How Jon Stewart became the most powerful man on TV
In Britain, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is passionately beloved of 100,000
Stewart Cook / Rex London Times
Stewart Cook / Rex London Times
In Britain, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is passionately beloved of 100,000 Stewart Cook / Rex Features Janice Turner Updated 1 minute ago
He cut Blair down to size and squared up to Clinton, all in the space of a week. Now, with his Rally to Restore Sanity, the voice of reason is getting radical
Jon Stewart jerks up the blind behind his desk. “See that,” he says, pointing to his view of a run-down warehouse. “Horses live in that building.” Really, why? “I guess for the rent. As you can see, we’re over in this corner of New York, not the main drag. Around here it’s heroin addicts and horses.”
It seems fitting that, while America’s TV corporations cluster in imperious skyscrapers around glossy midtown, their most excoriating critic is bunkered down on Manhattan’s western edge, in a district so downbeat even New York estate agents don’t have a name for it. Around the Daily Show studio, it’s all convenience stores, garages and Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club; there’s nowhere to eat but Subway, it’s not gentrified or comfy and there’s the distinct tang of horse s***. Perfect territory for satire.
In Britain, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is passionately beloved of 100,000 or so comedy geeks and US politics junkies who track it down to More4. While we have Mock the Week, Have I Got News for You or Radio 4’s The Now Show to lampoon political events and Chris Morris’s The Day Today or Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe to satirise the surreal excesses of 24-hour rolling news, none matches The Daily Show’s scale, pace and authority.
Four nights a week, 42 weeks a year, it presents America with a searing, late-night comedy counterpoint to the day’s events. What it lacks in a mass audience – an average show on its cable station, Comedy Network, gets 1.8 million viewers – it makes up for in disproportionate influence. Its audience is mostly 18 to 34, college-educated, urban or at least urbane: demographic catnip to advertisers. But crucially it is also watched by politicians, opinion formers, broadcasters – the very people it critiques – who rush to promote their book, movie or candidature on what Newsweek called “the coolest pit stop on television”. At 6pm, as the knackered-looking carriage horses of Central Park clop back to their stables next door, sleek town cars are pulling up. The week I visit, The Daily Show’s guests are Ben Affleck, Tony Blair, Mad Men hunk du jour Jon Hamm and Bill Clinton. “A lotta man-meat,” reflects Jon Stewart, staring at their names on his notice board.
In his decade at The Daily Show, Stewart has acquired a cultural authority unique in a comic. When veteran broadcaster Walter Cronkite died last year, Time magazine asked which newscaster succeeded him as the “most trusted man in America”, and Stewart won with 44 per cent of the vote. “Look,” he insists, “it was an internet poll that could have been won by a dildo rolled in glitter.”
It is his instinct to pop pomposity and play down his figurehead status, but on October 30 in Washington DC he will head what he calls the Million Moderate March, a Rally to Restore Sanity, a parody of the demagogic Republican Tea Party movement rallies held in the capital. He claims it will be “very funny, a good skit”, but it bears the serious purpose at the heart of his comedy.
Stewart’s contention is that American TV, a profusion of channels hustling for market share, has become a branch of showbiz, not just partisan but conflict-driven, turning complex policy questions – the war in Iraq, healthcare reform, the Ground Zero mosque – into crude, imbecilic ding-dongs. And this in turn revs up emotions and further polarises America. “I tend to think the majority of people in the country and the world are reasonable,” says Stewart. “But also busy. They have s*** to do. So you rely on the media, unfortunately, to do a very vital purpose: to digest the issues of the day. Instead, it creates a sort of wind tunnel, a wall of sound. Our frustration is that there is not an incredibly tenacious media organism working for our benefit and cutting up our meat, in a way that hopefully clarifies things.”
Americans hungry for digestible but nutritious analysis – spiced with piquant satire – have turned to a 22-minute late-night comedy show. The first Daily Show book, America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction, topped the New York Times bestseller list for 18 weeks. A new volume, Earth (The Book): A Visitor’s Guide to the Human Race, satirising the whole world, its politics and its history, could well do the same.
Stewart, 47, has the conventional good looks useful in a parodic anchorman, though at a short-legged 5ft 7in, seems a glove puppet of the commanding figure he cuts behind his iconic desk. Out of his customary sharp suit, in his off-duty uniform of chinos and T-shirt, he is also startlingly hairy. And I am struck that he is more New Jersey than New York; his agile intelligence comes with a dash of blue-collar rawness – few Americans swear with such relish. And every night, just before the cameras roll, the darling of Dean and Deluca liberals revs himself up with Springsteen’s Born to Run.
Just before taping begins, Stewart invites questions from the studio audience: “You can ask me anything you like,” he says, “and I will answer you facetiously.” Indeed, as an interviewee, he replies first comedically, then in earnest, uneasy if more than a minute from a gag. “This is what they play to prisoners in Guantánamo,” he says at one point. “Videos of me deconstructing how we make Guantánamo funny.”
When Stewart took over The Daily Show in 1999, he transformed what was then an uneven satirical programme that would drift into lampooning celebrities, focusing its guns resolutely and unfashionably on politics. This coincided with the birth of the Bush presidency, whose excesses and absurdities Stewart and his team rejoiced in bringing into the comedy spotlight, rather as Spitting Image thrived in the Thatcher years. The Iraq war became “Mess O’Potamia”, the horrors of Guantánamo were told through a bearded Muppet called Gitmo, whom Stewart waterboarded, while his protégé Stephen Colbert coined the word “truthiness” to describe what he saw as Bush’s tendency to act from the gut without regard for logic or facts.
The faux-pompous Daily Show intro – “live from Comedy Central’s world news headquarters in New York!” – contains more than truthiness. The programme has the infrastructure of a newsroom. “We take information and put it through a satirical digestive process, and hopefully that produces turds of wisdom,” says Stewart. “We take great pains that the context makes sense. Jokes only work if they ring true. It’s not a question of whether it’s shoddy journalism, but whether it is s****y comedy.”
A huge team, including ten writers, monitor Fox, CNN and other stations constantly for material. John Oliver, a British comic and for four years a Daily Show regular, rarely switches off his TV at home. Before he started living with his girlfriend, a female veteran of the Iraq war, he kept it on all night. “I got to the stage when I could only sleep hearing the buzz of it. Which gives you very strange dreams. You don’t know whether you’ve heard a story on screen or in your subconscious.”
For all his Emmys (11 in 10 years) and huge salary (estimated by Forbes to be $14m a year), you half believe Stewart when he says he’d do this if no one was watching. I ask if he is aware of his British audience and he says airily, “Yes, I am kept abreast of our viewers in… Shrop-shire. Actually, we barely care who watches it here. If I wasn’t doing this, I’d be shouting at the TV. There are mornings you walk in and you view the news clips and it is the opposite of turning a light on. Whatever it is we’re showing drains all the vitamins and minerals out of you. But then we go through the process of the day and we turn whatever we were seeing into something funny and fun, and it is cathartic and energising.
“But that is something we do for us. If there are other people who have been feeling that same way and can’t articulate it and enjoy having it presented to them in segments with beer commercials, then that is a wonderful thing.”
While other late-night hosts lazily read funnies scripted by others, Stewart acts as editor-in-chief, approving every word, giving the show its coherent voice. He leads the 9am writers’ meeting in which clips are watched, ideas chucked around, then, throughout the morning as a script takes shape – often torn up to encompass breaking news – he gives notes. A draft is produced by 3pm with rehearsals at 4.15, in which there are impromptu rewrites, and then, at 6pm, it is shot before an audience (the two tapings I attended did not have a single retake) and goes on air at 11pm.
Since we meet at 2.30pm, I expect Stewart to be distracted. “Do I look like a ball of anxious?” he asks. He does not. “If I was any more unwound you’d have to mop me up.” Over the years, friends have attested to his workaholism and neurosis: he still has the nervous energy, the manic pen-fiddling and scribbling on his notes, of a former Olympian smoker. His office contains a luxury doggy bed so one of his two pitbulls can hang out, and a running machine: “Basically so I never have to leave this place.” But he adds, “When I’m in, I’m in. I put on my game head. But I’ve worked very hard not to take this mentality home. I’m not on the computer all night checking things. I’ve tried very hard to restructure my life. I mean, how much insomnia can you tolerate?”
In any case, while the schedule is physically demanding, it is also psychologically forgiving. “There are nights when the funny tap is dissipated, there is an air bubble on the line. After the show you are dejected. Then you just walk in the back room and say, ‘F*** it, what are we doing tomorrow?’”
Jon Stewart was a Jewish kid – Jon Leibowitz – who grew up in middle-class, non-Jewish Lawrenceville, New Jersey. His mother was a teacher, his father a physics professor. He went to the local high school – “not very intellectually challenging” – rather than the neighbourhood’s elite prep. He describes himself as a leftist, “but in central Jersey that meant I believed Reagan should only have two statues built to him”.
What formed his views? “The indoctrination camps,” he deadpans. “The Khmer Rouge.” He devoured science fiction, Kurt Vonnegut and Aldous Huxley: “I was fascinated with the idea of attempted utopias always being dystopian. I’ve always felt what is defined as leftist strikes me as relatively reasonable. Capitalism is a good system, but there is some collateral damage. So wouldn’t it be nice if we could cushion some people’s fall.”
Then, when he was 9, political and personal events produced a perfect storm. “I came of age during Watergate and Vietnam: if you were raised in that era you are infused with a healthy scepticism towards official reports. Your parents get divorced, your president is impeached, your country loses a war. That’s around the same two to three-year period. That is going to leave a mark. A little scab.”
The divorce left Stewart angry, he acted out, coasted at school, broke contact with his father – who has never watched him perform – many years ago. Residual anger was the main reason he dropped Leibowitz for Stewart, his middle name. “No one has wit at 11, you’re obnoxious; you don’t learn to wield anything like wit until you’re much older. Then it’s like anything: it can be destructive or constructive. And I got my ass kicked a lot for not knowing the difference.”
He was argumentative with some teachers, noted in his high-school yearbook for making classmates laugh, but never clubbable. “I was always more comfortable bartending than drinking in the bar. It’s like sports [he played college soccer]: I liked to wear my uniform, it differentiates you. You are always alone on stage and that is comfortable for me.”
College was followed by an unhappy three-year interlude of odd jobs: busboy, local government clerk, puppeteer for disabled children. He’d loved George Carlin, Steve Martin, Woody Allen, Monty Python, without ever imagining he might be like them. Then, aged 23, he heard “a siren’s call, a subconscious lure; the humour moves you. When I watched comedy I would think, ‘That’s how my brain works.’ I was like someone who’d been playing an instrument in their head but had no idea they could really play it.”
He took off for New York, performed in downtown comedy joints, bombed, tried again, got the 2am slot. And after five years he landed on a TV writing team, working his way up until, by 1993, he had his own MTV talk show. He has tried to break into movies – like former Daily Show regular Steve Carell – but after his last flop, Death To Smoochy, he seems resigned that this is doomed. “Unfortunately, whatever the reptilian trick is in my brain, this is the direction it takes. I love this. This show uses every part of me. The only things that I am able to do, I am able to do here.”
The Daily Show offices have the vibe of a going-places internet start-up: dressed-down, friendly, someone’s golden retriever dozing in a corridor, purposeful but low-budget. Clearly Stewart has a warm relationship with staff, fist-bumping cameramen before taping begins.
When the American internet magazine Jezebel suggested recently that the programme’s women writers and performers were unappreciated, Daily Show female staff published a passionate defence of their boss, calling him “generous, humble, genuine, compassionate, fair, supportive, ethical…”
“Oh, we wrote that for them,” quips Stewart. It seems less a case of bias than the simple fact that while women – who comprise 40 per cent of viewers – admire this satire, few combine the requisite political geekery and too-cool-for-school intellectual presumptuousness to make it. Only one regular presenter, Samantha Bee, is female. And Stewart admits the show is a “subjective and weirdly selfish organism. It’s not sexism, it’s eye-to-eye-ism. ‘You see it my way? You don’t? Well, you’re not going to like it here.’ Jezebel talked to a few women who didn’t have a good time here. I guarantee I could find ten times more men who felt their contributions were not valued – and they were right.”
I suggest that many women love the show because it is so rare to find a handsome funny-guy – male comics being mostly an odd-looking bunch – and he dissolves into his high-pitched nervous giggle. “That is the most sexist… I’m going to call Jizzabel. Is there a Jizzabel? If not, I’m going to stake out that domain name and make me a fortune.”
He is not, he admits, a “particularly social animal”, disdains black-tie New York gala-land, didn’t even collect his last Emmy, never befriends politicians he interviews. I quote a description of him as a “highly functioning hermit” and he giggles again, saying, “I don’t have a hyperbaric chamber, I’m not counting germs as we speak. I consider myself a reasonably functioning hermit; I think ‘highly’ would be too generous.” After the show, he always races back to Tribeca for dinner with his wife of ten years, Tracey, or to see their children, Nathan, six, and Maggie, four. He is a devoted dad: his kids’ photos take up a whole office wall. “You go to a party, those people don’t need you to open s*** or help them get their pants on. So they’re not nearly so nice to you.” He’s late to fatherhood, though not through want of effort, “I tried, it didn’t take.”
Being a beer-drinking, down-home, ordinary Joe, temperamentally outside the media-political complex, only bolsters his credibility. Given America’s deep suspicion of public intellectuals, it helps that he is goofy as well as cerebral, the show’s political jibes always annotated by his mobile face, the comedy equivalent of close-up magic. And he still loves a great fart joke.
After ten years, he has no intention of leaving, “But there will come a time when I will be holding the team back,” he says, “and I will have to hang up the sarcasm, since I’m not able to do it as nimbly as I need to. What helps me is I feel that, at a pinch, I can always get into my head and pull it out.
“What gives me peace is that I have expressed the thing I have always wanted to express. But it does not live for ever. When I leave, I leave. This isn’t Seinfeld – it doesn’t run on syndication, it is over. This is not just a creative outlet for me, but the organising principle for my life. My entire biology functions on a Daily Show schedule, so when that ends, it will be an enormous change. That is when I will go through menopause, I’m sure.”
Stewart has no interest in that hallowed US showbiz goal, the late-night chat show. He says he will never run for public office. But the Rally to Restore Sanity – Stephen Colbert will hold a simultaneous spoof extreme Republican event, the Rally to Keep Fear Alive – began as a Daily Show wheeze, yet might gather into a serious political expression, albeit leavened with gags: suggested placard slogans include, “I disagree with you, but I’m pretty sure you’re not Hitler”. As I write, 140,000 people have confirmed they will be at the Lincoln Memorial and there are plans for satellite rallies in other US cities. But with the blessing of Oprah, who after interviewing Stewart said on Twitter, “I think Jon Stewart’s on to something,” it seems set to exceed that. Comedy was once said to be the new rock’n’roll, but could it be the new politics?
During the Bush years, Stewart said he represented the “disenfranchised centre”, so after Obama’s victory there was speculation that his satire would be extraneous. “Yes, a world of lollipops and unicorns. For a whole week horses s*** strawberry toffee.” Instead, as the American political volume has ratcheted up, he has risen as a calming force, calling for sense and reason, to “turn it down a notch, America”.
I meet Stewart before the rally has been confirmed, but it is clearly brewing in his head. “I can’t believe that the general vocal minorities and more extremist elements among us are able to dominate the discourse.” When I ask if Sarah Palin could be president or whether the midterm elections are crucial, Stewart sighs. “I try not to prognosticate, because that is what our media has become expert in. Everything is crucial and everything is not. If Palin were elected, would it be the end of the republic? No. Look, we enslaved people, we had a civil war, violent uprisings, women weren’t allowed to vote and black people weren’t allowed to eat in diners in certain places. We have overcome a great deal of struggle. The ship of state moves forward.”
Fox News’ Glenn Beck and Palin’s Tea Party movement do not comprise a new political organism, he says. “It’s the confusion between losing and tyranny. I’m used to the people I vote for losing: I know what a s*** taco tastes like. But if you feel entitled to govern, that taste is unacceptable and you’re convinced a revolutionary process created it.”
Stewart’s secretary comes in to say it is only half an hour before rehearsal. I ask him what he thinks of Tony Blair, his guest tomorrow, who on a tour of American TV sofas is feeling the kind of love he rarely enjoys at home. “I think in some ways he is the antithesis of Bush, in that he still cares what we think of him,” says Stewart. “Bush is still trying to say to his supporters, ‘Well, evil had to go.’ Blair still has a desire to explain.”
I remark that some critics suggest his interviews drift into PR puffery and bonhomie, that he pulls his punches when politicians are right next to him. Stewart then spends five minutes musing about the unsatisfactory process of a six-minute slot when you “butter the turkey but don’t get time to stick it in the oven”. And later, as I chat with John Oliver, Stewart comes over and says, “If you have anything you want me to tell Blair, anything you wanna get in there, I’ll be sitting right there – I might as well hit him with it.”
I don’t do that, of course. But I do attend Tuesday’s taping, where the usual audience contains a large quota of smooth, young British embassy staff. Blair emerges in an oddly shiny blue suit. “Yes, there were a few eggs thrown,” he admits, flashing his now cartoonish over-smile. “But the book is selling.” Thereafter, Stewart – having said he has not read A Journey beyond the cover – launches into the most deft pulling apart of Blair’s logic about Iraq and his assertion that the West should use force against Iran that I’ve ever witnessed.
“I live in New York,” Stewart begins. “We have cockroaches. I’m rich. I hire people to come in; they fumigate… I will never, as long as I live in New York City, be totally rid of cockroaches. Now, I could seal my apartment; I could use bug bombs so that it was nearly unliveable and reduce the number of cockroaches. But what kind of life is that for me? [Laughter] Do you see what I’m saying? Our strategy seems idealistic and naive to some extent.”
There is an extraordinary jazz to Stewart in full flow. He appears to reconcile two contradictory mental processes – like a clown unicycling on a high wire while reading The New York Times. He interrogates Blair, yet when the mood is a beat too heavy, finds from somewhere a roof-raising laugh.
“Our resources are not limitless,” he goes on. “We cannot continue to go into countries, topple whatever regime we find distasteful, occupy that country to the extent that we can rebuild its infrastructure, rewin the hearts and minds, because here’s my point: ultimately, within that, there could still be a pocket of extremism in that country. So all that effort still would not gain us the advantage and the safety that we need, as evidenced by the attacks in England by home-grown extremists. So don’t we need to rethink and be much smarter about the way we’re handling this?”
Blair, who, to be fair, barely gets a word in, can only reiterate his line about the urgent threat of world extremism. But it sounds hollow. He leaves with a look that says, “Blimey, I’m glad that’s over.”
As the taping ends, Stewart pratfalls to the audience in mock relief and – since I am sitting in his eye line in the small studio – gives me a daft, “What d’ya think?” gesture. I can only offer a thumbs up: that turkey felt a very hot oven. And as he goofs off stage to plan tomorrow’s show, I recall what Stewart said earlier. “People say there is a certain cynicism in humour, but I think the opposite – there is a sort of infantile idealism in what we do.”
Jon Stewart on...
The Daily Show team dissects humankind for the benefit of extraterrestrial visitors
...corporations
While individuals could provide relatively simple goods and services, more complex ones required a coordinated group effort. The name for such a group was a corporation – an independent legal entity built by and composed of humans that was granted some of the intrinsic rights of humans without having to be weighed down by their responsibilities or sense of morality.
Of course any corporation that did behave immorally would be immediately disciplined by market forces.
In the event such a firm chose to continue down a less than righteous path, they would be shunned and cast out of the family of man. (Those last two sentences were brought to you by and cannot be reproduced without the express written consent of the Sarcasm™ Company – doing their “sincere best” since 1936.)
…war
Once humans organised into a society, we immediately noticed that other humans had organised into completely different societies, and we were compelled to attack them. Violent conflict between societies was called war, and was one of the few universal constants of human existence. We waged war to acquire land or possessions from others, to retaliate for their attempts to acquire land or possessions from us, or because it was Tuesday. Most world religions denounced war as a barbaric waste of human life. We treasured the teachings of these religions so dearly that we frequently had to wage war in order to impose them on other people.
…economics
Economics arose as a way to explain the behaviours of markets. It became known as “the dismal science” because it couldn’t compete with the pure joie de vivre of particle physics or metallurgy. By the early 21st century, we’d gotten so good at economics that advanced nations only suffered major financial collapses twice every decade or so.
…fashion
Humans were constantly transforming the basic necessities of life into forms of artistic and cultural expression. Food became cuisine, shelter became architecture and water became the Enchanted Forest Water Safari, featuring the world’s wildest lazy river. The epitome of this phenomenon was fashion, which transformed clothing into a way of expressing our authentic inner selves, at least for a couple of months until our authentic inner selves were “out”. Some argued this was a superficial endeavour reflecting nothing more than our endless capacity for vanity. We called those people frumpy.
…altruism
As social beings, we were often moved to perform acts that benefited other people without any reward for ourselves… This selfless regard for our fellow man was called altruism, and it allowed us to build great societies and made us easy marks for conmen. Altruism manifested itself in the form of charity, which meant giving away something that had very little value for us but a great deal of value for the recipient. Professional charity was called philanthropy, which meant giving away something that had a great deal of value in exchange for positive corporate branding and tax write-offs.
He cut Blair down to size and squared up to Clinton, all in the space of a week. Now, with his Rally to Restore Sanity, the voice of reason is getting radical
Jon Stewart jerks up the blind behind his desk. “See that,” he says, pointing to his view of a run-down warehouse. “Horses live in that building.” Really, why? “I guess for the rent. As you can see, we’re over in this corner of New York, not the main drag. Around here it’s heroin addicts and horses.”
It seems fitting that, while America’s TV corporations cluster in imperious skyscrapers around glossy midtown, their most excoriating critic is bunkered down on Manhattan’s western edge, in a district so downbeat even New York estate agents don’t have a name for it. Around the Daily Show studio, it’s all convenience stores, garages and Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club; there’s nowhere to eat but Subway, it’s not gentrified or comfy and there’s the distinct tang of horse s***. Perfect territory for satire.
In Britain, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is passionately beloved of 100,000 or so comedy geeks and US politics junkies who track it down to More4. While we have Mock the Week, Have I Got News for You or Radio 4’s The Now Show to lampoon political events and Chris Morris’s The Day Today or Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe to satirise the surreal excesses of 24-hour rolling news, none matches The Daily Show’s scale, pace and authority.
Four nights a week, 42 weeks a year, it presents America with a searing, late-night comedy counterpoint to the day’s events. What it lacks in a mass audience – an average show on its cable station, Comedy Network, gets 1.8 million viewers – it makes up for in disproportionate influence. Its audience is mostly 18 to 34, college-educated, urban or at least urbane: demographic catnip to advertisers. But crucially it is also watched by politicians, opinion formers, broadcasters – the very people it critiques – who rush to promote their book, movie or candidature on what Newsweek called “the coolest pit stop on television”. At 6pm, as the knackered-looking carriage horses of Central Park clop back to their stables next door, sleek town cars are pulling up. The week I visit, The Daily Show’s guests are Ben Affleck, Tony Blair, Mad Men hunk du jour Jon Hamm and Bill Clinton. “A lotta man-meat,” reflects Jon Stewart, staring at their names on his notice board.
In his decade at The Daily Show, Stewart has acquired a cultural authority unique in a comic. When veteran broadcaster Walter Cronkite died last year, Time magazine asked which newscaster succeeded him as the “most trusted man in America”, and Stewart won with 44 per cent of the vote. “Look,” he insists, “it was an internet poll that could have been won by a dildo rolled in glitter.”
It is his instinct to pop pomposity and play down his figurehead status, but on October 30 in Washington DC he will head what he calls the Million Moderate March, a Rally to Restore Sanity, a parody of the demagogic Republican Tea Party movement rallies held in the capital. He claims it will be “very funny, a good skit”, but it bears the serious purpose at the heart of his comedy.
Stewart’s contention is that American TV, a profusion of channels hustling for market share, has become a branch of showbiz, not just partisan but conflict-driven, turning complex policy questions – the war in Iraq, healthcare reform, the Ground Zero mosque – into crude, imbecilic ding-dongs. And this in turn revs up emotions and further polarises America. “I tend to think the majority of people in the country and the world are reasonable,” says Stewart. “But also busy. They have s*** to do. So you rely on the media, unfortunately, to do a very vital purpose: to digest the issues of the day. Instead, it creates a sort of wind tunnel, a wall of sound. Our frustration is that there is not an incredibly tenacious media organism working for our benefit and cutting up our meat, in a way that hopefully clarifies things.”
Americans hungry for digestible but nutritious analysis – spiced with piquant satire – have turned to a 22-minute late-night comedy show. The first Daily Show book, America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction, topped the New York Times bestseller list for 18 weeks. A new volume, Earth (The Book): A Visitor’s Guide to the Human Race, satirising the whole world, its politics and its history, could well do the same.
Stewart, 47, has the conventional good looks useful in a parodic anchorman, though at a short-legged 5ft 7in, seems a glove puppet of the commanding figure he cuts behind his iconic desk. Out of his customary sharp suit, in his off-duty uniform of chinos and T-shirt, he is also startlingly hairy. And I am struck that he is more New Jersey than New York; his agile intelligence comes with a dash of blue-collar rawness – few Americans swear with such relish. And every night, just before the cameras roll, the darling of Dean and Deluca liberals revs himself up with Springsteen’s Born to Run.
Just before taping begins, Stewart invites questions from the studio audience: “You can ask me anything you like,” he says, “and I will answer you facetiously.” Indeed, as an interviewee, he replies first comedically, then in earnest, uneasy if more than a minute from a gag. “This is what they play to prisoners in Guantánamo,” he says at one point. “Videos of me deconstructing how we make Guantánamo funny.”
When Stewart took over The Daily Show in 1999, he transformed what was then an uneven satirical programme that would drift into lampooning celebrities, focusing its guns resolutely and unfashionably on politics. This coincided with the birth of the Bush presidency, whose excesses and absurdities Stewart and his team rejoiced in bringing into the comedy spotlight, rather as Spitting Image thrived in the Thatcher years. The Iraq war became “Mess O’Potamia”, the horrors of Guantánamo were told through a bearded Muppet called Gitmo, whom Stewart waterboarded, while his protégé Stephen Colbert coined the word “truthiness” to describe what he saw as Bush’s tendency to act from the gut without regard for logic or facts.
The faux-pompous Daily Show intro – “live from Comedy Central’s world news headquarters in New York!” – contains more than truthiness. The programme has the infrastructure of a newsroom. “We take information and put it through a satirical digestive process, and hopefully that produces turds of wisdom,” says Stewart. “We take great pains that the context makes sense. Jokes only work if they ring true. It’s not a question of whether it’s shoddy journalism, but whether it is s****y comedy.”
A huge team, including ten writers, monitor Fox, CNN and other stations constantly for material. John Oliver, a British comic and for four years a Daily Show regular, rarely switches off his TV at home. Before he started living with his girlfriend, a female veteran of the Iraq war, he kept it on all night. “I got to the stage when I could only sleep hearing the buzz of it. Which gives you very strange dreams. You don’t know whether you’ve heard a story on screen or in your subconscious.”
For all his Emmys (11 in 10 years) and huge salary (estimated by Forbes to be $14m a year), you half believe Stewart when he says he’d do this if no one was watching. I ask if he is aware of his British audience and he says airily, “Yes, I am kept abreast of our viewers in… Shrop-shire. Actually, we barely care who watches it here. If I wasn’t doing this, I’d be shouting at the TV. There are mornings you walk in and you view the news clips and it is the opposite of turning a light on. Whatever it is we’re showing drains all the vitamins and minerals out of you. But then we go through the process of the day and we turn whatever we were seeing into something funny and fun, and it is cathartic and energising.
“But that is something we do for us. If there are other people who have been feeling that same way and can’t articulate it and enjoy having it presented to them in segments with beer commercials, then that is a wonderful thing.”
While other late-night hosts lazily read funnies scripted by others, Stewart acts as editor-in-chief, approving every word, giving the show its coherent voice. He leads the 9am writers’ meeting in which clips are watched, ideas chucked around, then, throughout the morning as a script takes shape – often torn up to encompass breaking news – he gives notes. A draft is produced by 3pm with rehearsals at 4.15, in which there are impromptu rewrites, and then, at 6pm, it is shot before an audience (the two tapings I attended did not have a single retake) and goes on air at 11pm.
Since we meet at 2.30pm, I expect Stewart to be distracted. “Do I look like a ball of anxious?” he asks. He does not. “If I was any more unwound you’d have to mop me up.” Over the years, friends have attested to his workaholism and neurosis: he still has the nervous energy, the manic pen-fiddling and scribbling on his notes, of a former Olympian smoker. His office contains a luxury doggy bed so one of his two pitbulls can hang out, and a running machine: “Basically so I never have to leave this place.” But he adds, “When I’m in, I’m in. I put on my game head. But I’ve worked very hard not to take this mentality home. I’m not on the computer all night checking things. I’ve tried very hard to restructure my life. I mean, how much insomnia can you tolerate?”
In any case, while the schedule is physically demanding, it is also psychologically forgiving. “There are nights when the funny tap is dissipated, there is an air bubble on the line. After the show you are dejected. Then you just walk in the back room and say, ‘F*** it, what are we doing tomorrow?’”
Jon Stewart was a Jewish kid – Jon Leibowitz – who grew up in middle-class, non-Jewish Lawrenceville, New Jersey. His mother was a teacher, his father a physics professor. He went to the local high school – “not very intellectually challenging” – rather than the neighbourhood’s elite prep. He describes himself as a leftist, “but in central Jersey that meant I believed Reagan should only have two statues built to him”.
What formed his views? “The indoctrination camps,” he deadpans. “The Khmer Rouge.” He devoured science fiction, Kurt Vonnegut and Aldous Huxley: “I was fascinated with the idea of attempted utopias always being dystopian. I’ve always felt what is defined as leftist strikes me as relatively reasonable. Capitalism is a good system, but there is some collateral damage. So wouldn’t it be nice if we could cushion some people’s fall.”
Then, when he was 9, political and personal events produced a perfect storm. “I came of age during Watergate and Vietnam: if you were raised in that era you are infused with a healthy scepticism towards official reports. Your parents get divorced, your president is impeached, your country loses a war. That’s around the same two to three-year period. That is going to leave a mark. A little scab.”
The divorce left Stewart angry, he acted out, coasted at school, broke contact with his father – who has never watched him perform – many years ago. Residual anger was the main reason he dropped Leibowitz for Stewart, his middle name. “No one has wit at 11, you’re obnoxious; you don’t learn to wield anything like wit until you’re much older. Then it’s like anything: it can be destructive or constructive. And I got my ass kicked a lot for not knowing the difference.”
He was argumentative with some teachers, noted in his high-school yearbook for making classmates laugh, but never clubbable. “I was always more comfortable bartending than drinking in the bar. It’s like sports [he played college soccer]: I liked to wear my uniform, it differentiates you. You are always alone on stage and that is comfortable for me.”
College was followed by an unhappy three-year interlude of odd jobs: busboy, local government clerk, puppeteer for disabled children. He’d loved George Carlin, Steve Martin, Woody Allen, Monty Python, without ever imagining he might be like them. Then, aged 23, he heard “a siren’s call, a subconscious lure; the humour moves you. When I watched comedy I would think, ‘That’s how my brain works.’ I was like someone who’d been playing an instrument in their head but had no idea they could really play it.”
He took off for New York, performed in downtown comedy joints, bombed, tried again, got the 2am slot. And after five years he landed on a TV writing team, working his way up until, by 1993, he had his own MTV talk show. He has tried to break into movies – like former Daily Show regular Steve Carell – but after his last flop, Death To Smoochy, he seems resigned that this is doomed. “Unfortunately, whatever the reptilian trick is in my brain, this is the direction it takes. I love this. This show uses every part of me. The only things that I am able to do, I am able to do here.”
The Daily Show offices have the vibe of a going-places internet start-up: dressed-down, friendly, someone’s golden retriever dozing in a corridor, purposeful but low-budget. Clearly Stewart has a warm relationship with staff, fist-bumping cameramen before taping begins.
When the American internet magazine Jezebel suggested recently that the programme’s women writers and performers were unappreciated, Daily Show female staff published a passionate defence of their boss, calling him “generous, humble, genuine, compassionate, fair, supportive, ethical…”
“Oh, we wrote that for them,” quips Stewart. It seems less a case of bias than the simple fact that while women – who comprise 40 per cent of viewers – admire this satire, few combine the requisite political geekery and too-cool-for-school intellectual presumptuousness to make it. Only one regular presenter, Samantha Bee, is female. And Stewart admits the show is a “subjective and weirdly selfish organism. It’s not sexism, it’s eye-to-eye-ism. ‘You see it my way? You don’t? Well, you’re not going to like it here.’ Jezebel talked to a few women who didn’t have a good time here. I guarantee I could find ten times more men who felt their contributions were not valued – and they were right.”
I suggest that many women love the show because it is so rare to find a handsome funny-guy – male comics being mostly an odd-looking bunch – and he dissolves into his high-pitched nervous giggle. “That is the most sexist… I’m going to call Jizzabel. Is there a Jizzabel? If not, I’m going to stake out that domain name and make me a fortune.”
He is not, he admits, a “particularly social animal”, disdains black-tie New York gala-land, didn’t even collect his last Emmy, never befriends politicians he interviews. I quote a description of him as a “highly functioning hermit” and he giggles again, saying, “I don’t have a hyperbaric chamber, I’m not counting germs as we speak. I consider myself a reasonably functioning hermit; I think ‘highly’ would be too generous.” After the show, he always races back to Tribeca for dinner with his wife of ten years, Tracey, or to see their children, Nathan, six, and Maggie, four. He is a devoted dad: his kids’ photos take up a whole office wall. “You go to a party, those people don’t need you to open s*** or help them get their pants on. So they’re not nearly so nice to you.” He’s late to fatherhood, though not through want of effort, “I tried, it didn’t take.”
Being a beer-drinking, down-home, ordinary Joe, temperamentally outside the media-political complex, only bolsters his credibility. Given America’s deep suspicion of public intellectuals, it helps that he is goofy as well as cerebral, the show’s political jibes always annotated by his mobile face, the comedy equivalent of close-up magic. And he still loves a great fart joke.
After ten years, he has no intention of leaving, “But there will come a time when I will be holding the team back,” he says, “and I will have to hang up the sarcasm, since I’m not able to do it as nimbly as I need to. What helps me is I feel that, at a pinch, I can always get into my head and pull it out.
“What gives me peace is that I have expressed the thing I have always wanted to express. But it does not live for ever. When I leave, I leave. This isn’t Seinfeld – it doesn’t run on syndication, it is over. This is not just a creative outlet for me, but the organising principle for my life. My entire biology functions on a Daily Show schedule, so when that ends, it will be an enormous change. That is when I will go through menopause, I’m sure.”
Stewart has no interest in that hallowed US showbiz goal, the late-night chat show. He says he will never run for public office. But the Rally to Restore Sanity – Stephen Colbert will hold a simultaneous spoof extreme Republican event, the Rally to Keep Fear Alive – began as a Daily Show wheeze, yet might gather into a serious political expression, albeit leavened with gags: suggested placard slogans include, “I disagree with you, but I’m pretty sure you’re not Hitler”. As I write, 140,000 people have confirmed they will be at the Lincoln Memorial and there are plans for satellite rallies in other US cities. But with the blessing of Oprah, who after interviewing Stewart said on Twitter, “I think Jon Stewart’s on to something,” it seems set to exceed that. Comedy was once said to be the new rock’n’roll, but could it be the new politics?
During the Bush years, Stewart said he represented the “disenfranchised centre”, so after Obama’s victory there was speculation that his satire would be extraneous. “Yes, a world of lollipops and unicorns. For a whole week horses s*** strawberry toffee.” Instead, as the American political volume has ratcheted up, he has risen as a calming force, calling for sense and reason, to “turn it down a notch, America”.
I meet Stewart before the rally has been confirmed, but it is clearly brewing in his head. “I can’t believe that the general vocal minorities and more extremist elements among us are able to dominate the discourse.” When I ask if Sarah Palin could be president or whether the midterm elections are crucial, Stewart sighs. “I try not to prognosticate, because that is what our media has become expert in. Everything is crucial and everything is not. If Palin were elected, would it be the end of the republic? No. Look, we enslaved people, we had a civil war, violent uprisings, women weren’t allowed to vote and black people weren’t allowed to eat in diners in certain places. We have overcome a great deal of struggle. The ship of state moves forward.”
Fox News’ Glenn Beck and Palin’s Tea Party movement do not comprise a new political organism, he says. “It’s the confusion between losing and tyranny. I’m used to the people I vote for losing: I know what a s*** taco tastes like. But if you feel entitled to govern, that taste is unacceptable and you’re convinced a revolutionary process created it.”
Stewart’s secretary comes in to say it is only half an hour before rehearsal. I ask him what he thinks of Tony Blair, his guest tomorrow, who on a tour of American TV sofas is feeling the kind of love he rarely enjoys at home. “I think in some ways he is the antithesis of Bush, in that he still cares what we think of him,” says Stewart. “Bush is still trying to say to his supporters, ‘Well, evil had to go.’ Blair still has a desire to explain.”
I remark that some critics suggest his interviews drift into PR puffery and bonhomie, that he pulls his punches when politicians are right next to him. Stewart then spends five minutes musing about the unsatisfactory process of a six-minute slot when you “butter the turkey but don’t get time to stick it in the oven”. And later, as I chat with John Oliver, Stewart comes over and says, “If you have anything you want me to tell Blair, anything you wanna get in there, I’ll be sitting right there – I might as well hit him with it.”
I don’t do that, of course. But I do attend Tuesday’s taping, where the usual audience contains a large quota of smooth, young British embassy staff. Blair emerges in an oddly shiny blue suit. “Yes, there were a few eggs thrown,” he admits, flashing his now cartoonish over-smile. “But the book is selling.” Thereafter, Stewart – having said he has not read A Journey beyond the cover – launches into the most deft pulling apart of Blair’s logic about Iraq and his assertion that the West should use force against Iran that I’ve ever witnessed.
“I live in New York,” Stewart begins. “We have cockroaches. I’m rich. I hire people to come in; they fumigate… I will never, as long as I live in New York City, be totally rid of cockroaches. Now, I could seal my apartment; I could use bug bombs so that it was nearly unliveable and reduce the number of cockroaches. But what kind of life is that for me? [Laughter] Do you see what I’m saying? Our strategy seems idealistic and naive to some extent.”
There is an extraordinary jazz to Stewart in full flow. He appears to reconcile two contradictory mental processes – like a clown unicycling on a high wire while reading The New York Times. He interrogates Blair, yet when the mood is a beat too heavy, finds from somewhere a roof-raising laugh.
“Our resources are not limitless,” he goes on. “We cannot continue to go into countries, topple whatever regime we find distasteful, occupy that country to the extent that we can rebuild its infrastructure, rewin the hearts and minds, because here’s my point: ultimately, within that, there could still be a pocket of extremism in that country. So all that effort still would not gain us the advantage and the safety that we need, as evidenced by the attacks in England by home-grown extremists. So don’t we need to rethink and be much smarter about the way we’re handling this?”
Blair, who, to be fair, barely gets a word in, can only reiterate his line about the urgent threat of world extremism. But it sounds hollow. He leaves with a look that says, “Blimey, I’m glad that’s over.”
As the taping ends, Stewart pratfalls to the audience in mock relief and – since I am sitting in his eye line in the small studio – gives me a daft, “What d’ya think?” gesture. I can only offer a thumbs up: that turkey felt a very hot oven. And as he goofs off stage to plan tomorrow’s show, I recall what Stewart said earlier. “People say there is a certain cynicism in humour, but I think the opposite – there is a sort of infantile idealism in what we do.”
Jon Stewart on...
The Daily Show team dissects humankind for the benefit of extraterrestrial visitors
...corporations
While individuals could provide relatively simple goods and services, more complex ones required a coordinated group effort. The name for such a group was a corporation – an independent legal entity built by and composed of humans that was granted some of the intrinsic rights of humans without having to be weighed down by their responsibilities or sense of morality.
Of course any corporation that did behave immorally would be immediately disciplined by market forces.
In the event such a firm chose to continue down a less than righteous path, they would be shunned and cast out of the family of man. (Those last two sentences were brought to you by and cannot be reproduced without the express written consent of the Sarcasm™ Company – doing their “sincere best” since 1936.)
…war
Once humans organised into a society, we immediately noticed that other humans had organised into completely different societies, and we were compelled to attack them. Violent conflict between societies was called war, and was one of the few universal constants of human existence. We waged war to acquire land or possessions from others, to retaliate for their attempts to acquire land or possessions from us, or because it was Tuesday. Most world religions denounced war as a barbaric waste of human life. We treasured the teachings of these religions so dearly that we frequently had to wage war in order to impose them on other people.
…economics
Economics arose as a way to explain the behaviours of markets. It became known as “the dismal science” because it couldn’t compete with the pure joie de vivre of particle physics or metallurgy. By the early 21st century, we’d gotten so good at economics that advanced nations only suffered major financial collapses twice every decade or so.
…fashion
Humans were constantly transforming the basic necessities of life into forms of artistic and cultural expression. Food became cuisine, shelter became architecture and water became the Enchanted Forest Water Safari, featuring the world’s wildest lazy river. The epitome of this phenomenon was fashion, which transformed clothing into a way of expressing our authentic inner selves, at least for a couple of months until our authentic inner selves were “out”. Some argued this was a superficial endeavour reflecting nothing more than our endless capacity for vanity. We called those people frumpy.
…altruism
As social beings, we were often moved to perform acts that benefited other people without any reward for ourselves… This selfless regard for our fellow man was called altruism, and it allowed us to build great societies and made us easy marks for conmen. Altruism manifested itself in the form of charity, which meant giving away something that had very little value for us but a great deal of value for the recipient. Professional charity was called philanthropy, which meant giving away something that had a great deal of value in exchange for positive corporate branding and tax write-offs.
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