Angry Optimist: The Life and Times of Jon Stewart

by Lisa Rogak

  Only he’d have to travel almost six thousand miles to do so.

  CHAPTER 12

  WHEN 2013 BEGAN, it was clear that Stewart was ready to head off in a new direction, at least temporarily. Though he had announced three years earlier that he had optioned the rights to Maziar Bahari’s book and life story, he rarely mentioned it in public after the fact.

  Until March of 2013, that is, when he announced that he’d be leaving for three months to direct the movie which now bore the title Rosewater. Though he had finished the script a couple of years earlier, he had had to wait on the financing; Stewart knew that once he got the go-ahead, he had to move fast.

  In the first few years that Stewart was hosting The Daily Show, whenever he couldn’t be on the set, one of the correspondents ended up sitting in the anchor’s chair. Most of the time, that substitute host was Colbert—though Steve Carell also occasionally subbed for Stewart—and his success at the job inevitably led to The Colbert Report. After Colbert left, Stewart had changed course and decided to put the show on hiatus whenever he had to be away, usually just a week at a time, though the longest previous hiatus of just over two months occurred during the writers’ strike of 2007–2008.

  But an absence of twelve weeks from the airwaves was another matter entirely, and it was clear that Comedy Central executives—not to mention viewers—wouldn’t stand for it. And so Stewart decided to appoint the Show’s “senior British correspondent” John Oliver as guest host for the entire time. Four weeks would consist of reruns, while Oliver would end up hosting for eight weeks in all.

  Stewart was eager to pursue new opportunities away from The Daily Show, but it was also clear he needed a break. Some of his previous supporters now had issues with him, and could point out recent mistakes and missteps he’d made, in their eyes. For one, they started to criticize his knowledge of how government and policy works, and they were becoming impatient with what they viewed as his ignorance.

  “Stewart seems weirdly unaware that there’s more to fiscal policy than balancing the budget,” said New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. “But in this case he also seems unaware that the president can’t just decide unilaterally to spend 40 percent less; he’s constitutionally obliged to spend what the law tells him to spend.”

  Jonathan Chait, a writer with New York magazine, piled on as well. “One of the habits [Stewart] has is to want to be bipartisan, but sometimes he misunderstands the way he needs to do that,” said Chait. “Basically, you’ll have Republicans in Congress do something objectionable, and the Democrats won’t agree to it. Then he’ll blame it on ‘Congress.’ It’s not fair to criticize both parties in Congress when one side is doing something objectionable.”

  So when June arrived and he hosted his last show before the hiatus, it was a good time to get out of Dodge.

  But that didn’t mean stepping away from the desk would be easy for him.

  When it came time to leave, Stewart was visibly nervous about his first attempt at directing a film. “I am a television person who is accustomed to having a thought at ten A.M. and having it out there at six thirty P.M. and then moving on, so this is a little scary,” he admitted. “But one of the reasons we are in this business is to challenge ourselves.

  “It’s something I haven’t done before, so I’m certainly coming from a place where I feel a lot more confident, or at least routinized,” he said. “I’m moving into this area [that’s new to me], so I thought the first day it might be nice to just sit in the chair and read Filmmaking for Dummies just to let them know that they are being led by an idiot boy. But I’m looking forward to it. It’s a real good story.”

  Besides, as he had said many times before, it was in his makeup to be restless. “I like doing different things by nature,” he admitted.

  But in a way, the only thing that would change on the show would be the host. The production of The Daily Show had, by this time, become a well-oiled machine with not much left to chance. Perhaps that had been part of the problem the critics had noticed: it had become way too predictable.

  “Everything will fundamentally stay the same, in terms of the way that the show runs,” said Oliver. “Jon built it to operate in a certain process, so that process really has to stay. It’s like a NASCAR driver giving keys to his car to a member of his pit crew. I fundamentally understand how the engine works—I just never have driven it that fast before.”

  Nevertheless, Comedy Central executives were understandably nervous. “[Taking time off] is something that he’s been interested in for a while, so we worked out a way to accommodate it,” said Kent Alterman, programming chief at Comedy Central. “We’re interested in him being fulfilled and happy here, so nobody ever told him, ‘You can’t do this,’ and we know he takes the show very seriously. There was a shared feeling between Jon and us that John Oliver made the most sense to fill in.”

  “I’m fortunate to have the type of people who have been producing it,” said Stewart. “We’ve been there almost fifteen years, and Oliver is top-notch. He’s a guy who has all the tools. He’s so ready to do this, I don’t think they’ll miss a beat. If anything, he’ll bring a nice British sophistication. It will be like Upstairs, Downstairs where everybody has been downstairs for a long time and now we’re going to get to go upstairs.”

  In the seven years that Oliver had been a correspondent on the show, he had risen to the top of the heap, just as Colbert had done years earlier. And like Stewart, he was a news junkie. He kept his TV on at home all the time, though in order to keep a happy home life with his wife, Kate Norley, a veteran of the Iraq War, he learned to turn it off at night.

  Oliver was excited but equally nervous about his hosting debut. “I’m looking forward to it in the way someone looks forward to a bungee jump,” said Oliver. “I know it will be a fun and exciting experience, but I’m just not a hundred percent sure I should be doing it. But it’s a real honor to be able to do this for him, however misplaced that trust.”

  He was also uncertain about how the set of the Show would feel without Stewart. “He’s a large part of our lives here, and the prospect of not having him around is a dislocating feeling,” Oliver admitted.

  At the same time, Oliver had spent enough time on the set that he was fully aware of how the show operated on a day-to-day basis. “Jon has always told us [that] you want to make sure that the spine of the argument is in shape,” he said. “You can write jokes at any point of the day. Jokes are not that hard to write, or they shouldn’t be when it is literally your job. It’s harder to shift the point of view of a headline later in the day. That’s the kind of thing you need to keep an eye on early. You’d think you’d come in early in the day and go, ‘What jokes should we tell?’ And that’s not always the case.”

  “This show is such a sausage factory, that you are only concerned with the next day,” Oliver added. “I find it hard in my general life to think further than the week ahead. So I’ve not really taken any big-picture thought about it, other than survival. But I’ve never had a regular job till I moved here. So I still can’t imagine not working here. It really is just a process of trying to get each show on.”

  On June 10, Oliver assumed hosting duties, and once he settled into Stewart’s seat, he let loose: “Welcome to The Daily Show,” he began. “I am John Oliver and let’s all just acknowledge for a moment that this is weird. This looks weird. It feels weird. It even sounds weird.”

  Over the next three months, both he and the critics were surprised at how well he did. From the first week that Oliver filled in as guest host, it was clear Stewart had made the right choice. Critics raved about The Daily Show, something they hadn’t done for a while. And some made no secret of the fact that they actually preferred Oliver over Stewart as the mainstay.

  Perhaps more importantly, at least in the eyes of Comedy Central executives, the ratings during Oliver’s tenure equaled Stewart’s: his first week, Oliver’s shows attracted 1.5 million viewers, the same as Stewart’s.

>   * * *

  Stewart began his time away from The Daily Show by meeting his Egyptian counterpart Bassem Youssef, who is regularly referred to as the Egyptian Jon Stewart. Youssef invited Stewart onto his show El Bernameg, aka “The Program.” When Stewart appeared on the show in June of 2013, Youssef’s show was the most popular show in Egypt.

  Dr. Youssef doubles as a heart surgeon and got his start as a humorous critic of the Egyptian government—and journalists—by making videos of his funny diatribes in the laundry room of his Cairo apartment building and posting them on YouTube after the 2011 revolution known as the Arab Spring. He called the show The B+ Show, aka “B(e) Positive,” after his blood type, and aired the first show in March 2011 while riots were still going on in Tahrir Square. “My program is a direct result of what happened in the revolution,” said Youssef. Within a few months, his YouTube shows were so popular, garnering five million hits each, that a major Egyptian TV network offered him a show of his own, which quickly became the most-viewed show in the country, and it spread throughout the region.

  It’s clear Youssef regarded Stewart as a hero. He framed one of his favorite Stewart quotes—“I’m not going to censor myself to comfort your ignorance”—and displays it prominently in his office. “I love Jon Stewart, and I will never shy from the fact that he is a role model,” he said, adding that while there are similarities between the shows, his is necessarily less-polished than the American version. “We are at a different stage in building our country,” he explained. “Stewart is in a much more stable environment, a much more established democracy. Here, it is much harder to come up with the program.”

  In hosting Stewart on his show, Youssef was also returning the favor. He had appeared on The Daily Show on a visit to the States in June 2012. “I love the guy,” said Youssef. “He’s part of the reason why I’m here.”

  In addition to his name-recognition in Egypt, there were signs that Stewart’s popularity was spreading throughout the world. Even though The Daily Show is only broadcast in a handful of countries—including India, Australia, Portugal, and the United Kingdom—millions of people could view his shows online through ComedyCentral.com and YouTube. And if their governments banned it, there were always work-arounds online.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, China has a growing audience for The Daily Show, although Stewart’s increasing popularity caused the Chinese government to start banning the bootlegged and illegally downloaded broadcasts that are uploaded with hastily added subtitles to Chinese social media sites like Sina Weibo and Youku; often the addition of a new show crashes the sites. In the spring of 2013, Stewart reported on the air pollution in Beijing and made the comment, “Things may be bad, but at least we can’t chew our air.” The segment went viral across the country along with an online campaign for Stewart to produce a week’s worth of shows in China.

  Known by his Chinese name Jiong Situ, Stewart has become so popular that many people yearn for their own version of The Daily Show, which would be pretty much impossible under the current Communist government. “How wonderful it would be if we could also complain about our country like this,” commented one Weibo user.

  * * *

  From all accounts, despite the fact that Rosewater was the first movie he directed, Stewart was the consummate professional on the set.

  According to star Shohreh Aghdashloo, who played a gypsy queen on NBC’s Grimm series, Stewart worked hard to make the actors and crew feel comfortable. The first day of the shoot, he acknowledged his lack of experience and apologized in advance to the cast for any mistakes he’d make. Though he turned out to be a very hands-on director, he knew enough to trust the actors to make their own decisions when it came to figuring out their characters’ motivations and actions.

  “The good directors allow you to do that,” said Aghdashloo, mentioning that she was so impressed with his work that she told him he was a born director. With a budget of under $10 million, the movie was shot primarily in and around Amman, Jordan, with longtime Hollywood producers Scott Rudin and Gigi Pritzker helming the production team. But after just a week on the set, Stewart asked his producers to increase the film’s budget. Even though actor Gael García Bernal, who starred as Che Guevara in the 2004 movie The Motorcycle Diaries, had already agreed to play Maziar Bahari in Rosewater, shortly before filming began he had asked for more money. The other principal actors in the film were relative unknowns and the film crew relied on numerous locals to pitch in where they were needed.

  And so adjustments were made on the fly. A riot scene involving eight hundred extras presented an issue because there was no money in the budget for the expense. “There was a lot of debate and chaos around what we should do,” said Alaadin Khasawneh, who worked as a member of the production team and also played a prison guard in the movie. He and the team came up with an ingenious solution: they put out the word on Jordanian social media sites that extras would be paid with a hug by Stewart. “It was a big risk and a gamble, but it worked out. And it just goes to show how much Jon is loved in Jordan.”

  Bahari, author of the book Then They Came for Me, also spent time on the set and was very pleased with how Stewart handled his story. “I think Jon did a very good job with the film,” Bahari said. “I’m excited to see what the final result will look like.”

  And García Bernal concurred. “It was the most incredible filming adventure I’ve ever put myself into,” he said.

  The shoot was complicated by the fact that part of the filming schedule occurred during Ramadan. “It was an intense five weeks because people were fasting,” said Khasawneh.

  As filming progressed through the summer, Stewart settled into his role. His schedule on the film prevented him from watching Oliver’s work as his substitute, but he joked that “[Directing] has been exciting and invigorating, but weird as hell,” he said. “And I don’t watch The Daily Show because it’s too weird. It’s like watching someone have sex with your wife’s desk.”

  What was even stranger was that, as Aghdashloo described it, there was “a line of beautiful girls” always waiting just outside the set, eager for a chance to meet Stewart in the flesh.

  The film wrapped in August 2013, Stewart returned to the States, and reclaimed his hosting seat on September 3, 2013. Postproduction began on Rosewater, and though a distributor had not yet been lined up, Stewart announced that the film would be released sometime in 2014.

  * * *

  When Stewart returned to The Daily Show, he was tanned, rested, refreshed, and more than ready to resume his hosting duties. Still, speculation had now begun about when—not if—he would leave permanently.

  Was his first hiatus indeed the beginning of the end of Jon Stewart’s long reign on The Daily Show? And if he left, what could he do that could possibly match his accomplishments on Comedy Central? Depending upon how Rosewater did with the critics and at the box office, he could forge ahead with a new career in the movies, succeeding the second time around, this time behind the camera.

  On the flip side, many people have floated the idea that a natural next step for Stewart would be in the world of politics. But as before, he denied that he had any desire to run for political office on any level, answering the query, as usual, with a joke. “I would consider it, but unfortunately, there are some photos of me that would preclude me even from working at the post office, quite frankly.”

  But he’s also given a more serious, practical answer: “I make a lot of money writing jokes,” he said. “I get to go home, nobody bothers me. I don’t have to get people to vote on things.”

  Despite years of making people laugh, making people famous, and changing how people view the news media and politicians, Stewart retains an aw-shucks attitude toward the amount of influence he’s wielded through the years. “I deny that I am powerful,” he said. “Power implies an agenda that’s being acted on. Every generation has had its people who stand at the back and make fun of those in charge. I’m not saying I’m powerless and in a vacuum, bu
t if I really wanted to change things, I’d run for office. I haven’t considered that, and I wouldn’t because [comedy] is what I do well. And the more I move away from comedy, the less competent I become.”

  He cautioned that there was a good chance that The Daily Show would cease to exist once he made his final exit. “When I leave, I leave,” he said. “My entire biology functions on a Daily Show schedule, so when that ends, it will be an enormous change.”

  As one of the oldest employees on The Daily Show—as well as holding one of the longest tenures—there was another reality that Stewart had to face. “There will come a time when I will be holding the team back, and I will have to hang up the sarcasm since I’m not able to do it as nimbly as I need to.”

  Fast forward a decade—or two—and he doesn’t believe he’ll still be in the same spotlight. “I’m not going to disappear, but I don’t want to work this hard.”

  Stewart openly admits that the show and its relentless pace has aged him, in a similar way to how presidents look considerably older after only a year or two in office. “Look what’s happened to me in the ten years I’ve been doing it: I’d [look like] the Crypt Keeper at a certain point.”

  He admits that when he finally leaves The Daily Show, there will be a void in his life that nothing will be able to fill. “Without the show I’m just an old guy yelling at the TV.”

  “You just have to keep trying to do good work, and hope that it leads to more good work,” he said. “I want to look back on my career and be proud of the work, and be proud that I tried everything. I want to be able to look back and know that I was terrible at a variety of things.”

  He also gives ample credit to his youthful soccer obsession for helping him get where he is today. “Comedy and hosting a talk show is about the closest thing to sports that I have found,” he said. “You don’t know the outcome, and it really is up to you to do your best. If you lose, you lose, but you lose with dignity. You didn’t want to be good for a small player or a guy with no left foot. You wanted to be good, to take your best shot at the top guys and see how you came out.”