Divided We Fail

By PAUL KRUGMAN NY Times
Barring a huge upset, Republicans will take control of at least one house of Congress next week. How worried should we be by that prospect?

Not very, say some pundits. After all, the last time Republicans controlled Congress while a Democrat lived in the White House was the period from the beginning of 1995 to the end of 2000. And people remember that era as a good time, a time of rapid job creation and responsible budgets. Can we hope for a similar experience now?

No, we can’t. This is going to be terrible. In fact, future historians will probably look back at the 2010 election as a catastrophe for America, one that condemned the nation to years of political chaos and economic weakness.

Start with the politics.

In the late-1990s, Republicans and Democrats were able to work together on some issues. President Obama seems to believe that the same thing can happen again today. In a recent interview with National Journal, he sounded a conciliatory note, saying that Democrats need to have an “appropriate sense of humility,” and that he would “spend more time building consensus.” Good luck with that.

After all, that era of partial cooperation in the 1990s came only after Republicans had tried all-out confrontation, actually shutting down the federal government in an effort to force President Bill Clinton to give in to their demands for big cuts in Medicare.

Now, the government shutdown ended up hurting Republicans politically, and some observers seem to assume that memories of that experience will deter the G.O.P. from being too confrontational this time around. But the lesson current Republicans seem to have drawn from 1995 isn’t that they were too confrontational, it’s that they weren’t confrontational enough.

Another recent interview by National Journal, this one with Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, has received a lot of attention thanks to a headline-grabbing quote: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

If you read the full interview, what Mr. McConnell was saying was that, in 1995, Republicans erred by focusing too much on their policy agenda and not enough on destroying the president: “We suffered from some degree of hubris and acted as if the president was irrelevant and we would roll over him. By the summer of 1995, he was already on the way to being re-elected, and we were hanging on for our lives.” So this time around, he implied, they’ll stay focused on bringing down Mr. Obama.

True, Mr. McConnell did say that he might be willing to work with Mr. Obama in certain circumstances — namely, if he’s willing to do a “Clintonian back flip,” taking positions that would find more support among Republicans than in his own party. Of course, this would actually hurt Mr. Obama’s chances of re-election — but that’s the point.

We might add that should any Republicans in Congress find themselves considering the possibility of acting in a statesmanlike, bipartisan manner, they’ll surely reconsider after looking over their shoulder at the Tea Party-types, who will jump on them if they show any signs of being reasonable. The role of the Tea Party is one reason smart observers expect another government shutdown, probably as early as next spring.

Beyond the politics, the crucial difference between the 1990s and now is the state of the economy.

When Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, the U.S. economy had strong fundamentals. Household debt was much lower than it is today. Business investment was surging, in large part thanks to the new opportunities created by information technology — opportunities that were much broader than the follies of the dot-com bubble.

In this favorable environment, economic management was mainly a matter of putting the brakes on the boom, so as to keep the economy from overheating and head off potential inflation. And this was a job the Federal Reserve could do on its own by raising interest rates, without any help from Congress.

Today’s situation is completely different. The economy, weighed down by the debt that households ran up during the Bush-era bubble, is in dire straits; deflation, not inflation, is the clear and present danger. And it’s not at all clear that the Fed has the tools to head off this danger. Right now we very much need active policies on the part of the federal government to get us out of our economic trap.

But we won’t get those policies if Republicans control the House. In fact, if they get their way, we’ll get the worst of both worlds: They’ll refuse to do anything to boost the economy now, claiming to be worried about the deficit, while simultaneously increasing long-run deficits with irresponsible tax cuts — cuts they have already announced won’t have to be offset with spending cuts.

So if the elections go as expected next week, here’s my advice: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Bob Guccione, Penthouse Founder, Dies at 79

By ROBERT D. McFADDEN NY TIMES
Bob Guccione, who founded Penthouse magazine in the 1960s and built a pornographic media empire that broke taboos, outraged the guardians of taste and made billions before drowning in a slough of bad investments and Internet competition, died Wednesday in Plano, Tex. He was 79.

Mr. Guccione, who had lived in Texas for the past year, died of lung cancer at Plano Specialty Hospital after a long battle with the disease, said April Dawn Warren Guccione, his fourth wife.

His empire began in London in 1965 with a bank loan, an idea and an accident. The loan was for $1,170. The idea was a new magazine with explicit nude photos to outdo Hugh Hefner’s Playboy. And the accident was an old mailing list, so that promotional brochures with pornographic samples went out to clergymen, schoolgirls, old-age pensioners and wives of members of Parliament.

The outcry was huge. And there was a $264 fine for mailing indecent materials. But all 120,000 copies of the first issue of Penthouse sold out in days, and Mr. Guccione, a struggling artist from New Jersey who had been knocking around Europe for more than a decade, was on his way to being a tycoon.

By the early 1980s he was one of America’s richest men, king of a $300 million publishing empire, General Media. Besides Penthouse, with a monthly circulation of 4.7 million in 16 countries, the company owned 15 other magazines, including Omni and Penthouse Forum as well as titles on bodybuilding, photography and computers, in addition to book, video and merchandising divisions.

Forbes listed Mr. Guccione’s net worth in 1982 as $400 million. His art collections, worth $150 million, included works by Degas, Renoir, Picasso, El Greco, Dalí, Matisse and Chagall. Troves of art and antiques filled his Manhattan home, a 17,000-square-foot double town house on East 67th Street, and his country estate in Staatsburg, N.Y.

Mr. Guccione looked the part of the libidinous pornographer. He was tanned and muscled, and he wore slim pants and silk shirts open to the waist, showing gold chains on a hairy chest. His personality was volatile, but associates said he did not drink, smoke or use drugs.

“He was a mass of contradictions, engendering fierce loyalty and equally fierce contempt,” Patricia Bosworth, who had been executive editor of Mr. Guccione’s Viva magazine in the 1970s, wrote in Vanity Fair in 2005. “He hired and fired people, then rehired them. He could be warm and funny one minute and cold and detached the next.”

Robert Charles Joseph Edward Sabatini Guccione was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 17, 1930, the son of Anthony and Nina Guccione. He was raised Roman Catholic in Bergenfield, N.J., and said he considered the priesthood before deciding to be an artist. In 1948 he graduated from Blair Academy, in Blairstown, N.J. At 18 he married the first of his four wives, Lilyann Becker, and had a daughter, Tonina. The marriage soon failed.

Over the next 12 years he traveled in Europe and North Africa, sketching tourists in cafes and working odd jobs. In Tangier he met Muriel Hudson, an English singer. They traveled together for several years, were married in 1955 and had four children: Bob Jr., Nina, Anthony and Nick.

In 1960 they settled in London, where he ran a dry-cleaning business, drew cartoons for a syndicate and edited a small newspaper. A mail-order business, selling back issues of men’s magazines, put him deep in debt, and his wife left him, taking the children. But Penthouse transformed his life.

With Kathy Keeton, a dancer from South Africa who was his girlfriend, his business partner and later his wife, Mr. Guccione challenged Playboy at the height of the sexual revolution, introducing Penthouse in the United States in 1969 and building it into one of the nation’s most successful magazines, a mix of what was billed as “sex, politics and protest” that took in an estimated $3.5 billion to $4 billion over 30 years.

Its images of women, often shot by Mr. Guccione, left little to the imagination. Compared with Playboy Playmates, as the Hefner centerfold models were known, Penthouse Pets were arrayed in far more provocative poses. The magazine infuriated feminists and conservatives, but others praised it for breaking taboos.

Penthouse occasionally ran nude layouts of well-known women, including Madonna. In 1984, sexually explicit photos of Vanessa Williams, taken two years before she became the first black Miss America and rejected for publication by Playboy, appeared in Penthouse. Ms. Williams lost her crown and sued for $500 million, but the suit was dropped and Penthouse reported a $14 million newsstand windfall.

Aside from the battle of the centerfolds, Penthouse offered an aura of class: fiction, celebrity profiles and political articles. It published Alan Dershowitz, Stephen King, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates and J. P. Donleavy, and interviews with Germaine Greer, Gore Vidal and Isaac Asimov.

Other Guccione magazines made splashes: Viva, featuring male nudes for female browsers, folded in 1978 after five years; Omni, a science and science fiction offering, began in 1978 and ended in 1995. Mr. Guccione employed his children and father in his enterprises.

The dissolution of the Guccione empire took years. A $200 million Penthouse casino in Atlantic City never materialized, and he lost much of his investment. “Caligula,” a $17.5 million movie containing hard-core sex scenes and graphic violence, with a cast that included Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren, was shunned by distributors, and Mr. Guccione lost heavily. He once hired 82 scientists to develop a small nuclear reactor as a low-cost energy source, but it came to nothing and cost $17 million.

The government took chunks of his fortune. In 1985, the Internal Revenue Service demanded $45 million in back taxes. In 1992, he had to borrow $80 million for another tax bill. In 1986, after a scathing federal antipornography report, Penthouse was withdrawn from many newsstands and circulation revenues — a major source of income — fell sharply.

The trend accelerated in the 1990s as Internet pornography grew increasingly available. Mr. Guccione responded with more explicit sexual content that drove advertisers and vendors away, limiting many sales to pornographic bookstores. Ms. Keeton, the president and chief operating officer, died in 1997, and friends said her loss had profound effects on Mr. Guccione’s business and personal life.

Besides his fourth wife, whom he married in 2006, Mr. Guccione is survived by his five children and a grandson.

Mr. Guccione, who developed throat cancer in 1998, sold artworks, media properties and his Staatsburg estate as revenues dwindled and debts soared. Penthouse posted a $10 million loss in 2001, General Media filed for bankruptcy in 2003, and he resigned as chairman and chief executive of Penthouse International. Creditors foreclosed on the Guccione mansion, and he moved out in 2006. (Penthouse magazine, however, is still being published.) Dozens of items from the town house — fireplace mantels, marble columns, even a circular staircase — were auctioned off by a Connecticut gallery in 2009 for a fraction of their presale estimates, with the proceeds going to a charity.

“Kind of gaudy,” said Dave Kerr, a prospective buyer looking skeptically over the lot. “It wouldn’t work in our house. I guess he lived a different lifestyle.”

Lured Into a Trap, Then Tortured for Being Gay

By MICHAEL WILSON and AL BAKER NY Times
He was told there was a party at a brick house on Osborne Place, a quiet block set on a steep hill in the Bronx. He showed up last Sunday night as instructed, with plenty of cans of malt liquor. What he walked into was not a party at all, but a night of torture — he was sodomized, burned and whipped.
All punishment, the police said Friday, for being gay.
There were nine attackers, ranging from 16 to 23 years old and calling themselves the Latin King Goonies, the police said. Before setting upon their 30-year-old victim, they had snatched up two teenage boys whom they beat, the police said — until the boys — one of whom was sodomized with a plunger — admitted to having had sex with the man.

The attackers forced the man to strip to his underwear and tied him to a chair, the police said. One of the teenage victims was still there, and the “Goonies” ordered him to attack the man. The teenager hit him in the face and burned him with a cigarette on his nipple and penis as the others jeered and shouted gay slurs, the police said. Then the attackers whipped the man with a chain and sodomized him with a small baseball bat.
The beatings and robberies went on for hours. They were followed by a remarkably thorough attempt to sanitize the house — including pouring bleach down drains, the police said, as little by little word of the attacks trickled to the police. A crucial clue to the attackers was provided by someone who slipped a note to a police officer outside the crime scene, at 1910 Osborne Place in Morris Heights, near Bronx Community College.
Seven suspects were arrested on Thursday and Friday, and two were still being sought in a crime that the leader of the City Council called among the worst hate crimes she had ever heard of. “It makes you sick,” said the Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, the city’s highest ranking openly gay official.

The charges included abduction, unlawful imprisonment and sodomy, all as hate crimes.

“These suspects deployed terrible, wolf-pack odds of nine against one, which revealed them as predators whose crimes were as cowardly as they were despicable,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said at a news conference.

The assaults are the latest in a string of recent episodes of bullying and attacks against gays. A Rutgers University student jumped to his death off the George Washington Bridge last month, prosecutors said, after his roommate had secretly set up a webcam in their room and streamed over the Internet his sexual encounter with another man. Two men were accused of robbing and beating a man in the Stonewall Inn, a landmark gay bar in Greenwich Village, last weekend while shouting slurs.

Neighbors on Osborne Place said the house, nondescript but for its door painted a bright lime green, had been vacant for some time. A group of teenagers and young men had moved in as squatters, neighbors said, and hosted loud parties.
“You could smell it from them,” said a neighbor who gave only his last name, Gomez. “From the start, you could tell they were trouble.” Mr. Gomez said he and other neighbors had discussed whether anything could be done about the squatters, but nothing came of it.

The nine suspects — the group seemed not so much part of an established gang as a loose group of friends who adopted a nickname — knew some or all three victims. The idea for the attacks seemed to have been hatched last Saturday, after one member of the group saw the 30-year-old man, who he knew was gay, with a 17-year-old who wanted to join the gang, the police said.
Hours later, at 3:30 a.m. on Sunday, the group grabbed the 17-year-old, took him to the house and slammed him into a wall, the police said.
He was beaten, made to strip naked, slashed with a box cutter, hit on the head with a can of beer and sodomized with the wooden handle of a plunger, the police said. And he was interrogated about the 30-year-old and asked if they had had sex.
The teenager said that they had. The gang members set him loose, warning him to keep quiet or they would hurt his friends and family. The teenager walked into a nearby hospital and said he had been jumped by strangers on the street and robbed.

At 8:30 p.m. on Sunday, the police said, the group members grabbed a second 17-year-old, beating and likewise interrogating him about his contact with the 30-year-old. He, too, said he had had sex with the man. They took his jewelry and held him while the 30-year-old arrived for what he thought was a party, his arms filled with 10 tall cans of Four Loko, a caffeine-infused malt liquor. He had cleaned out a store of its entire stock.
He was immediately set upon and tied up. Then the assailants ordered the second teenager to attack the 30-year-old, and they joined in the beating. The beating lasted hours, the police said. The attackers forced the man to drink all 10 cans of liquor — each about twice the size of a can of beer, with a higher alcohol content, 10 percent to 12 percent, according to Four Loko’s Web site.
While the man was held captive and attacked, five of the Latin King Goonies went to his house, which he shared with his 40-year-old brother. Using a key taken from the 30-year-old to get inside, they found his brother in bed. They pulled a blanket over his head and hit him, demanding money. When he refused, one placed a cellphone to the brother’s ear, and he heard the voice of his younger brother, who said he had been kidnapped and who pleaded, “Give them the money.”

The brother complied. The men took $1,000 in cash, two debit cards and a 52-inch television.

The brother managed to free himself about three hours later, and he called the police, leaving out the fact that his brother was being held. By then it was Monday morning. Detectives went to the brothers’ home and, upon leaving, saw the 30-year-old, passed out on the landing from the alcohol he had consumed. But having no reason to believe he had been a victim of a crime, they did not question him.
Detectives returned later that day, suspicious of how the robbers had entered the brothers’ home without using force, and the 30-year-old told them he had been picked up in a van by strangers and forced to give them his keys and address, the police said.
Officers still had no idea about the first teen who had visited the hospital, because he had not called the police, and hospitals are not required to inform the authorities about assaults, the police said. The man had said he was robbed near 1910 Osborne, and police officers tried to obtain a search warrant for the house but were told they did not have enough cause, the police said.

Late on Tuesday the second teenager walked into a Bronx police station house and gave a version of what had happened, the police said. None of the three victims, in their first interviews with the police, were fully forthcoming, fearing reprisal and wanting to keep their lives a secret. But the second teenager gave an address, and a second request for a search warrant was granted.

On Wednesday morning, officers entered 1910 Osborne Place and found a surprising sight: an immaculate house, with fresh coats of paint and the smell of bleach hanging thick in the air. One detective called the house “the cleanest crime scene I’ve ever seen,” Mr. Kelly said.

“Lots of bleach and paint were used to cover the blood shed by their tortured prey,” he said. “They even poured bleach down the drains.”
Rugs and linoleum had been ripped out. Detectives were able to scrape evidence, including pubic hair and empty liquor cans, from the house, but not much was found, Mr. Kelly said.
The break in the case came later Wednesday when someone in a crowd of onlookers outside the house quietly slipped an officer his phone number and, when a detective called, gave the name of the man believed to be the ringleader of the group of nine: Ildefonzo Mendez, 23. Officers later learned the name of the first victim from the other teenager.

By Wednesday night, all three victims had given full accounts of the attacks, and for the next 36 hours, officers with the Hate Crimes Task Force, the Gang Division and Special Victims squad worked up a list of nine suspects.

Arrests began Thursday.

The other suspects under arrest were identified as David Rivera, 21; Nelson Falu, 18; Steven Carballo, 17; Denis Peitars, 17; Bryan Almonte, 17; and Brian Cepeda, 16. They were being held by the police in the Bronx on Friday night, with no arraignment scheduled. Still being sought, the police said, are Elmer Confessor, 23, and Ruddy Vargas-Perez, 22.

One suspect confessed, a law enforcement official said, others have not given statements.

One suspect was taken to the hospital unconscious Friday night, with an undisclosed medical problem.


Sam Dolnick and Elizabeth A. Harris contributed reporting.

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

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.

Tony Curtis, Hollywood Leading Man, Dies at 85

DAVE KEHR
Tony Curtis, a classically handsome movie star who came out of the Hollywood studio system in the 1950s to find both wide popularity and critical acclaim in dramatic and comic roles alike, from “The Defiant Ones” to “Some Like It Hot,” died on Wednesday at his home in Henderson, Nev., near Las Vegas. He was 85.

The cause was cardiac arrest, the Clark County coroner said.

Mr. Curtis, one of the last survivors of Hollywood’s golden age, became a respected dramatic actor, earning an Oscar nomination as an escaped convict in “The Defiant Ones,” a 1958 Stanley Kramer film. But he was equally adept in comedies; his public even seemed to prefer him in those roles, flocking to see him, for example, in the 1965 slapstick hit “The Great Race.”

As a performer, Mr. Curtis drew on his startlingly good looks. With his dark, curly hair worn in a sculptural style later imitated by Elvis Presley and his plucked eyebrows framing pale blue eyes and full lips, Mr. Curtis embodied a new kind of feminized male beauty that came into vogue in the early ’50s.

A vigorous heterosexual in his widely publicized (not least by himself) private life, he was often cast in roles that drew on a perceived ambiguity: his full-drag impersonation of a female jazz musician in “Some Like It Hot” (1959); a slave who attracts the interest of an aristocratic Roman general (Laurence Olivier) in Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus” (1960); a man attracted to a mysterious blonde (Debbie Reynolds) who turns out to be the reincarnation of his male best friend in Vincente Minnelli’s “Goodbye Charlie” (1964).

But behind the pretty-boy looks was a dramatically potent combination of naked ambition and deep vulnerability, both likely products of his Dickensian childhood in the Bronx. Tony Curtis was born Bernard Schwartz on June 3, 1925, to Helen and Emanuel Schwartz, Jewish immigrants from Hungary. Emanuel operated a tailor shop in a poor neighborhood, and the family occupied cramped quarters behind the store; the parents in one room and little Bernard sharing another with his two brothers, Julius and Robert. Helen Schwartz suffered from schizophrenia and frequently beat the three boys. (Robert was later found to have the same disease.)

In 1933, at the height of the Depression, his parents found they could not properly provide for their children, and Bernard and Julius were placed in a state institution. (Julius was hit by a truck and killed in 1938.) Returning to his old neighborhood, Bernard became caught up in gang warfare and the target of anti-Semitic hostility. As he recalled, he learned to dodge the stones and fists to protect his face, which he realized even then would be his ticket to greater things.

In search of stability, Bernard made his way to Seward Park High School on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. During World War II he served in the Navy aboard the submarine tender U.S.S. Proteus. His ship was present in Tokyo Bay in 1945 for the formal surrender of Japan aboard the U.S.S. Missouri, which Signalman Schwartz watched through a pair of binoculars.

Back in New York, he enrolled in acting classes in the workshop headed by Erwin Piscator at the New School for Social Research, where one of his colleagues was another Seward alumnus, Walter Matthau. He began getting theater work in the Catskills and caught the eye of the casting agent Joyce Selznick, who helped him win a contract with Universal Pictures in 1948. After experimenting with James Curtis, he settled on Anthony Curtis as his stage name and began turning up in bit parts in films like Anthony Mann’s “Winchester ’73” alongside another Universal bit player, Rock Hudson.

Mr. Curtis’s career advanced rapidly at first. He was promoted to supporting player, billed as Tony Curtis for the first time, in the 1950 western “Kansas Raiders,” and became, he recalled, first prize in a Universal promotional contest, “Win a Weekend With Tony Curtis.”

He received top billing in 1951 in the Technicolor Arabian Nights adventure “The Prince Who Was a Thief.” His co-star was Piper Laurie, and they were paired in three subsequent films at Universal, including Douglas Sirk’s “No Room for the Groom,” a 1952 comedy that allowed Mr. Curtis to explore his comic gifts for the first time.

In 1951 Mr. Curtis married the ravishing MGM contract player Janet Leigh. Highly photogenic, the couple became a favorite of the fan magazines, and their first movie together, George Marshall’s “Houdini” (1953), was Mr. Curtis’s first substantial hit.

Perhaps the character of Houdini — like Mr. Curtis, a handsome young man of Hungarian Jewish ancestry who reinvented himself through show business — touched something in Mr. Curtis. In any case, it was in that film that his most consistent screen personality, the eager young outsider who draws on his charm and wiles to achieve success in the American mainstream, was born.

Mr. Curtis endured several more Universal costume pictures, including the infamous 1954 film “The Black Shield of Falworth,” in which he starred with Ms. Leigh but did not utter the line, “Yondah lies da castle of my foddah,” that legend has attributed to him. His career seemed stalled until Burt Lancaster, another actor who survived a difficult childhood in New York City, took him under his wing.

Lancaster cast Mr. Curtis as his protégé, a circus performer who becomes his romantic rival, in his company’s 1956 production “Trapeze.” But it was Mr. Curtis’s next appearance with Lancaster — as the hustling Broadway press agent Sidney Falco, desperately eager to ingratiate himself with Lancaster’s sadistic Broadway columnist J. J. Hunsecker in “Sweet Smell of Success” (1957) — that proved that Mr. Curtis could be an actor of genuine power and subtlety.

The late ’50s and early ’60s were Mr. Curtis’s heyday. Taking his career into his own hands, he formed a production company, Curtleigh Productions, and in partnership with Kirk Douglas assembled the 1958 independent feature “The Vikings,” a rousing adventure film directed by Richard Fleischer. Later that year the producer-director Stanley Kramer cast Mr. Curtis in “The Defiant Ones” as a prisoner who escapes from a Southern chain gang while chained to a fellow convict, who happens to be black (Sidney Poitier).

“The Defiant Ones” may seem schematic and simplistic today, but at the time it spoke with hope to a nation in the violent first stages of the civil rights movement and was rewarded with nine Oscar nominations, including one for Mr. Curtis as best actor. It was the only acknowledgment he received from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in his career.

Mr. Curtis began a creatively rewarding relationship with the director Blake Edwards with a semi-autobiographical role as a hustler working a Wisconsin resort in “Mister Cory” (1957). That was followed by two hugely successful 1959 military comedies: “The Perfect Furlough” (with Ms. Leigh) and “Operation Petticoat,” in which he played a submarine officer serving under a captain played by Cary Grant.

Under Billy Wilder’s direction in “Some Like It Hot,” another 1959 release, Mr. Curtis employed a spot-on imitation of Grant’s mid-Atlantic accent when his character, posing as an oil heir, tries to seduce a voluptuous singer (Marilyn Monroe). His role in that film — as a Chicago musician who, with his best friend (Jack Lemmon), witnesses the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and flees to Florida in women’s clothing as a member of an all-girl dance band — remains Mr. Curtis’s best-known performance.

Success in comedy kindled Mr. Curtis’s ambitions as a dramatic actor. He appeared in Mr. Douglas’s epic production of “Spartacus,” directed by Stanley Kubrick, and reached unsuccessfully for another Oscar nomination in “The Outsider” (1961), directed by Delbert Mann, as Ira Hayes, a Native American who helped to raise the flag at Iwo Jima. In “The Great Impostor,” directed by Robert Mulligan, he played a role closer to his established screen personality: an ambitious young man from the wrong side of the tracks who fakes his way through a series of professions, including a monk, a prison warden and a surgeon.

Mr. Curtis’s popularity was damaged by his divorce from Ms. Leigh in 1962, following an affair with the 17-year-old German actress Christine Kaufmann, who was his co-star in the costume epic “Taras Bulba.” He retreated into comedies, playing out his long association with Universal in a series of undistinguished efforts including “40 Pounds of Trouble” (1962), “Captain Newman, M.D.” (1963) and the disastrous “Wild and Wonderful” (1964), in which he starred with Ms. Kaufmann, whom he married in 1963.

In “The Great Race,” Blake Edwards’s celebration of slapstick comedy, Mr. Curtis parodied himself as an impossibly handsome daredevil named the Great Leslie, and in 1967 he reunited with Alexander Mackendrick, director of “Sweet Smell of Success,” for an enjoyable satire on California mores, “Don’t Make Waves.”

Mr. Curtis made one final, ambitious attempt to be taken seriously as a dramatic actor with “The Boston Strangler” in 1968, putting on weight to play the suspected serial killer Albert DeSalvo. Again under Richard Fleischer’s direction, he gave a rigorously deglamorized performance, but the film was dismissed as exploitative in many quarters and failed to reignite Mr. Curtis’s career. That year, he divorced Ms. Kaufmann and married a 23-year-old model, Leslie Allen.

After two unsuccessful efforts to establish himself in series television — “The Persuaders” (1971-72) and “McCoy” (1975-76) — Mr. Curtis fell into a seemingly endless series of guest appearances on television (he had a recurring role on “Vegas” from 1978 to 1981) and supporting roles in ever more unfortunate movies, including Mae West’s excruciating 1978 comeback attempt, “Sextette.”

A stay at the Betty Ford Center — he had struggled with drug and alcohol abuse — followed his 1982 divorce from Ms. Allen, but Mr. Curtis never lost his work ethic. He continued to appear in low-budget movies and occasionally in independent films of quality. He took up painting, selling his boldly signed, Matisse-influenced canvases through galleries and stores.

After divorcing Ms. Allen, Mr. Curtis was married to the actress Andrea Savio (1984-92) and, briefly, to the lawyer Lisa Deutsch (1993-94). He married his sixth wife, the horse trainer Jill VandenBerg, in 1998, and with her operated a nonprofit refuge for abused and neglected horses.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Curtis’s survivors include Kelly Lee Curtis and the actress Jamie Lee Curtis, his two daughters with Janet Leigh; Alexandra Curtis and Allegra Curtis, his two daughters with Christine Kaufmann; and a son, Benjamin, with Leslie Allen. A second son with Ms. Allen, Nicholas, died of a drug overdose in 1994.

He published “Tony Curtis: The Autobiography,” written with Barry Paris, in 1994 and a second autobiography, “American Prince: A Memoir,” written with Peter Golenbock, in 2008, and in it he described a romance with Marilyn Monroe in 1948, when both were young, relatively unknown performers who had recently arrived in Hollywood. The affair was only a memory when they worked together a decade later, both as major stars, in “Some Like It Hot.”

“Somehow working with her on ‘Some Like It Hot’ had brought a sense of completion to my feelings for her,” he wrote. “The more we talked, the more I realized that another love affair had bitten the dust.”

In 2002 he toured in a musical adaptation of “Some Like It Hot,” in which he played the role of the love-addled millionaire originated by Joe E. Brown in the film. This time, the curtain line was his: “Nobody’s perfect.”

His final screen appearance was in 2008, when he played a small role in “David & Fatima,” an independent budget film about a romance between an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Muslim. His character’s name was Mr. Schwartz.