Jon Stewart's a comedian. So why do so many young Americans turn to him for their news? Conor O'Clery meets the host of 'The Daily Show'
For all the banter, Jon Stewart describes what he does as throwing tomatoes from the back of the room. The New Jersey-born comedian hosts The Daily Show, a nightly broadcast of fake news on the US cable channel Comedy Central that takes aim at politics and journalism. For many viewers the half-hour show, which combines satirical sketches with live interviews, has become more reliable than real news. One in five Americans in their 20s regularly get their news from the show, according to one poll. Stewart has a stable of "reporters" and regularly carries reports from "correspondents" pretending to be in Iraq (or, as it is known on The Daily Show, Mess O'Potamia).
Wildly popular on university campuses, The Daily Show is now packaged in a global edition and aired on CNN International on Saturday and Sunday nights. I ask Stewart in his cluttered Manhattan office what reaction he is getting from abroad. "I barely have reaction from here," he replies with typical self-effacement. Stewart has in fact featured on the covers of Newsweek and Rolling Stone, he has won two Emmy Awards and his book America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide To Democracy Inaction is the hottest best-seller in the US.
"We try not to measure the reaction to the show as much as our own internal barometer," he says. "I don't want to take the temperature of how people are receiving it, because I think that would affect how we're producing it."
He declines to say whether it is parody, satire or fake journalism. "I don't know," he says. "When we see something we find absurd or interesting, we try and write jokes about it or come up with something interesting to say about it. We have two ways of choosing material. One is the common response-type joke - if you imagine a bunch of people sitting around in a room watching television and just shouting things at the television as they occur. The second is to see news on a broader contextual scale and to look for patterns. For instance, in [President Bush's] inaugural address the pattern was 'freedom' and 'liberty', so we just decided to roll a quick montage of how often he said 'freedom' and how often he said 'liberty', tally up the scores, declare a victor and say 'freedom' was going to face 'justice' in the finals."
Stewart's guests come from both sides of the partisan divide. During the election campaign John Kerry was a guest (Stewart asked him: "Is it true that every time I use ketchup your wife gets a nickel?"). So too were Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, the Bush adviser Karen Hughes and Senator John McCain. John Edwards actually declared his candidacy on the show. (Stewart made him promise to come back if he became president and decided he wanted to declare war.) Of course they were using the show for their own purposes, he admits. "These people are salespeople. Instead of rotisserie ovens they are selling this idea of pre-emptive war or social-security reforms."
George Bush has declined many requests to appear. The response Stewart gets from the White House is "what Dick Cheney told Patrick Leahy", he says, referring to the noted occasion when the vice-president told the Democratic senator to do something anatomically impossible with himself. No Bush cabinet member has appeared yet, but former cabinet members have, including Christine Todd Whitman, who spent a difficult two years as head of the Environmental Protection Agency. "People don't typically come on our show unless they're disgruntled," Stewart says. "Then they come on the show to express their disgruntlement. We are the last stop of the disgruntled."
He also has real journalists on the show. The guest on the evening I attend a taping is Anderson Cooper of CNN, who has just come back from Iraq. He complains to Stewart about how it is now impossible to walk around the streets or go to a restaurant in Baghdad. "Because you're so famous, right?" Stewart replies sympathetically. "The easiest thing in the world is to be a smart-ass," he tells me when I ask if the line was rehearsed. "What we want to do in the interviews is just listen and try and get a human moment or something funny out of it."
During the election campaign Stewart told an interviewer that he intended to vote for Kerry, and I ask him was that not a mistake, as it identified the show with a particular candidate. "There's no question that at a certain point we were leaning towards a certain election result," he says. "That's doesn't mean we thought one side was pure and the other evil. If you watched this show and didn't know I was voting for Kerry you're clearly not paying attention to the show. But if you think that by announcing it that I've lost my credibility as a comedian, I just didn't think we had any credibility to lose. If people feel the tone of the show is too strident or didactic, then it won't be funny any more, and it will suffer."
Part of the problem in a bitterly partisan US is the typecasting of people just because they say they are voting Democrat or Republican, he says. He hates the way real news is manipulated. "Government and corporate interests have become very sophisticated in understanding the news cycle, and they actively pursue a strategy of subverting authority. The idea of news is to provide clarity and context to people. The strategy that the government pursues is to create distractions. Twenty people with talking points go out there and flood the zone," he says. The result is a "cauldron of fog".
Stewart particularly objects to programmes such as CNN's Crossfire, which feature talking heads scoring points off each other, providing noise but no clarity and promoting the idea that there is no right or wrong in politics. When Crossfire invited Stewart to be a guest he turned the tables. The comedian accused the co-hosts, Paul Begala, a former Clintonite liberal, and Tucker Carlson, a bow-tied conservative, of being "partisan hacks".
Carlson fired back by accusing Stewart of sucking up to John Kerry, adding: "You're his butt boy. Come on. It's embarrassing." After trading more insults Carlson taunted Stewart by saying: "Wait. I thought you were going to be funny. Come on. Be funny." The comedian replied: "No. I'm not going to be your monkey." He then called Carlson a "dick". Since that encounter a new CNN boss has scrapped Crossfire and Carlson has left the station.
Stewart is delighted. During the warm-up before his show he tells the audience he gave up smoking because it left him weak and because "I believe Tucker Carlson would have beaten me in a physical match". He adds, to cheers from the 100 or so mostly young people: "Then again, I got him fired!" He insists he is not on a crusade, however. "I would never describe what we do as activism," he says. "We don't advocate a position, we don't actively pursue change. . . . I got a free shot at Crossfire, and I took it."
Spats on television often have no effect on collegiality off screen, but Stewart says he has no relationship with Carlson. "Usually, calling somebody a dick on national television tends to end the conversation. We're not collegial, because we don't have colleagues. They are not a part of my world and I am not a part of theirs.
"For all I know they may be very nice people, kind, filled with integrity. I doubt it. I simply don't know. But a lot of people think I'm a dick. When you are on television people either love you or hate you."
The people who dislike Stewart tend to be in the establishment. One of his guiding principles is: "It's fun to needle those in charge; it's not as much fun to needle the homeless." He says he is often asked where he draws the line, towhich he responds: "We're just talking jokes: you're the ones dropping bombs or bottoming out savings and loans or doing business with Iran."
Wal-Mart believes he went over the line in his book and refuses to stock it because it features a mock-up of the nine US Supreme Court judges, naked. "Rather than sell the book, somebody at Wal-Mart opened it," he says. "That was a mistake. Either they were too impressed with [Justice Antonin] Scalia to sell it or too disappointed. I'm not quite sure."
The comedian was born Jon Stewart Leibowitz. He dropped the last part of his name when he started doing stand-up, in the mid-1980s. After majoring in psychology at university he hosted a show on MTV, did an HBO special and had small parts in several movies (including one with Goldie Hawn in The First Wives Club that got cut out) before joining The Daily Show in 1999. He is married to Tracey McShane Stewart, a vet, and they have a son, Nathan, born last year.
With typical showbiz insecurity he doesn't see the popularity of The Daily Show lasting. People will get tired of it, he says. "We will become just part of the landscape, like Bennigan's," he says, referring to what is now a chain of Irish-American restaurants, "and people will pass by and say, 'Oh, yes, I think they have guacamole and wings in there.' That's the nature of this business." Perhaps so, but for now demand is growing. It is impossible to book a seat at recordings of The Daily Show until after midsummer.
I mention that my wife, not a Bush fan, said after the election that at least there was still Jon Stewart on Comedy Central to look forward to. He replies, smiling: "I appreciate that your wife believes I should put my comedic career over our country."
America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide To Democracy Inaction is published by Warner Books, $24.95