By all accounts, Jon Stewart would prefer a world in which he never had to speak to the press again. But when he finally agreed to participate in a Zoom interview about receiving the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor from the Kennedy Center, he had a thing or two to say. Here’s some of what didn’t make it into our profile.
Comments have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
On the Whiteness and maleness of “The Daily Show’s” early years
“I’d love to tell you the story of it as an epiphany, but I don’t think we were — and I certainly wasn’t — sophisticated or aware enough to be able to see that. In the moment, you’re embarrassed by your ignorance of it. You’re embarrassed that you were there for any length of time, and didn’t say, like, ‘Uh, does everyone go to Harvard?’ There’s a certain embarrassment associated with how long it took and how hard it was, and how even when you did it, you still missed some of the emotional ramifications.
On trying to hire more a more diverse writing staff for his new Apple TV Plus show, “The Problem With Jon Stewart”
“It was punching holes in the box to get oxygen. And it’s not woke. It’s not done to be moral. Or to be virtuous. It makes it better.” (Writers include military veterans and a social worker from Indiana who had never worked in TV.)
On why doing stand-up is better than acting
“The thing about comedy that’s nice is you don’t rely on anybody but a bar owner. There’s always hopefully going to be a bar owner who’s like, ‘Sure, come in on a Tuesday. Do what you can.’ ”
On sitting out the Trump years
During Stewart’s first episode of his new show, a man in the audience started going off on how he’d missed the Trump years. “I was like, ‘You know, I just want to interrupt you quickly and say, I wasn’t on television, but I was alive. So I did experience these things. I just didn’t have a show.”
On missing the grind of daily television
Giving up the daily morning meeting was a loss, Stewart says. “My whole circadian rhythm was around production. My body was attuned, adrenaline wise, to that rhythm, and at four o’clock every day after rehearsal, [it was like having] chocolate and espresso.”
On the difference between television and advocacy
“I think if your goal is to effect change, television is probably never your first go. Mother Teresa didn’t go like, ‘You know what I think I’m going to do? A half-hour every week about lepers: 'Lepers Half-Hour!’ She went out there to Kolkata and was like, ‘All right, who wants porridge?”
On having no regrets about attacking conservatives
“Was the language vitriolic at times?” Absolutely. And I would say almost overwhelmingly deserved. And I really don’t need criticism from people who, four hours a day, five days a week talk about liberals and Democrats like they’re a cancer and like they’re not American. I was certainly uncouth, profane, reductive, like, all those things. But man, was I spitting into a fire hose. So spare me your outrage.”
On whether he feels a sense of competition with his proteges — and how he feels about his legacy
“It’s funny that it’s, you know: ‘Oh, you guys are up against each other,’ It’s not a league. It’s not like if we win we go into the Champions League of Satire. Boy, if you want to talk legacy — like, isn’t that lovely? Somebody wants to look back at you and say, ‘Hey, man, you helped me with what I do.’ ”
On keeping the Twain Prize in perspective
“It’s lovely, after all these years, to get a chance to go down there and spend a weekend with so many of my favorite people. But I don’t want to get into, like, the legacy of, ‘We changed the world! People, gather around! We are the Plato and Sophocles of cable television!' We were on [basic cable] with, like, Spanish people playing soccer. We were that far up the dial, where you’d get a nosebleed.”
Maybe he’ll take the advice he told Stephen Colbert when “The Colbert Report” got picked up. Colbert: recalls “He goes, 'You worked so hard for this, but I just want you to remember — when your child is crossing that stage at some university and getting their degree 15 years from now, I want you to smile and you say to yourself, ‘I paid for some of this with poop jokes.’”
Here’s more of what the people he worked with had to say about him.
Stephen Colbert: “He invited all of us correspondents to have our own opinions. And it turned out I had an opinion, which I didn’t know I did.” Colbert remembers vacationing with Stewart in the Cayman Islands, on a 60-foot boat: “Jon looked up at and said, ‘Some part of me strongly wants to jump off the top of this boat,’ And he got to the top and then he’s like, 'All right, on three, let’s jump!’ And on three, he jumped and I did not. And I was quite surprised by a man as anxious as he is — because he’s an anxious individual — that he had that much of a daredevil streak. He’s a tightrope walker. And I guess he also does that in his work.”
Jessica Williams: “I was shaking,” Williams says about her “Daily Show” audition, “He didn’t let me walk away thinking that I hadn’t done a great job. I remember thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, did I just get this job?’ — which is crazy, because at that time I had applied to work at American Apparel and Urban Outfitters, and I walked away from those jobs knowing I wasn’t going to get those.”
Aasif Mandvi: “I got to really explore the idea of being this brown face on this show. I could speak truth to insanity through comedy and satire, when nobody was doing that who looked like me. I owe him a great deal because of that. Before ‘The Daily Show,’ I was that guy who was in that movie that you might have seen. After ‘The Daily Show,’ I was Aasif Mandvi — and that changed my life and my career.”
Samantha Bee: “Trying to make Jon laugh was our main function,” she says. “My entire show now is point of view, and all of that foundation was really laid by my time at ‘The Daily Show,’ and from observing him as a very pure example of that. Really, no one was doing it the way that he was doing it at the time, and he was a great teacher.”
Hasan Minhaj: “Jon became this incredible distiller of truth and information during the Bush War in Iraq and the War in Afghanistan years. He really represented what great political satire was for an entire generation of us comics that grew up in the early 2000s and came up in the in the mid-aughts.” Minaj says Stewart can still call or text him for advice any time. “He’s like Jewish Yoda to me.”
Trevor Noah: “We see the world in a similar way, but from different viewpoints, I think Jon and I share a frustration — there’s something that definitely irks us about incongruences. But we get to our conclusions in very different ways. If you gave Jon and I the same cooking ingredients, there’s a good chance we would both come up with some sort of pie dish, but mine may be a cottage pie and then he might make a quiche.”
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