by Lisa Rogak
“There’s a huge discrepancy between the Jon Stewart who goes on TV every night and the Jon Stewart who runs The Daily Show with joyless rage,” said an anonymous former executive.
It was something that Bob Wiltfong witnessed on a daily basis during his tenure at the show, and he blames Stewart’s tendency toward anger as one of the reasons why he only worked there a short time. “When I look at the show now, I can see the anger come out in his comedy, and I’m not like that,” he said. “I’m much more positive about the world. So in a way, I didn’t fit the core principle there.”
Indeed, when it surfaces publicly, Stewart’s anger has seemed misplaced and just a little bit self-righteous. Actor and comedian Seth MacFarlane created Family Guy, among other top-rated comedy shows, and right after the 2006–2007 writers’ strike, he incorporated a brief snippet—a very inside-the-industry joke—into the animated show that ragged on Stewart for going back on the air while the writers were still out on strike. After the Family Guy episode aired, Stewart called MacFarlane and proceeded to scream and yell at him for a full hour, saying he had no right to call him out for that.
“I was really kind of in shock more than anything else,” MacFarlane told Piers Morgan on CNN. “It was kind of an odd Hollywood moment. I was a huge fan of his show, and here I was getting this angry phone call.” MacFarlane added that Stewart then asked him, “Who the hell made you the moral arbiter of Hollywood?”
Morgan then replied, “But not if you’re the self-appointed moral arbiter of Hollywood, which is exactly the position he plays. There’s a certain irony in Jon Stewart ringing up haranguing you for mocking him.”
Then again, perhaps Morgan was just getting back at Stewart for the time a year earlier when Stewart appeared on Larry King’s show on CNN and criticized the network’s decision to bring in Morgan to take over King’s show; after all, MacFarlane was visibly shocked when Morgan initially brought up the angry phone call on his show. Before then, he hadn’t mentioned it publicly.
Even after the first few years, the Daily Show schedule was so relentless and taxing, more than a few staffers wondered how long Stewart could keep it up. “Doing The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is creatively and physically exhausting,” he admitted just six months after starting as host in 1999. Yet, at the same time, he admitted that exhaustion had its benefits.
Our work “is actually enhanced by a certain sleep deprivation, because it’s the part of your brain that you’re not really in touch with until something’s desperately wrong,” he said.
“There are a lot of days when we walk off that show and go, ‘Ewww, we were putrid,’” he said. “I feel like when you watch that show, it shouldn’t look like we’re working hard on it, but we are.”
He’d worked his tail off to get the opportunity to host the show, and once there he’d be damned if he’d let anything or anyone interfere. But even he admitted that sometimes he thought it was too much. “Even if you’re eating delicious chocolate cake, there are moments you feel like, ‘I’ve had too much,’” he said. “Now replace ‘chocolate cake’ with ‘shit taco’ and you know what our day is like every day.”
CHAPTER 9
WITH THE DAILY SHOW firmly established as a ratings success, Stewart started to branch out from his hosting and producing duties. In 2003, the clause in his Comedy Central contract about doing no outside work had long expired, and he decided to test the waters once more in Hollywood. He accepted a role in the movie Death to Smoochy, which came out in 2002.
The movie, directed by Danny DeVito and starring Ed Norton and Robin Williams, came out in the spring of 2002 and was pitched as a black comedy featuring child entertainers that also offered a thinly veiled satirical critique of Barney the dinosaur, a popular children’s character of the time. The plot revolved around children’s TV show host Randolph Smiley—played by Robin Williams—and his desire to exact revenge upon his replacement—a purple rhinoceros named Smoochy, played by Edward Norton—after getting fired from the show. In keeping with Stewart’s previous track record with movies, the critics savaged it.
“The script is so shoddy, the direction so inept, and the acting so wretched, that every second of this film creaks like a broken-down tractor,” wrote one critic, who added that it was the first time in his life that he had walked out of a movie theater before a film had ended.
Stewart and Vincent Schiavelli in a scene from the 2002 movie Death to Smoochy. (Courtesy REX USA/Snap Stills/Rex)
For his part, Stewart admitted that he had bombed in the role of Marion Frank Stokes—president of the TV network that aired the show and in on Smiley’s revenge schemes behind the scenes—along with the rest of the cast, and he had finally conceded that it was unlikely that any more movies would appear on his résumé.
To salve his wounded pride, he ramped up his stand-up appearances on the weekends and whenever The Daily Show went on a brief hiatus to allow staffers a vacation. Stewart discovered that the world of stand-up was a much different place for him in 2003 than even a few years earlier. For one, he filled larger venues where audiences were actually paying attention, now that he was famous. “I like going back to that now and again,” he said. “I try to do a show at least once a month, just to talk about whatever’s on my mind at the time.”
Also bringing him back from the brink of destruction that was Smoochy, Newsweek chose Stewart for their annual “Who’s Next?” prize for 2004, for which they name the celebrity most likely to make a big splash the following year.
In retrospect, the magazine was spot-on in their prediction, and not just for Stewart’s professional accomplishments.
* * *
With the primaries in the spring of 2004, The Daily Show headed into its second full presidential campaign season, with the highlight being the 2004 Republican and Democratic National Conventions. It was clear the tide was turning: politicians were starting to realize that making an appearance on The Daily Show was an effective and easy way to reach America’s younger voters.
The trend harkened back to earlier presidential campaigns, most notably in 1992, when Governor Bill Clinton appeared on The Arsenio Hall Show to serenade viewers with his saxophone. But it dates back even further to 1968, when candidate Richard M. Nixon appeared on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and told the audience to “Sock it to me,” the mantra of the show.
Just before the Iowa caucuses in 2004, the campaigns for Governor Howard Dean and Senator John Kerry called The Daily Show producers and said they wanted to be interviewed on the show; at the time, Dean was ahead of Kerry in the polls. Stewart and Colbert loved the idea. “We’ll do it like Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie on The Simple Life, two rich East Coast Ivy League men who try to slum on the farm to connect with the farmers,” said Colbert.
When Colbert and crew showed up for the shoot, Kerry was nowhere in sight. He’d suddenly shot ahead of Dean in the polls by eight points, and instead of the campaign bus crammed full of reporters and staffers, Kerry started to travel by helicopter and forgot all about the interview. “The Dean people are in full panic mode and don’t want to talk to anybody,” said Colbert. They tried to make amends, and promised they’d see if Dean would be available in a few days, but Colbert would have none of it.
“We reminded them that we’re fake press and are only here for two days in order to create the illusion that we’re going to be here for the entire campaign,” he explained. “I said if they didn’t give us an interview today, there’s absolutely nothing for us to put on the air. We’ll shoot lock-offs of locations and do it in front of a green screen, but no interview and we’re leaving at three o’clock. So, yes, we travel with the press, but only to the point where we can create the illusion that we’re press. We never forget that we’re not,” said Colbert.
In the end, both Dean and Kerry appeared on the show, but in very different capacities and time frames. Dean appeared in a taped spoof interview with Stewart during the primary season, and Kerry appeared just before the Democratic conve
ntion. Stewart ended up on the receiving end of public backlash as the result of both.
First, the Dean sit-down was a sophomoric attempt at humor for both sides, a five-minute formal interview segment punctuated with thought-bubble asides that were poorly acted by both. But the Kerry interview put Stewart under even more scrutiny, primarily for his out-of-character softball exchange.
“It was impossible to get an interview with John Kerry at the time,” said Tucker Carlson, the former host of the CNN show Crossfire. Once Stewart landed the interview, he disappointed many viewers. “He asked him questions like, ‘Why are people so mean to you? How did you get so great? What is your vision for America?’ It’s a Nerf interview.”
Even though he was quick to point out that he’s not a journalist for perhaps the thousandth time since The Daily Show began, the criticism shocked Stewart. He scrutinized his own behavior and soon launched an about-face campaign of his own to resurrect his reputation. Never one to shy away from pointing fingers at the news media and politicians at large, the old version of Stewart came out, and he ramped up his attacks across the board.
Though critics and reviewers had accused Stewart of producing and hosting an ultraliberal show from the first week he took over, Stewart maintained that he was an equal opportunity comedian when it came to poking fun at the different political parties. A team of Pew researchers combed through every show aired in the second half of 2007 and found that “Stewart’s humor targeted Republicans more than three times as often as Democrats. The Bush administration alone was the focus of 22 percent of the segments.”
However, Pew concluded that things weren’t as unbalanced as they seemed. “The fact that more jokes are made about conservatives and Republicans is largely a function that the Republicans hold the White House and have been in power for the last seven years,” observed David Hinckley, critic-at-large for the New York Daily News. “Bush is Christmas, Hanukah, and New Year’s all rolled into one. Among comedians and satirists, Bush is a gold mine.”
Colbert agrees, though he adds that Stewart cares less about the political leanings of a potential target than the intent. “Jon is admirably balanced,” he said. “He pursues the true intention of the person speaking, left or right [in order] to be able to honestly mock.”
“What we go after are not actual policies but the façade behind them,” said Stewart. “We work in the area between the makeup they’re wearing and the real face. And in that space, you can pretty much hammer away at anybody.”
However, at the same time, head writer Steve Bodow was looking forward to taking the show in a new direction in 2007. “[We’ve enjoyed] many, many, many comedic opportunities from George Bush, but we’re very glad to see him go, politically and also comedically,” he said. “We’ve really been working with and on him for all this time, but let’s get some new material and some new challenges.”
And so this could be part of the reason why Stewart started to go after Kerry that same year; in 2007 the Bush presidency was in its waning days, and Stewart and his team might have to start to gear up to learn how to make fun of a Democratic president. He started to turn the tables by appearing on Larry King Live to criticize John Kerry. “If anyone has ever been raised in a laboratory to become president, it’s Kerry,” he said. “From the age of three, he got his ‘My First White House’ kit. Now that he’s finally in the race to be president, he has decided [to be] a likable average Joe, and it so clearly goes against his constitution.
“All [politicians] run to this weird sense of ‘I’m going to put on that red-and-black-check jacket and I’m going to go down to a factory and have a cup of coffee and a doughnut with a dude and show him that I’m an idiot.’”
He also quickly squashed rumors that he might enter politics himself.
Despite his about-face on Kerry, politicians continued to flock to the Show, equating an appearance with an instantaneous rise in visibility and name recognition among younger Americans. In the fall of 2004, John Edwards, former President Clinton, Pat Buchanan, and John McCain all appeared on the show, though Stewart’s line of questioning remained a bit less confrontational with them than some would have liked.
Besides, Stewart still didn’t think of himself as particularly political. “People confuse political interest with interest in current events,” he pointed out. “The political industry is devoted to the electing and un-electing of officials, and that can be corrosive. If the Republicans don’t lose either house, people will talk about Karl Rove’s genius. There’s no genius. It will be the triumph of machine and money and strategy over reality. I don’t think that’s anything to honor or enjoy.”
The political campaign industry is also focused on manipulating the media, and Stewart reserved special vitriol for those reporters and anchors who allowed it to happen, further ramping up his well-worn attacks on the media.
“They’ve all become part of the same organism and no longer see themselves as the other,” he continued. “Journalists have become stars, and their stardom is about who they can get, and by getting the right person they can keep advancing. The paradigm has switched.”
He summed up his perspective this way. “There’s a difference between making a point and having an agenda,” Stewart said. “We don’t have an agenda to change the political system. We have a more selfish agenda, to entertain ourselves. We feel a frustration with the way politics are handled and the way politics are handled within the media.”
He also changed his tone about the show, softening his take a bit in a subtle way. “It’s not fake news,” he added. “We are not newsmen, but it’s jokes about real news. We don’t make anything up, other than the fact we’re not actually standing in Baghdad. The appeal of doing the show is that it’s cathartic.”
Some may have been surprised by the change, but there may have been a good reason behind it: Stewart was now a father. Nathan Thomas Stewart was born on July 3, 2004—Jon and Tracey named him after Stewart’s grandfather. Almost from the beginning they called him Little Man.
He now had the chance to prove that he was a better father than the one who had deserted him.
* * *
He barely had time to adjust to life as a new father before a series of events in the fall of 2004 raised his profile along with his workload.
In the wake of the conventions—indeed, even while they were still going on—The Daily Show got noticed in a big way. Even though ratings and reviews were both growing, the buzz was getting even louder: on September 19, 2004, right in the middle of the election coverage, The Daily Show won two Emmy Awards for Outstanding Writing for a Variety, Music or Comedy Program as well as for Outstanding Variety, Music, or Comedy Series.
Approximately 1.1 million people viewed each episode of The Daily Show, an increase of 20 percent for 2004 alone. But what was even more satisfying was that the show achieved a 0.74 rating for the third quarter; The O’Reilly Factor was just slightly ahead at 0.76.
Best of all, in the first nine months of 2004, Comedy Central added fifty new advertisers. “The Daily Show is a good piece of that,” said Hank Close, Comedy Central executive vice-president of advertising sales. “It’s a very, very strong driver of our revenue.”
“It’s an advertisers’ sweet spot,” said Brad Adgate, senior vice-president of corporate research at Horizon Media. “Young people are the least likely to read a newspaper or watch TV news, and The Daily Show is one show that really has found a niche.”
When some TV shows become successful, occasionally advertisers will request that the producers clamp down on including anything in the show that could be viewed as controversial or negative toward the product. While former Daily Show correspondent Bob Wiltfong had seen that this was often the case in his days spent in traditional TV news, he said he never saw any signs of this happening at The Daily Show. “The show was so successful, they didn’t dare touch it,” he said. “As a former TV correspondent, I felt like there was less concern about what advertisers thought while we we
re in the editing room or writing, and there was never any talk of whether Comedy Central would lose advertising revenue if we made this joke. ‘Do we need to take off the gloves with this guy but not with that guy because of his connections with Viacom?’ No, that never happened, while when I was working on a real TV news show, it did occasionally come up: ‘Run this, and we’ll lose this advertiser.’ But never at The Daily Show, and I was surprised. I thought, this is the way real journalism should be.”
However, perhaps the most surprising bit of information to come out of the studies was that though the show—and Comedy Central—was long known as an efficient way for advertisers to reach the 18–34 demographic, after the conventions ended and the election season heated up, the average viewer actually began to grow older. According to Advertising Age, the median age of the average Daily Show viewer for the third quarter of 2004 was 35.7; in comparison, the median age for news shows on the three major networks was a whopping 60-plus. The age of the average O’Reilly viewer was pegged at 58.
The day after the Emmy ceremonies, Jon Stewart and the writing staff from The Daily Show released America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy, a mock high school history textbook that hit number one on The New York Times best-sellers list in its first week of release. While Walmart banned the book because it contained fake naked pictures of the Supreme Court justices—reimagined as cutout paper dolls—Publishers Weekly named it the Book of the Year.
“So much of what was out there already were polemics, books of emotional destruction,” said Stewart. “The idea of this is to be the emotional opposite. What’s the coldest, most analytical book you could write? A textbook! We wanted this to be an overview of the system, as opposed to a personal kick in the [balls].”
