Jon Stewart: The Rolling Stone Interview
Jon Stewart is an angry white man. Not Tea Party get-your-gun angry, or even Fox News all-liberals-are-Hitler angry. He’s more waiting-six-hours-for-the-phone-guy-who-never-showed angry. Like he knew the whole thing was probably going to be a major fucking headache, but still, he expected better.
The most valuable public service that Stewart provides, in fact, isn’t his scathing and brilliant mockery of the frauds and hypocrites and liars who populate our news media and government. It’s the alternative model of anger that he offers America four nights a week on The Daily Shore. This is how we should conduct ourselves when we’re pissed off, he seems to be saying. With a little humor, a little sense of proportion – a little class, for God’s sake. Outrage is all well and good, but it doesn’t always have to be purple-in-the-face stupid.
Stewart is at his most galvanizing on those rare occasions when his passion is on full display, unleavened by comedy – his ferocious tongue-lashing that killed off Crossfire, the CNN shoutfest, back in 2004; his methodical, let’s-go-to-the-video takedown of financial blowhard Jim Cramer in 2009; his furious tirade against Congress for denying health care to 9/11 first responders last December; his heartfelt call for reason at the Rally to Restore Sanity last fall, a moment he calls his “10 minutes of rank sincerity.” “We can have animus and not be enemies,” he urged the crowd of more than 200,000 assembled on the Washington Mall. “If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.”
It’s a message Stewart puts into practice each night on The Daily Show, the Comedy Central outpost he took over from Craig Kilborn in 1999. Stewart quickly transformed the show from a frat-boy clubhouse indulging in celebrity tits-and-ass jokes to an essential counterpoint to the nonstop noise of cable news. The fact that Stewart delivers his animus in the form of satire – he calls his staff “scolds who are good with a pun” – does nothing to deter 2 million viewers from turning to him each night for serious insight into the day’s events. In part, that’s because he’s been so effective at appropriating the props of a network news show – the anchor desk, the faux-grandiose backdrops, the know-nothing correspondents – that it’s easy to mistake his comedic take on the news for the real thing. But in a sense, it is the real thing. A desperate and grateful nation turns to Stewart because he does the job the media have abdicated: combing the public record to hold politicians and journalists accountable for their own words.
Dressed in khaki pants, a T-shirt and a flag-emblazoned baseball cap given to him by soldiers from Combined Joint Task Force-1 in Afghanistan, Stewart sat down with Rolling Stone over grits and coffee at a restaurant in Tribeca to talk about his comedy, the state of the world and Keith Richards’ balls.
You watch a lot of news. Do you ever just get to the point where you’re so sick of it that you never want to see another second of Wolf Blitzer as long as you live?
Yeah, that happened right around 1998. Unfortunately, I don’t have that luxury now, but when I go away on vacation I won’t look at the computer – I’m out. It’s like oxygen suddenly returns to your blood – it’s awesome.
The 24-hour news cycle must feel pretty relentless.
The speed of it is unbelievable now. Ten years ago we could do something a week after it happened, and it wouldn’t feel dated to us. Now it’s like bananas – you bring em home, and the next morning they’re brown. You’re like, “What the fuck happened?” It can definitely drain you a little bit.
From the targets you go after on the show, it seems like what makes you maddest is when people aren’t held accountable for their own words – Jim Cramer acting like he’s never made a wrong call, or Fox News repeating an outright lie over and over.
What annoys me the most is when people are being disingenuous. To be able to see them contradict themselves – it’s the magic of TiVo. Some of it is spurred from all of us talking around the office: “I’m sure that guy fucking said the exact opposite thing six months ago.” Trying to line those quotes up – we call it the one-to-one. “Can you get a one-to-one on that?” If you can get a one-to-one with a guy saying the exact opposite of what he said today, then you don’t even have to do anything. You just lay them back-to-back and sit back and giggle.
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