Jon Stewart, ‘The Daily Show,’ and a Whole Lot of Bull
Jon Stewart apologized: He couldn’t talk about The Daily Show right then. He was busy peddling a load of bull. Well, actually he was driving a load of bull. To prevent it from being peddled.
We had been scheduled for a phone interview, the sixteenth in what would turn out to be 23 sessions crucial to creating The Daily Show (The Book), An Oral History.
Some of the conversations would only last 15 minutes; some would stretch to several hours; all of them were rich with Stewart’s signature mix of lightning-fast humor and fierce opinions. But that abortive April chat was in some ways perfectly emblematic of the process of writing the book and telling the story of a show that was dedicated to identifying and mocking political bull.
The making of The Daily Show (The Book) was a year-long sprint full of surprises, interesting locations, and fascinating people — from performers including John Oliver to Samantha Bee to Stephen Colbert to Jessica Williams to behind-the-scenes Daily Show stalwarts like executive producer Jen Flanz. Plus that one 1,000-pound bull.
At first I thought Stewart was joking — it was, after all, April 1, April Fool’s Day. But then he explained that we would need to talk some other time because he was driving through New York City with a large, somewhat cranky black-and-white Angus in the trailer behind him. That morning, the bovine was being transported to a slaughterhouse in Queens when it bolted and began running through the streets. The NYPD and the animal control authorities cornered the bull and named it Frank Lee, after Frank Lee Morris, the prisoner who in 1962 pulled off a legendary escape from Alcatraz. Someone in the animal care community got in touch with Stewart’s wife, Tracey, who is creating a New Jersey sanctuary for rescued animals. And so Frank Lee, instead of becoming burger, had a celebrity chauffeur driving him to a happy new life. Except for the castration part.
The road to The Daily Show (The Book) was considerably longer, though a lot less bloody. In 1994 I wrote a New York magazine profile of the host of The Jon Stewart Show, a short-lived MTV talk show. We got along; we stayed in touch; and when Stewart turned The Daily Show into a pioneering blend of news parody and political commentary I wrote several other cover stories about him. After Stewart decided he would leave The Daily Show in August, 2015, he asked if I’d be interested in putting together an oral history. Interviews for the book — ultimately about 200 of them — began in September.
There was a lot of ground to cover, and the deadline was short. It was exhausting, requiring seven days a week for most of a year; it was exhilarating, hearing Steve Carell and Nancy Walls Carell trade jokes and memories of their days as correspondents.
The real challenge and excitement, though, were in telling both the inside and the outside Daily Show story. Guests and targets including Senator John McCain and Glenn Beck were surprisingly eager to talk; the current stars of Fox News, with the exception of Chris Wallace, weren’t.
Stewart and company had largely kept the process of making The Daily Show under wraps, for two reasons — one practical and one philosophical. The logistical demands of writing and producing 22 minutes of fresh television four nights a week didn’t leave much room for allowing reporters to hang around and chronicle how staffers glued together Gitmo the “Senior Imprisoned Guantanamo Correspondent” or assembled the video clips for the Vine called “50 Fox Lies in 6 Seconds.” But the philosophical reason was more interesting, and more important: Stewart was plenty proud of the work The Daily Show did, but he wasn’t interested in self-congratulation. That set the tone for everyone from the on-camera stars to the production assistants: Stay focused on making The Daily Show the best it could be every day, not on the awards and the hype and the criticism.
That approach certainly paid off for The Daily Show viewers. But it had an enormous fringe benefit for The Daily Show (The Book): Staffers were eager to share hilarious backstage stories about, for instance, Stephen Colbert performing improv in a Denver hotel lobby. They were also eager to explain their roles in “the process,” many of them for the first time. “We end up sounding evangelical in a certain way,” John Oliver said. “You sound like you are trying to sell Scientology equipment, saying there’s this process to a better show. That if you believe in it, and if you monitor it enough, you can get something amazing on the other side of it.”
How much of The Daily Show process had he tried to replicate for his own weekly HBO show? “Everything!” he said.
Oliver said this while sitting in his office at Last Week Tonight. Three floors above him, in the same building on West 57th Street, Samantha Bee was setting up shop for her own new show, in space vacated by CBS News. Her Full Frontal would craft its own, distinct comic vision, but Bee would do it with help from six other Daily Show alumni. Not to mention her own experience as the longest-serving Daily Show correspondent.
“You got to me, I’m crying,” Bee said, reaching for the tissues. “That show, it’s a huge part of my life.”
And she was there a mere 12 years. One of the remarkable things I learned in reporting the book was just how many staffers had spent their entire professional lives at The Daily Show, rising through the ranks and building a stability that’s highly unusual in the TV business.
Stewart has always been generous in sharing credit for the show’s brilliance, and one goal of The Daily Show (The Book) was to highlight more of the off-camera heroes. Josh Lieb, a brilliant writer and producer who now runs Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight show, talked over martinis, beneath a framed photo of Dean Martin, at the Friars Club. Justin Melkmann and Jimmy Donn, stalwarts of The Daily Show video department, spoke between Guinnesses and surrounded by graffiti at a dive bar in Brooklyn.
Then there was Jen Flanz, the consensus heart and soul of the show’s production staff. Flanz was hired in 1998, just out of college, when Craig Kilborn was still The Daily Show host. She rose from production assistant to executive producer, both setting an example for younger staffers and hiring dozens of them along the way. Flanz was also key to the family feeling at The Daily Show — usually in happy ways, like organizing staff theme parties, but also in painful ways: Her marriage to and divorce from Rory Albanese, a fellow up-through-the-ranks Daily Show staffer, and Flanz’s battle with cancer are dramatic threads running through The Daily Show (The Book). Like many of the staff, she was proud to talk about what the show had accomplished and reluctant to discuss how personal relationships factored into what went on the air, before eventually opening up about controversies including Stewart’s confrontation with Wyatt Cenac.
The biggest character, of course, is Stewart. One of the things that made The Daily Show great for more than 16 years was that Stewart insisted on trying to make it great every day. This made the experience a blur for Stewart, and the oral history was his first real attempt to reflect in depth, and a big reason why he wanted to do the book. He talked from behind the wheel in New Jersey and over pizza in Tribeca, between picking up his kids at school and crafting his new project for HBO.
“People always wanted to know what it was like to do the show or what the show meant, and we were all running around and never had much of a chance to put things in perspective,” he told me. “Hopefully this book gives us an opportunity to do that.”
In roughly 30 hours of interviews, Stewart was funny, profane, and insightful. The one thing he wasn’t was nostalgic. Certainly he missed the camaraderie, his relationships with the cast and crew. But even in the midst of probably the craziest American presidential campaign ever, Stewart did not miss being behind The Daily Show desk. He had done it all-out for as long as he could, with physical consequences nobody outside the show knew about: chronic insomnia, for one, which went away as soon as he stopped hosting.
Not that Stewart could turn off his Daily Show brain completely, however: Whenever a Clinton or Trump controversy would erupt, he would start thinking about how he might have turned the events into a bit. Even without the benefit of video clips or sound effects, Stewart’s reactions and analysis, particularly to Trump’s egomaniacal outrages and the Senate’s attempt to stall health care money for 9/11 first responders, make for fascinating reading.
“The beautiful paradox of the show was the catharsis and the satisfaction of exposing bullshit, and the impotence of exposing it,” he says. But that’s as far as Jon Stewart willing to go in defining what it all meant. He’ll let readers of The Daily Show (The Book) decide for themselves, and he hopes that they a get few new laughs out of it along the way. Besides, he’s got to get back to the farm and rub some pig bellies.
For more, check out The Daily Show (The Book) by Chris Smith. Foreword by Jon Stewart. Published by Grand Central Publishing. Copyright © 2016 Chris Smith.
