just giving it to my white side.
Stewart’s departure was the end of an era in a larger sense, too. He’d arrived at The Daily Show when the state-of-the-art was three-quarter-inch VHS tape, and he was leaving with Snapchat ascendant. In between, Stewart and The Daily Show had eagerly incorporated new technology to speed its creative process, and Stewart wasn’t averse to creating the occasional clickbait. But at heart he remained a throwback in his attitude toward social media.
I’d say, “Dude, Twitter—we need to get in that game!” But when it came to a personal Twitter account, Jon would say, “Why? We have a TV show! I don’t think anyone else needs to hear from me. They get to hear from me thirty minutes a day, four days a week.” And he’s right. But it was the last vestige of a show that’s solely about the TV show. It just doesn’t work that way anymore.
For the Daily Show staff, Stewart’s final few months were a blur. There were retrospective montages to assemble—of Stewart and correspondents breaking character and collapsing in giggles on the air; of Stewart, “a short, Jewish Susan Boyle,” bursting into song. But many of the laughs were laced with anxiety about what was ahead and wistfulness about what was ending.
We were doing a joke having to do with Toy Story, the last one, Toy Story 3. We were saying it was a tearjerker, and Jon’s like, “What made it a tearjerker?” So I was telling him the premise of the story: Andy goes off to college and leaves all of his toys behind. Jon says, “I don’t get it, what’s so sad?” And I was like, “Oh my God, you’re Andy and we’re your toys. Holy shit, you insensitive prick!”
John Edwards came to a show near the end, during the last two, three months maybe. Sat in the audience. He came backstage very briefly to say hey, but we didn’t talk much. I didn’t sit down and ask, “So, what’s your life like now?”
Does it show he had no hard feelings about the show making jokes about him? Maybe. I think it also indicates a person who feels isolated and removed from the life they once had and who is trying to reconnect with some of that.
President Obama came on one last time. That was big. After that, Jon just mostly wanted to have his friends as guests, other comedians.
Obama’s seven Daily Show appearances traced an almost novelistic arc. His first appearance, as an Illinois senator in November 2005, was a part of the warm-up for his presidential run, and the two men seemed to be feeling each other out, trading playful jabs about who was more overhyped. The middle period, during Obama’s White House years, was more contentious, with Stewart giving voice to the disappointments of the left and Obama arguing, defensively, for realism. The final interview, in July 2015, was a fitting combination of prickliness and wonkishness.
Jon Stewart: You’ve got this deal with Iran worked out, you’ve got your fast-track authority. Are you feeling like seven years in—
President Barack Obama: I finally know what I’m doing?
Jon Stewart: Let me ask you a question about Iran. Whose team are we on in the Middle East? Because I know we’re fighting with the Iraqis to defeat ISIS along with Iran, but in Yemen we’re fighting Iran with Iraqis and Saudis.
President Obama: That’s not quite right, but that’s okay.
Jon Stewart: But whose team are we on? Who are we bombing?
President Obama: Right now we are going after ISIL and we’ve got a sixty-country coalition and that’s our top priority. But with respect to Iran, this is an adversary. Anti-American, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, they sponsor terrorist organizations like Hezbollah.
Jon Stewart: Sounds like a good partner for peace.
Appropriately, the last part of the twenty-one-minute, three-part conversation found Stewart and Obama united in an earnest desire for more common purpose in public life—perhaps, they fantasized, there could be a new national service initiative. Then the dialogue ended with a combination of unfortunate prescience and genuine affection.
President Obama: I guarantee you if people feel strongly about making sure Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon without going to war, and that is expressed to Congress, then people will believe in that. And the same is true on every single issue. If people are engaged, eventually the political system responds, despite the money, despite the lobbyists, it still responds.
Jon Stewart: After seven years, is that the advice that you bequeath to future President Trump?
President Obama: Well, um, I’m sure the Republicans are enjoying Mr. Trump’s dominance.
Jon Stewart: Anything that makes them look less crazy. Sir, thank you so much for stopping by. It was a pleasure to see you.
President Obama: You’ve been a great gift to our country.
It’s weird, dude, the level of fame that Jon has had, because he’s not just another talk show host. It’s like one of your best friends from when you were a young guy with nothing, he’s this gigantic media icon. For my generation he was like our Oprah, you know? Our skinny little Jewish Oprah.
I don’t think he’s really changed, except he’s got a ton of money and he does a lot of good with it, and he certainly can’t walk down the street without getting his picture taken. But underneath it all, he’s still really the same guy. Not a lot of airs going on. Well, he certainly looks way fucking old. But I think even without the hit television show, he would have had that beaten down, middle-aged-Jewish-man look.
Oh, it was weird being one of the final guests. I usually get there an hour in advance and then we just spend like fifteen, twenty minutes kind of shitting on each other and catching up on the kids. But I could see that he was on the verge of tears. He really cared about the gig and the people who worked for him.
Wow, I was in my twenties when I first started going on the show. So it was bittersweet but also exciting and gratifying to have been a part of the entirety of it, and to have Jon ask me to be one of the final guests.
I remember as a kid watching Carson and thinking, that’s so cool that he’s friends with these people and they just hang out and talk. I never saw the PR behind it. And then I became the Tony Randall of The Daily Show. I was on fourteen times in sixteen years.
In the green room there was a giant bowl of chocolate and candy for the guests, and then a Lucite box filled with games, like Hasbro games. You were free to play the games. You may have been free to take the games. I don’t know if the games were one of the sponsors. But I would try to picture, I don’t know, Malala or Jim Cramer playing Chutes and Ladders. Or Bill Clinton or Lewis Lapham.
The last time I was on, the week before Jon’s final show, I didn’t think anything through. I just said, “I love you, Jon Stewart” for everybody in the room. I mean, everyone was feeling that.
The final day with Jon, it was a blur. There was crying during the day. I’ve been sitting in the room with Jon for so many years. He saw me go through a divorce and through cancer. I saw Beth Shorr during the day, and Beth is like stone. She doesn’t get emotional, and her and Jon were a hilarious pair because she’d been his assistant for so long. They weren’t looking at each other, but I saw her break down at one point. Beth lost her dad while she was at the show, a few years earlier, but Jon was kind of her dad and uncle. He’s been there for her.
I remember the moment Beth came in after sound check to tell me something… and we just kind of looked at each other, and she started bawling, and I started tearing. Because the people that you’re the closest to, it’s the hardest to talk to.
Jon had some pretty clear ideas for how he wanted those first couple of moments to go on the final show, bringing people on, having it build up, and build up, and build up. We always knew that the last person to come on would be Stephen, who had been off TV for a long time at that point, and who also had a history of occasionally coming on The Daily Show to have these discussions with Jon while he was still at the Report. So, we had a broad sense of what this arc would be. Some of the correspondents would be at the desk with Jon, and others would be on a green-screen “remote.” We had the montage of some of the politicians who had been targets over the years.
Yeah, I said, “So long, jackass.” I thought it was good. Was it heartfelt? It was fun.
The weekend before the final show, I was culling the whole script, and I was just feeling like, everyone loves Jon and feels this great gratitude toward him, and he’s not going to let that into his show, even though it’s so much what everybody wants to say and so much what the audience would want to hear. So I e-mailed Stephen that weekend, and I said, “Look, this is missing something, and I think it’s a moment of expressing something real to Jon, something that is not funny, necessarily. And I think that the show will not feel complete without it—not that night’s one show, but the whole show, the Jon show.”
And I said to Stephen, “I think you’re the only person who can do this. I realize this isn’t something that Jon is going to want until after it’s happened, and so I’m not telling him. If you’re into it, we’ll work it out between you, me, Chuck O’Neil, and a couple other people who need to know.”
Stephen says, “I think that’s a good idea,” and with one of his writers, they came up with a script by Tuesday or Wednesday.
On Thursday, the day of the final show, Stephen shows up and pulls me aside, before rehearsal, two hours before taping, and says, “I’m really not sure I should do this.”
I didn’t want to make Jon uncomfortable, and he meant so many things to so many people that I didn’t want to step on anybody’s toes. So I literally pulled Tracey, Jon’s wife, into a room backstage that night and I said the whole thing, the speech, to her in one of the edit suites. I said, “What do you think?” Tracey said, “Please say it. Jon will squirm, but please say it.”
Looking around at all the people that were there for the final Jon show, and me getting to see people I never get to see, like Riggle and Carell—that was really the joy of it. The other thing that really sticks out—everybody looks at the show and says, “Boy, that must have been a lot of fun.” It’s work. In the end, it’s fun, it’s fun work. But it’s work. Part of us is, once we hit the stage, part of us is removed from that.
Maybe the others weren’t. Maybe the others are more integrated human beings than I am. But for me, once you hit the stage, there was some sense of detachment. And it was very sad, you know? Something was coming to an end, and whenever something comes to an end, there’s a sense of mortality. Which is never fun at a party.
Jason and I were out of town shooting our show [The Detour] and Jason couldn’t physically come back, because it would have shut down production and cost us the budget of an entire episode. So he was only able to tape something, but I flew back. It was a great reunion, the perfect send-off, really.
I was completely fucking blown away to be invited for the final show. In fact, I thought it was one of those things where the police invite a bunch of wanted felons to get free gear, and then it turns out that they just arrest you. So I thought it might be Jon saying, “Hey, now that I got you back here, you fucking jerk, who’s a coward?” So I said yes, because I thought, if nothing else I might have an opportunity to say, “Jon, I’m sorry.”
And that’s what happened. He came backstage, before rehearsal, and all the correspondents were standing back there. Jon came through one by one, shook hands, and gave a hug to each one of us and said, “Thank you.” I said, “Thank you.” He started to go, I held his hand for a second, he looked me in the eyes, and I said, “Really—thank you.” And I considered that the best I could do in terms of the shit I had talked and the evil I had held in my heart for all those years.
Most of us in entertainment don’t stop and take stock of our accomplishments enough, because we’re usually pretty scared about what’s ahead, because it’s an uncertain business. Jon’s final show, to kind of be forced to confront the reality, it was really a gift.
Just overwhelming pride and gratitude. Being in the green room beforehand, and just seeing all these brilliant, hilarious people, and feeling like, “I cannot believe I’m part of this awesome legacy. This is so cool.” It was one of those pinch-me moments.
Steve Carell is there. Vance DeGeneres. People I didn’t come close to overlapping with at the show, but you feel this brotherhood. And you couldn’t help but feel emotional about this guy, everything that Jon—it’s meant so much to me. I was that standup comedian going from city to city where no one knew who I was, and now I’m “the comedian from The Daily Show.” I was able to buy a nice house because I got cast in a sitcom.
I’d realized it in theory before, but standing backstage that night, it was just absolutely incredible to actually see the careers passing by like boxcars, and then thinking, “Oh shit, Jon did all of this for these people while creating the greatest political comedy show in the history of television.”
I remember, in the 2004 election, hoping that The Daily Show could have moved the needle more than it did. And I know Jon never thought it would, and that wasn’t his intention. But I feel like it had enormous impact socially, on issues like gay marriage and how people look at racism, because The Daily Show mocked certain bad values and attitudes, and the new generation—at least in certain parts of the country—thought, “Oh, it would be ridiculous to act that way. Why would you ever not want gay people to get married?”
The Daily Show became a lens through which people looked at the news and the world that hadn’t been there before, and it also trained people, in this complicated media age, how to read and listen and interpret everything they’re being told.
Stewart and his show anticipated how we were going to be telling stories to ourselves, as social media has proliferated and video is widely available and anyone can add their commentary. The Daily Show’s style of commenting on the news is now how we comment on the news.
I wonder if we could even dream of having someone like Bernie Sanders getting the kind of support he’s getting if it weren’t for The Daily Show and what it did in the fifteen-odd years that Jon was the host. That is not hyperbole. Jon exposed a generation of young people to politics. Nobody else was able to get them even interested. So any issues I might have had with my little hurt feelings, he had a much bigger job to do than keep little Dan Bakkedahl and his comedy career happy.
When Rob Corddry came back for the last Jon episode he walked by me in the hall and said, “I had a dream about you last night.” And he keeps walking.
He finally came back and says, “I dreamed we were all here. We were all on the set. Jon was there. All the correspondents, and we were all ready to rehearse. Jon calls you over and says to you, ‘Okay. What are we going to do? You’ve got to write something for us.’” Rob says, “I had an anxiety dream for you!” He was willing to have the anxiety dream that I didn’t have so that I didn’t have to have it.
That night I said to Colbert, “I can’t wait for The Late Show to start, because I am so glad that the rest of the world is going to get to see all of you.” It was in the hallway between the crew lounge and the little antechamber right before you go in, right next to makeup, Jody Morlock’s makeup place. Colbert said, “I can’t believe I get to finally stop, it was just so hard.” That was an amazing time.
It was far more emotional than we’re used to being at The Daily Show. I walked into the studio at 2:30 that day, and Jon saw me and said, “Hey, you know, I’m so glad you’re here,” and turned around. I hadn’t seen him in a long time, because I had been out on the West Coast. I said to him, “I just want to tell you before it gets really crazy, I just want to say”—and before I could even get into it, he was looking away from me and couldn’t make eye contact. You didn’t have those moments with Jon that often, but it was a real moment and it was kind of a moment that wasn’t subverted by a joke. Jon is not very good at dealing with those kinds of things. I mean, that’s why comedians do what they do, to sort of cope with that, you know? And people always wanted something from Jon. So there was an element of, he was talking to you, but there was a slight distance. He wasn’t a hugger. He always seemed slightly distracted.
That night Jon says, “I’m not looking at you, I’m not looking at you, I’m not looking at you.” Then I said, “But I just wanted to thank you.”
The Daily Show was a place that was really fun, and certainly for me really formative, but it could also be really stressful. So there was a mix of feelings that a lot of people had about coming back, but they really did melt away as soon as I walked in.
I had floated an e-mail to one of my friends at the show, Jen Flanz. “Hey, listen. I’m thinking about coming back for the last show, but I want to make sure it’ll be cool with Jon.” Then I wrote Jon kind of a jokey e-mail, and he immediately responded, and he was like, “I would absolutely love to have you there.” It was absolutely incredible. I spent an hour and a half just walking around, sipping tequila, talking to everybody. So many people had come back, from so many different phases of the show. It was like taking time, which normally exists on kind of a line, and flattening it down to a point.
As we were rehearsing the huge thing with all the correspondents, I went running in to the studio. There was a line in Jon’s bullshit speech about the “Patriot Act” being the name because the “‘Are You Scared Enough to Let Me Look at All Your E-mails Act’ doesn’t sell.” I had contacted my Patriot Act expert, Ellen Nakashima at the Washington Post. I found her on vacation, in Hawaii, to check that the Patriot Act was about phone records, not e-mails. I was bullshit detecting the bullshit speech on the last day.
The last thing to do, after rehearsal, was bring, in sequence, all of the people that were going to be in these bits back to that rewrite room and just go through rewriting it, punching up jokes. That was my favorite moment of the night, actually.
One of the things that was kind of remarkable is how into it Jon was up to the last second. I didn’t expect that we were going to wing it on that last show. It had been pretty carefully scripted, as it needed to be. But I didn’t expect note sessions. Somebody came out and said, “Mo and Vance, Jon needs you.” We walked into the rewrite room and it was like a time machine. It was suddenly ten years before.
Jon was sitting on the couch in that room, and it’s literally a sequence of everyone who’s ever been on the show coming in for two minutes, working on a joke, and leaving again.
It was fantastic. This parade of fucking legends. Lew Black, Carell, Kristen Schaal, there’s Rob Riggle, Corddry, Helms, everybody. There’s Wyatt. Jon and Wyatt, there’s that whole weird thing between them, but they’re cool in the rewrite and then it’s all good, they’re just joking about it, but then it’s getting serious for a moment. It was like the whole experience of the show, over that fifteen years, collapsed into an hour. It was magic. And so, the last person to come in is Stephen.
He conspires to find a seat next to me. Jon gets distracted for a minute, and Stephen leans over and whispers to me. He says it in such a way that if Jon heard, it was still going to be okay: “I asked his wife about the thing. She thinks it should be a go.” I said, “Well, that’s all the answer we need.” Stephen says, “So, let’s do it?”
That was perfect, because Tracey knows Jon better than anybody, and what he might really want, and what he’s capable of saying he wants. Plus, also, I think in the back of both my head and Stephen’s was, if Jon is really pissed afterward, we can say, “Hey, Tracey said it was okay!”
Find somebody to throw under the bus—that’s the first rule of show business.
We spent a lot of time with people who were correspondents after us that we just met that day. It was really fun.
We hadn’t met most of these people, but there was a kinship. That we’d all gone through this exact same experience and…
It was pretty amazing to be in a room with thirty other people who sort of shared your comic sensibilities, you know? I was definitely the dimmest bulb in that lamp. Well, beside both of the Corddrys. No.
I remember they were miking me to go onstage, and seeing Trevor Noah standing across from me, just sort of shy and alone, waiting patiently to take the stage because he truly was the new guy, and he was about to own the whole show. That was interesting.
We had the whole thing planned out right up until Colbert would come on, at the end, in that standing position where he would be behind Jon. It’s that peculiar shot that Jon was always very fond of, because he likes to have both himself and the other person facing camera. It was just a way of sneaking someone on and then having them be able to play to the same camera with Jon in the foreground. There was also something about it that worked comedically, with the person behind very often delivering shots at Jon.
So we’d have Stephen back there, like, “Jon, aren’t you forgetting about someone?”
After whatever the final joke that Stephen and Jon had written for that exchange, in the script it just said, “Come back to Jon,” who said, “Thanks, everybody, so much, we’ll be right back.” So, I just told Chuck, the director, “When Jon says, ‘We’ll be right back,’ just stay there and maybe widen out the frame a little, because Stephen’s going to say some stuff.”
We didn’t put any of what Stephen was going to say in the script. He was off book with it.
Stephen Colbert: [sitting to Stewart’s right at the anchor desk] Actually, Jon, we’re not quite done.
Jon Stewart: [rolling away from Colbert on his chair and nearly toppling off the riser] Don’t do this.
Stephen Colbert: [rolling after Stewart and grabbing him by the arm] No—you can’t stop anyone, because they don’t work for you anymore! Huge mistake!
Jon Stewart: Please don’t do this.
Stephen Colbert: Here’s the thing: You said to me and to many other people here years ago never to thank you, because we owe you nothing.
Jon Stewart: [quietly] That’s right.
Stephen Colbert: It’s one of the few times I’ve known you to be dead wrong… We owe you because we learned from you, by example, how to do a show with intention, with clarity. How to treat people with respect. You are infuriatingly good at your job, okay? [Stewart covers his eyes, which appear to be filled with tears] And all of us who were lucky enough to work with you—and you can edit this out later—for sixteen years are better at our jobs because we got to watch you do yours. And we are better people for having known you… Personally, I do not know how this son of a poor, Appalachian turd miner—I do not know what I would do if you hadn’t brought me on this show. I’d be back in those hills, mining turds with Pappy!
Jon—and it’s almost over—I know you are not asking for this, but on behalf of so many people whose lives you changed over the past sixteen years, thank you. And now, I believe your line—correct me if I’m wrong—is “We’ll be right back.”
Stephen’s incomparable. He landed it in exactly the perfect way and said what everybody wanted to say. What I didn’t know was going to happen was everybody rushing the stage afterward. Stephen must’ve orchestrated that because he must’ve been starting to tell people, once Jon was onstage, like, “Hey, I’m going to do this thing.”
There is a British person inside Jon. He is emotionally repressed in a classically British way. As a Jersey man I’m sure he would take that as a spectacular insult.
As Stephen is speaking, I was standing in the wings next to Carell and we were thinking we could rush the stage. It was interesting watching Carell, who knew Colbert’s rhythms from so long back. He was kind of waiting to make sure that Colbert wasn’t going somewhere that Carell was going to stamp on. It was like seeing a really old pair of improvisors. Having one say, “Wait, wait, wait, he’s going somewhere with this. Now it’s a crescendo. Hold on, hold on, not yet.” It was amazing.
When Stephen started with his thing, I mean, I think the first thing that goes through my head is, “Oh, fuck. You’re going to do this. I had sort of thought that I was getting away a little scot-free here.” But I kind of thought that if they were going to pull something, they weren’t going to pull it then. I thought it would have to do with Bruce. Like at the end, after the band did “Born to Run,” Bruce maybe was going to say, “Hey man, I just want to say…” and then he was going to call somebody. And they’d do like you do at a wedding. So I thought there might be some toasting at the end. So I was off guard.
But that’s the people that worked there. They’re sneaky bastards.
You probably can’t hear it on TV, but we were all chanting, “Made him cry! Made him cry!” That’s what we were yelling as we were jumping up and down: “Made him cry!”
A pretaped, Goodfellas-style tour of the Daily Show offices gave the audience a glimpse of the inner workings of the show, and gave staffers a few seconds of well-deserved camera time. The segment also allowed Stewart a much-needed seven minutes to compose himself before delivering one last profane, seriously funny mission statement from behind the Daily Show desk.
“Bullshit is everywhere.” I just thought it would be a nice way of undercutting the self-seriousness of that moment, but also in some ways trying to find something that maybe encapsulates what our ethos is. And I wanted to curse. It’s hard not to curse. It’s twenty-two minutes. I don’t normally go that long without at least throwing something in there.
Harry Frankfurt was a guest years ago. On Bullshit. Yes, sir. And I love that book. I think probably George Carlin more than Frankfurt was the inspiration. But maybe Carlin with a hint of Frankfurt. A soupçon. If you were to say, “Who were the progenitors of the monologue?” it would be Carlin and Frankfurt.
Jon Stewart: Then there’s the more pernicious bullshit… It comes in three flavors: Making bad things sound good… “Patriot Act.” Because “Are You Scared Enough to Let Me Look at All Your Phone Records Act” doesn’t sell… Number two: hiding bad things under mountains of bullshit. “Hey, a handful of billionaires can’t buy our elections, right?” “Of course not. They can only pour unlimited, anonymous cash into a 501(c)(4) if 50 percent is devoted to ‘issue education’”… And finally, my favorite: the bullshit of infinite possibility… “We cannot take action on climate change until everyone in the world agrees gay marriage vaccines won’t cause our children to marry goats who are coming for our guns. Until then, I say we teach the controversy.”
So I say to you, friends: The best defense against bullshit is vigilance. So if you smell something, say something.
The first act had gone much heavier—longer—than we thought it was going to. The whole show was going much heavier. Michele Ganeless, the network president, was back there with us at the producers’ desk, and we were just talking to her about “What can we cut?”
Jon wanted to cut that, the bullshit speech. He was feeling self-conscious about it. And everybody was like, “That’s a bad idea! No, we can’t do that!” But it was one of the ways to maybe solve the time problem.
We have this intense discussion backstage about it and figured out, okay, we’ll do the band thing, and then we’ll figure it out, okay? Okay.
So, we break, Jon goes this way, I turn around and it’s fucking Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band standing behind me.
I may have a genetic malfunction that does not allow me to connect with Bruce Springsteen’s work every time, but I have a very deep connection to “Born to Run,” because that is the song I would hear if I was ever in the first act of the show. That meant I was present in the wings as Jon took questions from the audience. Jon said, “All right, let’s go,” and then “Born to Run” played until it was time to start the show. That was the way the show started every night, and now this was how the show was ending. And so it was not easy to keep it together, to hear “Born to Run” that way.
I don’t know what other dumb song Bruce Springsteen played.
After Bruce I was emotional again, but I think that’s more a tribute to his music. He and I’d had lunch at a place down here, and we talked about it a little bit, and I wanted “Land of Hope and Dreams,” and at first we were thinking acoustic, and then I just thought that was too melancholy. I wanted that last “Born to Run” riff to take everybody back into celebration mode. Let everybody have a moment, the last moment is us just celebrating with “Born to Run,” celebrating an anthem of leaving. Celebrating an anthem together. There should be nothing melancholy about it. It should be a feeling of joyous and raucous celebration that we got to be on the air for sixteen years, we got to be in the conversation, all these things that we never thought we’d get. We got to work with people that we loved. I wanted that last moment to be one of just pure joy.
But when that was done, then I walked over to the kids, Nate and Maggie, they were just kind of staring at me like, “What do we do now?” That hit me.
No basic cable show was ever going to fundamentally change politics or news, and that was never The Daily Show’s mission, anyway. But sixteen years later, judging by the 2016 presidential campaign, it appeared that depressingly little had improved. Democratic voters picked the stolid, establishment favorite as their presidential nominee, and the Republicans selected a candidate who was all vengeful, fear-mongering feelings. TV news coverage included extended, live footage of the imminent landing of Trump’s plane.
And yet: Echoes of Stewart were all over the political-cultural landscape. The most obvious were his satirical heirs and assigns: Noah, Bee, Oliver, Colbert. But while Stewart alone was certainly not responsible, the ripples of his approach could also be seen in the Washington Post’s annotation of every lie in a Trump speech; and in Fareed Zakaria, a nineteen-time Daily Show guest, saying in a live CNN interview that “this is the mode of a bullshit artist” when analyzing Trump’s latest attempt to cover over his ignorance; and even in this exchange on MSNBC during the Republican convention:
Chris Matthews: I have a theory about being African-American.
Michael Che: Really? Tell me more.
Much had changed personally for Stewart, of course. In sixteen years, he had moved from a one-bedroom apartment on West Eleventh Street to an expansive condo in Tribeca to an even more expansive farm in New Jersey. He and Tracey McShane married and had a son and a daughter, who taught him, he said, “what joy looks like.” But in essential ways Stewart was the same: He retained the capacity for fresh, genuine outrage, and he was determined to find new ways to spread comedy and sanity. Well, and get some sleep.
What drove Jon was being funny, but also being honest. Everything else came from that. The only benefit of fame is it allows you to work more.
We were never cavalier about the twenty-two minutes of television we had. We might not have hit it every night. You can’t. But I feel like we brought it every night.