Contents Cover Title Page Dedication Foreword by Jon Stewart Epigraph Introduction to the Beginning 1. This Just In 2. Indecision 2000—The Sunshine Wait 3. America Freaks Out 4. Check Your Soul at the Door 5. Mess O’Potamia 6. Indecision 2004—Crasstastic! 7. Do You Have the Balls? 8. Midwest Midterm Midtacular 9. Not The Daily Show 10. Indecision 2008—Clusterf@#k to the White House 11. In Cramer We Trust 12. Oh, For Fox Sake 13. Worst Responders 14. Anthony and Cleopenis 15. The Amazing Racism 16. Minarets of Menace 17. World of Class Warfare 18. Whoop-De-Doo 19. When Barry Met Silly 20. A Man Who Was on TV 21. Your Moment of Zen Photos Cast of Characters Acknowledgments About the Authors Newsletters Copyright For Lila, Jack, and Lisa Foreword by Jon Stewart It was the summer of 1998 and I was riding a wave of dizzying show business success. I was a thirty-five-year-old New York City standup comic with a canceled talk show, an unproduced screenplay, a book of unpublished essays, and two upcoming roles in Independent Films critics would almost unanimously hail as “speaking parts.” Life was good. People didn’t randomly shout “on weed” at just any old jackass on the street. No. They shouted it at me. The “Enhancement Smoker” from Half-Baked. Did I have any “starring” roles lined up? Any so-called mainstream “successes”? or creative “focus”? or “ideas”? Maybe not. But between the time I hosted a show on MTV to the time Josh Hartnett jammed a pen in my eye in The Faculty, I bet there wasn’t a Denny’s in the entire country I couldn’t walk into at three in the morning and not have someone want to get high with me. So when my old MTV bosses, Doug Herzog and Eileen Katz, and my old talk show EP [executive producer], Madeleine Smithberg, called to talk about the soon-to-be-vacated hosting job at Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, I was relatively cool on the idea. I actually was. My last foray in the real world of television hosting (fake hosting with Larry Sanders not withstanding) had ended with my face on a dartboard in the New York Post with the headline STEWART JOINS LATE NIGHT LOSERS. That’ll leave a mark. So present lack of success didn’t quite mitigate fear of future failure. My girlfriend at the time, and now wife, Tracey, felt differently. She knew I’d been a bit rudderless and creatively unmoored, and she thought this could be a chance to reengage a mind that, when unfocused, generally turned and kicked the living shit out of its owner. Tracey’s good like that. She knows things that I don’t yet know but will, and she waits patiently for me to know them, too, all while not displaying the I-know-things- you-don’t-know-yet-but-will face. It was a big decision. The kind you can only make while down the Jersey Shore over pie. So sitting at the big Horseshoe counter at Holiday Snack Bar, Long Beach Island, Tracey and I made a list of the Pros and Cons. Pro: It’s a job. For cash money. Con: Got to get up early and wear a tie. Pro: Only have to wear a tie for like twenty minutes a day. Con: Wasn’t sure the show was my sensibility. Pro: Maybe it could be. Con: If I screw this one up, the president of Show Business might kick me out, this time for good. Pro: (from Tracey) It seemed like an incredible chance to make a funny, smart show about things I really cared about. Con: The rightness of her position meant I couldn’t have any more pie. After the decision, the next sixteen and a half years are a bit of a blur. I know we enjoyed some incredible highs, endured some terrible tragedies, saw friends and colleagues come and go… I may have called the president “Dude” at one point and gotten a gospel choir to sing “Go fuck yourself” as a joyous refrain… I don’t miss the grind. I miss my friends. We may not have hit the mark with each bit, definitely left some laughs on the table, but damn, I’m proud of that place. We never forgot what a privilege it was to have a platform. I believe we treated the opportunity with the respect it deserved and we worked our asses off to get better at doing the show. And damn! The talent that I got to work with day in and out! And somewhere along the line the process of making that show became the mechanism by which I worked through my own emotions about the world. That’s hard to replace. That morning meeting when we plotted the day. Writers, producers, correspondents… PAs and interns. Always interesting, often illuminating, sometimes challenging, occasionally heated, and once or twice ferocious. It was a process that forced us… me… to evolve. To grow and learn. To disappoint myself, only to have an opportunity for redemption the very next night. Not just on the show but in the hallways and offices. The people there made me be better. And every night we got to present the meal we’d made. There really was nothing like waking up in the middle of the night, feeling anxious and angry and hurt. Feeling like the institutions of our great nation were no longer functioning, that the entire political/media landscape was an incestuous circle jerk of inoperable self-interest, ignoring even the simplest of solutions for a status quo that cannot and should not hold… and coming in to work the next day to have that complex goulash of sadness and fear drained by having Justin [Chabot] build a giant wheel of dildos for that night’s program. This show was and will always be the honor of my professional life. I could never wrap my head around putting it or my experience there in any coherent context. Favorite memories? Moments? What were we trying to do? Did we help? hurt? It was too big a meal for me to even try to digest. I’m really grateful to Chris for taking on the challenge. In casting as wide a net as he could to bring as many voices as would speak to the task. I look forward to reading this book and finally finding out what it was really like to work at The Daily Show… just don’t tell me how it ends… I get canceled, don’t I…? Dammit. My wildest dream for The Daily Show when I started was, “This will be fun. Hopefully we’ll do it well.” Success for me would’ve been feeling like I figured it out. That I got to express the things I wanted to. It was never “I want this to be a cultural touchstone… but only for a very small portion of America.” And I was hoping to stay on TV longer than nine months this time. —Jon Stewart Introduction to the Beginning The daily show. That’s what was scribbled on the Comedy Central schedule grid, in the 11 p.m. slot, for months, as a placeholder, in 1995. What exactly would happen in that half hour of programming? No one really knew. Except that it would happen… daily. Comedy Central itself was still a sketchy proposition at the time. In 1989, Time Warner, owner of HBO, had launched the Comedy Channel, the first cable channel devoted solely to comedy-based programming. Five months later Viacom, owner of MTV, had launched a competitor, Ha! The Comedy Channel featured a mix of quirky original shows and clips from standup comics; its signature creation was Mystery Science Theater 3000. Ha! countered with some low-budget original shows plus a wealth of reruns, including full episodes from Saturday Night Live’s middle years. The Gulf War, beginning in August 1990, was a breakthrough for cable news, with CNN showing there was a large audience for round-the-clock coverage, even though the big three networks still dominated the nightly ratings. Further up the dial, Ha! and the Comedy Channel merged, reemerging as Comedy Central in April 1991. And in a bar in Manhattan, a comedian on a blind date had an insight that would eventually help connect those wildly disparate developments. “I was at a sports bar, and all the TVs were turned to the war instead of sports,” Lizz Winstead says. “CNN had replaced their fancy reporters with young people, and they were on roofs, and there was green, and there was a theme song and all this shit. And I just thought, ‘Are they reporting on the war, or trying to sell me a war?’ Then the guy I was with said, ‘This is really cool,’ and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I might be on to something.’” The blind date didn’t lead anywhere, but Winstead’s brainstorm eventually