George W. Bush came out of the 2004 presidential election a winner. So did Jon Stewart.
The host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” was hands-down the hottest media figure of the campaign season. He was the face on the cover of all the right magazines. The hippest path to reaching the youth vote. The guy John Edwards sat next to when he declared his candidacy. The one John Kerry bantered with in a bid to seem more human.
At times, it seemed as if Stewart could do no wrong. His fake news show was voted the best news and information program by a national group of TV critics. He went toe-to-toe in a debate with Ted Koppel and didn’t blink. He ventured into the spin zone with Bill O’Reilly and came out smelling like a rose. And he got CNN’s “Crossfire” put on the chopping block. All of which the 42-year-old comedian ducks or downplays.
“By the way, it’s only going to get better,” he says when asked about his glowing reviews. “Apparently, there will never be a downslide.”
What’s his life like now? “Nonstop cocktail parties. A lot of glitterati, a lot of people in the know, newsmakers, opinion shakers. As a kingmaker, I have a responsibility to go out and find kings to be made.”
This, of course, doesn’t explain why he still performs stand-up comedy. He says he does a couple of dates a month to keep in touch with the format where he got his start.
“Ultimately, that’s what I’ll go back to doing when people have become sufficiently sick of me, that I’m forced once again to barnstorm the country in a beat-up van,” he says from the “Daily Show” offices in New York after apologizing for running late with a writers meeting.
His stand-up shows aren’t that far removed from what he does behind a desk for Comedy Central. Same sensibility. Some topical material. “A lot more nudity,” he says, never content to give a boring answer. “Considerable foul language. A slurred speech that appears to be narcotic-related.”
His fans know what he’s like. With Stewart, you get smart, pointed jokes and equal parts amusement and outrage at the hypocrisy of those who govern and inform us as a nation.
As a celebrity figure, he’s a disappointment to the tabloids. His wife, Tracey, is a veterinary technician. The two had their first child, a son named Nathan, last year. The comedians who started out in the club circuit with Stewart in the late 1980s speak well of him. He wears baseball caps and jeans when he’s off-camera. During his “60 Minutes” interview, he shared an ambition that many middle-age guys can relate to: He’d love to be able to dunk.
What he doesn’t have – unless he’s hiding some inner Peter Jennings – is the kind of gi-nor-mous ego that’s to be expected from the biggest names in news and entertainment. For Stewart, dealing with coming off his biggest year isn’t a problem because he views it as a ride that’s both fun and fleeting.
“It’s absolutely taken away any insecurities or self-esteem issues that had built up over my, let’s say, 41 years prior of not being praised,” he jokes. “It is preferable to being slammed, which I’ve also had. In general, I just feel that if you’re on TV, people like you more than they should or dislike you more than they should. And you just have to try and continue to develop as strong an internal barometer as you can for whether or not your work is stinky.”
He scoffs at the notion that he’s evolved into an influential figure. (And maybe he should because when he revealed in the fall that he planned to vote for John Kerry, it didn’t change the Democrat’s fate.) He patiently denies he has practically become a member of the mainstream media and insists he’s just a comedian who’s part of a funny team that puts out a show.
“People have placed this idea that we’re influential upon us, because we don’t feel it,” he says. “At our best, I think we’re an editorial cartoon. At our worst, we’re a bratty bunch of kids making poop jokes about Social Security.”
When Ted Koppel pressed him about his role as a cathartic outlet of truth in humor for news viewers, Stewart insisted he was just “the dancing monkey.” A Rolling Stone cover story raved that “the comedic tone of ‘The Daily Show’ is all deadpan irony, but the mood behind the scenes is one of intense youthful passion and even fury.”
The description makes Stewart laugh, but he admits it’s sometimes correct.
“The whole point of our show is to do a comedic show, but about things that we care about. … What we do is sort of implicit. We take that direct expression and basically try to bury it under the labyrinth of fart jokes and noises. If the show is 30 minutes of stridency, then that’s tedious. If you do five minutes of fart jokes, you might buy yourself one didactic moment.”
When Stewart replaced Craig Kilborn on “The Daily Show” in January 1999, he was a comedian who had also acted in some movies and TV shows and briefly hosted a talk show in the mid-1990s (it started on MTV, then was syndicated) that was well-reviewed but failed anyway. Since then, “The Daily Show” audience has tripled and its pop-culture presence has multiplied like crazy. The median age of the audience is 33, although the perception is that fans are mostly college kids.
Studies by esteemed research groups have indicated that a) yes, “The Daily Show” is a news source for young viewers and b) its viewers are more likely to know things like campaign issues than people who don’t watch it.
But now that the presidential race is history, the challenge for “The Daily Show” is to keep its edge and find targets as rich as the absurdities of the race for the White House. It’s not as easy now to figure out what should be the focus each night, Stewart admits.
“We have to search harder to find relevant veins to mine, as opposed to being a little more illuminated by the schedule of the election,” he says. “Our production content was driven by the election.”
Stewart says the show’s elevated profile hasn’t changed the way he and the staff work. He doesn’t feel an obligation to make jokes about certain topics like Social Security reform or protests in Lebanon because he must lecture his young fans about them. But he also doesn’t dodge the tragic. When the Terri Schiavo case took over the headlines, “The Daily Show” led with it, doing a segment that mocked round-the-clock cable coverage. “There is a plug I would like to pull. It is to those stations,” Stewart said on the air.
“Comedy is insult to injury,” Stewart says. “It’s always interesting that people ask what’s off-limits to comedy, but not to injury. … For some reason, making jokes about war is considered worse than war. I always wonder, ‘Where do I draw the line?’ I draw the line where the world draws the line.”
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On the list of the show’s most frequent targets, the news media may be ahead of the Bush administration. The show’s correspondents – performers like Stephen Colbert, Rob Corddry and Ed Helms – revel in standing in front of fake backdrops and blowing hard about whatever topic they’re supposedly covering. But it’s Stewart who, as the face of the show, mixes most often with the real media, whether he’s questioning them as guests or appearing on their shows.
He’s got a simple explanation for why media types love to interview him, and it’s not pretty.
“Everything we talk about is about them,” he says. “They’re very fond of hearing about themselves. There’s nothing that the media likes to hear about more. Look at all the shows that revolve around the media. My favorite is when a thousand of them head out to the Michael Jackson trial and then they all have a half-hour show on “Are we doing too much on the Michael Jackson trial?’ As though they have no control.”
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Stewart enjoys calling out a journalistic insecurity or weak spot. For instance, he mocks the media’s fixation on whether blogs are useful tools or the equivalent of the new angry mob.
“They make it seem as though bloggers are camped out on Michael Schiavo’s front lawn or at the Michael Jackson trial. That’s the media! That’s dudes with cameras! Blogs are in their own homes and offices. And they’re just writing.”
Stewart insists he had nothing to do with the fact that CNN announced plans to drop “Crossfire,” the long-running show where conservatives yelled at liberals, from its schedule. (The show is still on the air.) In October, Stewart went on the show and told the co-hosts what he really thought: that scream fest political shows were hurting America. And he called co-host Tucker Carlson a, well, colorful name. Not too long afterward, the president of CNN told the press Stewart had a point.
“Look, as much as these guys talk, if Pol Pot’s talk show was doing really well in the ratings, he’d still have a talk show,” says Stewart. “That was a vulnerable show.” He says “Crossfire” was losing its creative and commercial footing and “I just happened to be the idiot that was there at one time who said it.”
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Stewart doesn’t have to wonder about what he’ll be doing for the next presidential election because he’s signed with “The Daily Show” through 2008. He’s not interested in speculating about the race yet. He says he doesn’t know where the Democrats are heading with their attempts to revive and redefine the party.
“If you have a lead, I’d love to follow it. It appears right now it’s much like the way the Harlem Globetrotters used to beat up on the Washington Generals. They’re the Washington Generals right now.”
Stewart sounds more concerned with crafting next week’s jokes than sizing up what the future holds for either party. “I don’t think we buy into the whole political paradigm,” he muses. “So much of that world right now is a battle for supremacy between partisans. I think I fall on the side of most people, which is: “I’m busy. I wish you guys did all this better.’ Most people I know don’t define themselves by their party affiliation.”
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