Jon Stewart is Leaving Me
Wait, what?
Jon Stewart can’t leave The Daily Show! I mean, of course he can (and clearly will, and feels strongly that he should), but…but…what about us?
You know. US. We, who were thirtysomethings when a little known comedian/actor/talk show host (unless you were a rabid fan of the Larry Sanders Show, which, by the way, you should have been) started talking to us as if we were the intelligent, hip, nerdy-cool grown-ups we didn’t even know we aspired to be. With That Guy, on That Fake Newscast, we were able to laugh like hell at the antics of the adults who were so badly running the world we thought we understood way better than they did.
I don’t exaggerate when I say that because of Stewart, a vast, lazy swath of us came to be far more politically aware, engaged in things truly newsworthy, feeling like we all had an inside track the network-bots couldn’t begin to parse. Oh, we were smug, because Jon Stewart brought us all aboard his dare-to-know-it-all train. We took him, his deep research, his gamer mentality and his fanboy ways and we pronounced him IT, and he tough-loved us in return.
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Because of him, the word Indecision is capitalized in my head during every election cycle for all time. Because of him, every time I see a bag of Funyuns, I think of the 2007–2008 WGA strike; he said he knew his writers were back when every vending machine in the building was out of Funyuns again. Because of him, I will always say Iraq but think Mess O’Potamia, I can’t stop myself; that’s the power of Jon. Because of him, actors and actresses and musicians and authors and artists and politicians and pundits and ordinary people became accessible and extraordinary by virtue of their willingness to appear on a tiny little show, broadcast by a literal joke of a network, anchored by a guy who could, and sometimes did, easily and very publicly outwit almost all of them.
Because of Jon Stewart, an awful lot of us got connected; not just by humor, but by shared rage, by indignation, by disbelief, by grief.
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In 2001, we sat staring at this-cannot-be-happening images over and over for the nine days before Jon Stewart came back to us, to perfectly describe what we were all feeling and thinking, unashamedly sobbing along with us. The view from his window had been the Twin Towers. Now it was the Statue of Liberty, proving that the reports of irony’s demise were greatly exaggerated. He ended that emotional show with the only Moment of Zen that could possibly have worked during those raw, bloody days: he pulled his newly adopted puppy from under his desk and held him close, visibly soothing his own fear along with his dog’s fear and that of the audience. I relay that story, because it says something about our connection to Jon Stewart; in nearly any other public figure’s hands, that puppy would have felt like a prop, and the gesture like a stunt. It didn’t. Not at all. It brought home what those of us living in cities that retained their skyline that day were only beginning to grasp. People assume New Yorkers are brave and tough and uncompromising and that they love their city beyond reason; people needed reminding that in those early days after 9/11, the citizens of New York City “lucky” enough to be physically untouched were deeply scarred and terrified beyond all imagining.
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We’ve watched Stewart’s hairline recede, his formerly bountiful head of dark hair silvering along with our own. We’ve geeked out along with him in the presence of our common heroes, as he tries to remain calm while faced with some of the most aesthetically and/or beneath the surface beautiful people on earth; we’ve cringed as he hosted some of the soulless, too. He’s interviewed the most and least powerful, the monumentally talented, the breathtakingly courageous, the craven and the forgotten and the previously undiscovered.
Early on, we nearly herniated while laughing hysterically along with our host, at a couple of guys named Steve, at a crank in a suit named Lewis, at some hilarious chick named Samantha. Later, a brilliant spittling faux-nebbishy Brit named John-with-an-h…and so many others.
We watched as he realized, to his everlasting grief and right in front of us all, that the reach and power of his show may very well have contributed to the detention and torture of a journalist in another country. We held our breath while he went to a dangerous place to tell that story via a different medium.
We loved that his staff and the man he chose to fill his chair were so true to what he’d left behind.
We fully exhaled only when he returned.
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He was different, though. We knew time away and the events that led to it changed Jon Stewart at some sort of cellular level; we suspected that this new version of him was beginning to tire of commenting on the things that drove him and most of the rest of us nuts, every single day with no remedy in sight.
Let’s face it: the usual suspects have far outstayed their welcome in Jon Stewart’s Theater of Humorous Outrage. They keep coming back, those same faces, over and over — they keep getting re-elected to the public eye. They keep jostling into prime position as targets for maximum mockery; but really, it’s all been said.
Almost always, best said by Jon Stewart.
He’s taken a lot of personal hits over his Daily Show tenure; his long friendships with Anthony Weiner and Brian Williams, for instance, have put him in what must be a very painful position — if he doesn’t take the gloves off, he’s irrelevant. And as much as he may pine for irrelevance, that ship sailed way back in Season 4. He must hate that particular intersection of life and work.
On the other hand, I recently watched Angelina Jolie (who, love or hate her, is not in the habit of giggling or batting her eyelashes at any man) giggle and bat her eyelashes at Jon Stewart. Loving father and husband though he is, he probably didn’t hate that.
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Personally, I’m experiencing even more angst over this than I expected to. I suppose I knew the day would come, but grasping the unimaginable reality of someone else behind that ridiculous desk is beyond me. Jon Stewart had the nerve to assume that I could keep up with his wiseguy brilliance, and with the genius writers cycling through The Daily Show offices. I was thirty-eight when I started watching him, but I grew up with him politically and culturally. I see both humor and possibility where I wouldn’t have, before The Daily Show with Jon Stewart taught me that those two things often run in tandem; that humor used wisely can shrink some big, ugly things down to a kickassable size.
Right now, though. I’m busy wallowing in the denial stage of grief without a Moment of Zen to spare. Somebody please stop the earth spinning (in the wrong direction, per Neil deGrasse Tyson) over Jon Stewart’s head. I don’t want to get off. I just want to preserve everything about the show in amber, until somebody figures out how to capture its lightning in another bottle.
Or Jon Stewart comes back to me. Whichever comes first.
