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Jon Stewart cares less virtually his legacy than you practice
On the eve of inbound the comedy hall of fame, the former host of 'The Daily Show' is already in his second act
"By and large, they are not peculiarly conscientious well-nigh where they brand their bowels," he explains.
Seven years after he retired from hosting "The Daily Show," simply as Donald Trump was starting what seemed in 2015 to be a kind of a joke of a entrada, Stewart is calling by video chat from Hockhockson, Northward.J., where he lives near a 45-acre animal sanctuary he runs with his wife, Tracey, a veterinary technician. The town regulates how much animal waste matter is allowed to accrue on certain pastureland. "And then you lot notice yourself in a state of affairs where you lot're like, 'Oh, the creature got out on the affair, but, yous know, nosotros're pooped out. We're at our poop capacity,' " says Stewart.
Stewart has called himself a "turd miner" in his comedy work, too. For 16 years as the host of and creative force backside "The Daily Show," he was panning for truth and laughs through the sludge of politics and cable news — while also co-creating "The Colbert Study" and racking upward 22 Emmys, v Peabody Awards, 2 Grammys and 2 New York Times best-selling books along the mode. When he started in 1999, no one expected him to turn a satirical riff on the news into date national boob tube, and on One-act Central, no less.
But he was funny and gave catharsis to a country (well, mostly liberals) grappling with ix/xi, the Republic of iraq State of war, the financial crisis and the rise of 24-hr punditry — in an age earlier social media, or even YouTube. As distrust in government and media grew, Stewart was where young people turned to make sense of the world.
"He created a genre," says Trevor Noah, Stewart'south successor at "The Daily Show." "Everyone thought for a very long time that comedy was an escape from seriousness. 'No, we just brand the jokes. Don't say anything real.' … And I think what Jon Stewart successfully did was he inverted that idea and he said, 'No, comedy, and specially satire, will be the home of authenticity and difficult subjects and ideas.' "
The show worked because "he built information technology in his image … it was so uniquely well-nigh him," says Lorne Michaels, creator and executive producer of "Sat Night Live." He picked the satirical targets, he brought in correspondents who fabricated him laugh, he interviewed serious people without being a slap-up, Michaels explains. It's what Michaels and David Letterman did to build successful shows: "Yous build it around the things y'all're really interested in."
On Lord's day, Stewart volition become the 23rd recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor from the Kennedy Eye. It'due south substantially an consecration into the comedy icons' hall of fame, alongside Michaels, Tina Fey, Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray. Stewart gave speeches at the Twain Prize ceremonies for both his buddy Dave Chappelle and his hero George Carlin, so he knew what it meant when the Kennedy Center called. But still, it was weird. All this? For turd mining?
"I remember thinking like, Oh, that tin't be. I'g a young comedian," says Stewart. "And it took me a piffling scrap to go like, Oh correct, I'one thousand old. I become it now. I'm that guy. I'm the guy they want to be like, 'We're gonna throw you a party because we don't know how long this is gonna go.' "
Thing is, Stewart is young, at to the lowest degree relative to other big-fourth dimension comedians who've left their history-making shows. And he's non done. In fact, he just started experimenting with a second deed in streaming Idiot box that'southward a lot like the bear witness that made him famous. It's an open invitation for comparisons and criticisms — a reddish cape in the Net bull band — that seems to demonstrate a total lack of business organisation for preserving his legacy.
Which makes this an odd time to receive a legacy accolade.
Stewart, a lot similar your dad on Zoom, has positioned his camera so that I am either closely examining his pores or oft talking to the top of his head. He's in his abode office and has on glasses and a grayness sweatshirt. Just talk to anyone who worked with him on "The Daily Prove," and they'll say he wears the same outfit every single day: a T-shirt, khakis and a Mets cap, like Steve Jobs and his turtlenecks. "Information technology'due south possible that he had 20 different versions of the aforementioned T-shirt and pants combo," says Samantha Bee, who was "The Daily Show's" longest-running correspondent. As a joke, the staff bought him that exact outfit for his 50th birthday.
Tracey did the decorating, he says, "because she knows that left to my own devices, my office would be milk crates." Backside him are photos of his kids, Nate and Maggie, blackness-and-white photographs of the Jersey Shore taken past his adept buddy Bruce Springsteen, and, most prominently displayed, a large blowup of the 1972 New York Knicks title squad with Clyde Frazier and Bill Bradley.
"That's upward at that place to remind me that they did win once, like 50 years ago," he says.
That Jon Stewart nonetheless lives in New Jersey is very Jon Stewart. At 1 point in his younger life, he says, "the merely band that I had seen more Bruce was a band called Backstreets, which was a Bruce tribute ring."
He comes from a long line of Jewish immigrants. One grandmother lived through the pogroms in Russia. One grandfather, from a Jewish community in Inner Mongolia, fled Japanese invasion. Stewart and his older brother Larry were raised in Lawrenceville, N.J., near Princeton. Their father, Donald, a physicist, left their mother, Marian, a teacher, when Stewart was 11. Eventually, Stewart and his father became estranged.
Information technology was on his second night doing stand-up in his 20s that he became Jon Stewart. He'd been born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz, as Trump once helpfully reminded the world on Twitter. But the emcee had trouble pronouncing information technology and, every bit Stewart said in his Twitter war with Trump, "Can't an overrated Jew have a complicated relationship with his dad without being defendant of hiding his heritage?" (They reconciled by the end of his male parent's life.)
Repeated failure is the courage of any showbiz commencement, and Stewart had a pretty spectacular run.
"I always felt estranged from the globe," Stewart says. "I e'er felt like, this is a brain that would similar to exist in the world but not participate in it. It doesn't work correct. There's something wrong that is not valuable to what appears to be normal social club."
He'd dreamed of being a professional soccer player just knew information technology was a long shot and, anyway, blew his knee out in college at William & Mary.
And so he moved back to Bailiwick of jersey and tried existent jobs, but to get fired once again and once again. Porter in a bakery. Autoclave guy at a cancer-research lab. Sorting live mosquitoes for the New Jersey Department of Wellness. His own brother fired him from his start job as a stock boy at Woolworth'due south. Later, in New York, he drove a catering van and managed to go it towed with the nutrient he was supposed to drop off at a holiday party however within. "I had to chase that f---ing van all the way from Midtown to the impound lot," he says.
That comedy might be the answer, he says, "I'd always had that in my caput." But it wasn't until he started bartending at City Gardens, a legendary punk club where he'd watch Joan Jett, GWAR and Butthole Surfers that he could meet a possibility of a different life. Perchance on a stage. Not behind a bar. Non in Trenton. Drinking himself into oblivion at the other bar where he worked, which was located under a liquor store, he had an epiphany. "I was like, 'Okay, this isn't how I'k going to die.' " He got a vi-week lease in New York, "and just said, like, 'I'thousand going to go where I recall my brain will feel at abode.' "
"Jon was a jerry-built soccer role player who thought he was funny, and he was funny," says Denis Leary, who came up in the clubs with Stewart, alongside Colin Quinn, Chris Stone and teenage Dave Chappelle working for beer money at Take hold of a Ascension Star or a plate of hummus at the One-act Cellar. His souvenir, says Leary, was being so charming you didn't realize he was likewise this angry, ranting guy. "He tin can be actually goofy, and at the same fourth dimension, before you knew information technology, yous'd be like, 'Oh wow, that's a complete obliteration of the Reagan AIDS policy he just did.' "
It took half-dozen years, but in 1992, Stewart did the first of many stand-up sets on "Letterman" — his ultimate goal — with jokes about famine in Russia, immigrants, bigotry, nuclear war, State of israel, and imagining Jesus, Moses and Muhammad every bit rivals on the aforementioned high school swim team. Then he went home and the high concluded. "I was similar, I yet live in a hovel," Stewart says. "It was an illegal sublet with a pigsty in the floor where you could see rats running effectually."
Hosting gigs came and went, until in 1993, MTV gave him "The Jon Stewart Show," its version of a late-nighttime talk evidence. Stewart wore a leather jacket; interviewed MTV VJs; did goofy sketches, like a version of Orpheus in which a puppet Tori Spelling is rescued from Hades; and showcased musical guests similar Faith No More, Ol' Muddy Bounder, and "Weird Al" Yankovic, who were too hip for the networks. If he was bored or had greater ambitions, he didn't bear witness it.
"The hush-hush of Jon is to not be living in the future, but to exist living in the present and enjoying the now and not going, 'Why do I accept to interview this impaired person?' " says Steve Higgins, a author on "The Jon Stewart Show" and now a longtime writer-producer on "Saturday Night Live."
When Stewart took over "The Daily Bear witness" in 1999, from its countdown host, Craig Kilborn, he was that guy from MTV who'd had his eponymous talk show canceled after Marilyn Manson burned a Bible onstage.
Information technology was going to get canceled anyway, but that'south the better story.
Expectations were low, and freeing. "We were these hacking pirates launching ourselves into legitimate news circles and making fun of everything effectually us," says Colbert, describing the feel of running around the 2000 presidential conventions as a correspondent, ambushing delegates and pushing out four or five shows. Steve Carell, meanwhile, managed to talk his way onto John McCain'due south bus.
Stewart talks oftentimes about being raised on the tenets of "The Emperor Has No Apparel." And that philosophy permeated the show. He laid information technology out in his "Balderdash---t is everywhere" rant on his final show: "If yous odour something, say something."
That's why Stewart went on CNN'southward "Crossfire" in 2004 and famously eviscerated co-host Tucker Carlson, telling him that the show was "non only bad, but hurting America," and that he was doing theater, or performing "partisan hackery" in a bow tie, instead of actually fostering contend. And when the show got canceled iii months after, CNN's president said Stewart's appearance was a cistron.
Cut to 18 years later and Carlson is the biggest star on Fox News, with 3.4 million viewers a night. His pro-Russian stances are being distributed as Russian propaganda. He'south called the Ukraine crisis a mere "border dispute" and asked what's so bad about Vladimir Putin ("Has Putin always called me a racist?").
Does Stewart think that, past knocking him down, he may have inadvertently given Carlson the incentive to ascension and be more Tucker Carlson-y?
"There's mythologizing equally far equally, like, a villain origin story," Stewart says. "Not fifty-fifty shut. Like that dude has been that dude forever and just found his place. It's not that the crystal found the right dwelling and of a sudden the Fortress of Confinement was congenital. I don't recollect he's any unlike than he's e'er been."
Other tardily-nighttime hosts have been missed when they left, but none with the urgency of Stewart during the Trump years. He was greeted with raucous thanks and standing ovations whenever he came on Colbert. In that location was lamentation, sometimes anger among liberals who thought he'd abased them in their fourth dimension of demand.
In his stead, though, was a political comedy landscape dominated by people whose careers he'd either started or nurtured: Colbert, Samantha Bee, John Oliver, Trevor Noah, Michael Che on "Weekend Update."
For the near part, since he left the show, Stewart has led a groundhog-like existence, puttering away in happy seclusion with Tracey and their now-teenage kids and popping his head out every in one case in a while to do stand-up gigs with Dave Chappelle or bluster about Trump'southward "gleeful cruelty" on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert." His running gag was to physically pop out from under Colbert's desk — his pilus white, having grown that archetype beard of a sometime late-night host gone feral — claiming he's been living there this whole time.
He has likewise frequently popped up in Washington to shame Congress into "showing a baseline of humanity," every bit he put information technology in a recent Reddit AMA. In 2019, he called out Congress's "rank hypocrisy" and "shameful" lack of action in impassioned testimony for the reauthorization of the September 11th Victim Bounty Fund. He'southward spending the week earlier his Twain Prize celebration going to rallies in Wilmington, Due north.C., and Kansas City, Mo., supporting legislation to provide additional funding for veterans dying from exposure to toxic burn down pits.
Stewart says he left "The Daily Bear witness" so he wouldn't miss his kids growing upwardly. And for years he's stuck to that. His first public appearance after retirement was going on WWE SummerSlam to get trunk slammed by John Cena, because his son is a wrestling fanatic.
He'southward gone vegetarian, is learning Brazilian jujitsu with his son and has taken upwardly drumming. "The fact that he drums for an hour or hours a twenty-four hour period and didn't mention information technology to you lot is a little flake odd," says proficient friend Jimmy Kimmel.
Stewart hands could have kept up that pastoral pace. He could exist getting java with comedians in cars like Jerry Seinfeld or starting a travel show like Conan O'Brien.
Instead, he's Shaun White doing the halfpipe at 35, or Michael Hashemite kingdom of jordan returning to the Bulls after the baseball years.
In January 2021, he started his first Twitter business relationship with the energy of, well, a comedian who hadn't spent 4 days a week for the by one-half-decade thinking about and reacting to Trump.
Tweet No. three: "And so…if I practise really well on hither I get to be President, aye?"
So in September, he jumped right back into the turd mines, debuting his new Apple Goggle box Plus show and podcast, "The Problem with Jon Stewart," which might equally well exist the fraternal twin of "The Daily Show." It's a direct outgrowth of a 2010 episode of "The Daily Show," when Stewart convened a console of 9/11 outset responders as a way of shaming Congress for stalling on the victims compensation bill. Information technology passed before the end of the year, and firefighters on that panel accept largely credited Stewart.
Sure, there are differences. The streaming show isn't on every night. Information technology's just eight hour-long episodes, with accompanying podcasts, each devoted to a unmarried event, similar critical race theory and gun control. Every show has a console word with real people and an interview with a power broker (erstwhile Disney CEO Bob Iger, SEC Chair Gary Gensler).
Merely he is dorsum behind a desk-bound, delivering the kind of complex monologues on serious issues that he calls "geometric proofs for fart jokes."
He'south too resumed his role as a political lightning rod, particularly when semi-bourgeois provocateur Andrew Sullivan wrote a lengthy Substack saying Stewart "ambushed" him into making him await racist. A quick Google News search will bring up contempo articles from Fox News or the National Review about his "pitiful demise" or how his "super-woke" new show is a flop. On the left, he's been accused of sympathizing with oil companies and defending Joe Rogan, subsequently Stewart said he'd rather debate him than abolish him.
Even the name of his show, he says, is intentional bait for conservative pundits to see how many write screeds nearly what his real problem is. (Sullivan took the bait.) "The fun is in watching the laziness, the people who are coming up with their hot takes … and they're just laying downwards trope afterwards trope," Stewart says.
Glory and humiliation are both possible outcomes, a lot like doing stand-up. What he did on "The Daily Bear witness" is complete and untouchable — a 16-year mic drib. How exercise you lot follow up beingness the voice of a generation when the next generation either thinks you're lame or has no idea who you are? How exercise you jump back into a game you divers that has evolved without you? And why endeavor?
Perhaps information technology has to do with how blithe Stewart gets telling me about the time he bombed — difficult — at Radio City Music Hall in 1999. And so hard "I didn't even know half-dozen,000 people could be that serenity," he says. And then difficult that Shirley Jones hugged him. "I don't even know the woman," he says.
You lot have risks. That's comedy. "Isn't that what'southward seductive about it?"
The bombing?
"No! It's the uncertainty of it," he says. The volatility. The thrill of riding that line.
"Y'all know, if somebody said to me, 'Are you nervous about going out there again with something new?' It's like, 'I mean I guess, but what's my option? Yeah, I'm nervous nearly information technology. And so I'm non gonna say annihilation to anybody ever over again?' "
Stewart'southward trying something new. He'south still got stuff to say.
"This is the life we've chosen," he says. "This is what we exercise."
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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/04/22/jon-stewart-twain-prize/
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