Angry Optimist: The Life and Times of Jon Stewart

CHAPTER 9

WITH THE DAILY SHOW firmly established as a ratings success, Stewart started to branch out from his hosting and producing duties. In 2003, the clause in his Comedy Central contract about doing no outside work had long expired, and he decided to test the waters once more in Hollywood. He accepted a role in the movie Death to Smoochy, which came out in 2002.

The movie, directed by Danny DeVito and starring Ed Norton and Robin Williams, came out in the spring of 2002 and was pitched as a black comedy featuring child entertainers that also offered a thinly veiled satirical critique of Barney the dinosaur, a popular children’s character of the time. The plot revolved around children’s TV show host Randolph Smiley—played by Robin Williams—and his desire to exact revenge upon his replacement—a purple rhinoceros named Smoochy, played by Edward Norton—after getting fired from the show. In keeping with Stewart’s previous track record with movies, the critics savaged it.

“The script is so shoddy, the direction so inept, and the acting so wretched, that every second of this film creaks like a broken-down tractor,” wrote one critic, who added that it was the first time in his life that he had walked out of a movie theater before a film had ended.

For his part, Stewart admitted that he had bombed in the role of Marion Frank Stokes—president of the TV network that aired the show and in on Smiley’s revenge schemes behind the scenes—along with the rest of the cast, and he had finally conceded that it was unlikely that any more movies would appear on his résumé.

To salve his wounded pride, he ramped up his stand-up appearances on the weekends and whenever The Daily Show went on a brief hiatus to allow staffers a vacation. Stewart discovered that the world of stand-up was a much different place for him in 2003 than even a few years earlier. For one, he filled larger venues where audiences were actually paying attention, now that he was famous. “I like going back to that now and again,” he said. “I try to do a show at least once a month, just to talk about whatever’s on my mind at the time.”

Also bringing him back from the brink of destruction that was Smoochy, Newsweek chose Stewart for their annual “Who’s Next?” prize for 2004, for which they name the celebrity most likely to make a big splash the following year.

In retrospect, the magazine was spot-on in their prediction, and not just for Stewart’s professional accomplishments.

With the primaries in the spring of 2004, The Daily Show headed into its second full presidential campaign season, with the highlight being the 2004 Republican and Democratic National Conventions. It was clear the tide was turning: politicians were starting to realize that making an appearance on The Daily Show was an effective and easy way to reach America’s younger voters.

The trend harkened back to earlier presidential campaigns, most notably in 1992, when Governor Bill Clinton appeared on The Arsenio Hall Show to serenade viewers with his saxophone. But it dates back even further to 1968, when candidate Richard M. Nixon appeared on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and told the audience to “Sock it to me,” the mantra of the show.

Just before the Iowa caucuses in 2004, the campaigns for Governor Howard Dean and Senator John Kerry called The Daily Show producers and said they wanted to be interviewed on the show; at the time, Dean was ahead of Kerry in the polls. Stewart and Colbert loved the idea. “We’ll do it like Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie on The Simple Life, two rich East Coast Ivy League men who try to slum on the farm to connect with the farmers,” said Colbert.

When Colbert and crew showed up for the shoot, Kerry was nowhere in sight. He’d suddenly shot ahead of Dean in the polls by eight points, and instead of the campaign bus crammed full of reporters and staffers, Kerry started to travel by helicopter and forgot all about the interview. “The Dean people are in full panic mode and don’t want to talk to anybody,” said Colbert. They tried to make amends, and promised they’d see if Dean would be available in a few days, but Colbert would have none of it.

“We reminded them that we’re fake press and are only here for two days in order to create the illusion that we’re going to be here for the entire campaign,” he explained. “I said if they didn’t give us an interview today, there’s absolutely nothing for us to put on the air. We’ll shoot lock-offs of locations and do it in front of a green screen, but no interview and we’re leaving at three o’clock. So, yes, we travel with the press, but only to the point where we can create the illusion that we’re press. We never forget that we’re not,” said Colbert.

In the end, both Dean and Kerry appeared on the show, but in very different capacities and time frames. Dean appeared in a taped spoof interview with Stewart during the primary season, and Kerry appeared just before the Democratic convention. Stewart ended up on the receiving end of public backlash as the result of both.

First, the Dean sit-down was a sophomoric attempt at humor for both sides, a five-minute formal interview segment punctuated with thought-bubble asides that were poorly acted by both. But the Kerry interview put Stewart under even more scrutiny, primarily for his out-of-character softball exchange.

“It was impossible to get an interview with John Kerry at the time,” said Tucker Carlson, the former host of the CNN show Crossfire. Once Stewart landed the interview, he disappointed many viewers. “He asked him questions like, ‘Why are people so mean to you? How did you get so great? What is your vision for America?’ It’s a Nerf interview.”

Even though he was quick to point out that he’s not a journalist for perhaps the thousandth time since The Daily Show began, the criticism shocked Stewart. He scrutinized his own behavior and soon launched an about-face campaign of his own to resurrect his reputation. Never one to shy away from pointing fingers at the news media and politicians at large, the old version of Stewart came out, and he ramped up his attacks across the board.

Though critics and reviewers had accused Stewart of producing and hosting an ultraliberal show from the first week he took over, Stewart maintained that he was an equal opportunity comedian when it came to poking fun at the different political parties. A team of Pew researchers combed through every show aired in the second half of 2007 and found that “Stewart’s humor targeted Republicans more than three times as often as Democrats. The Bush administration alone was the focus of 22 percent of the segments.”

However, Pew concluded that things weren’t as unbalanced as they seemed. “The fact that more jokes are made about conservatives and Republicans is largely a function that the Republicans hold the White House and have been in power for the last seven years,” observed David Hinckley, critic-at-large for the New York Daily News. “Bush is Christmas, Hanukah, and New Year’s all rolled into one. Among comedians and satirists, Bush is a gold mine.”

Colbert agrees, though he adds that Stewart cares less about the political leanings of a potential target than the intent. “Jon is admirably balanced,” he said. “He pursues the true intention of the person speaking, left or right [in order] to be able to honestly mock.”

“What we go after are not actual policies but the façade behind them,” said Stewart. “We work in the area between the makeup they’re wearing and the real face. And in that space, you can pretty much hammer away at anybody.”

However, at the same time, head writer Steve Bodow was looking forward to taking the show in a new direction in 2007. “[We’ve enjoyed] many, many, many comedic opportunities from George Bush, but we’re very glad to see him go, politically and also comedically,” he said. “We’ve really been working with and on him for all this time, but let’s get some new material and some new challenges.”

And so this could be part of the reason why Stewart started to go after Kerry that same year; in 2007 the Bush presidency was in its waning days, and Stewart and his team might have to start to gear up to learn how to make fun of a Democratic president. He started to turn the tables by appearing on Larry King Live to criticize John Kerry. “If anyone has ever been raised in a laboratory to become president, it’s Kerry,” he said. “From the age of three, he got his ‘My First White House’ kit. Now that he’s finally in the race to be president, he has decided [to be] a likable average Joe, and it so clearly goes against his constitution.

“All [politicians] run to this weird sense of ‘I’m going to put on that red-and-black-check jacket and I’m going to go down to a factory and have a cup of coffee and a doughnut with a dude and show him that I’m an idiot.’”

He also quickly squashed rumors that he might enter politics himself.

Despite his about-face on Kerry, politicians continued to flock to the Show, equating an appearance with an instantaneous rise in visibility and name recognition among younger Americans. In the fall of 2004, John Edwards, former President Clinton, Pat Buchanan, and John McCain all appeared on the show, though Stewart’s line of questioning remained a bit less confrontational with them than some would have liked.

Besides, Stewart still didn’t think of himself as particularly political. “People confuse political interest with interest in current events,” he pointed out. “The political industry is devoted to the electing and un-electing of officials, and that can be corrosive. If the Republicans don’t lose either house, people will talk about Karl Rove’s genius. There’s no genius. It will be the triumph of machine and money and strategy over reality. I don’t think that’s anything to honor or enjoy.”

The political campaign industry is also focused on manipulating the media, and Stewart reserved special vitriol for those reporters and anchors who allowed it to happen, further ramping up his well-worn attacks on the media.

“They’ve all become part of the same organism and no longer see themselves as the other,” he continued. “Journalists have become stars, and their stardom is about who they can get, and by getting the right person they can keep advancing. The paradigm has switched.”

He summed up his perspective this way. “There’s a difference between making a point and having an agenda,” Stewart said. “We don’t have an agenda to change the political system. We have a more selfish agenda, to entertain ourselves. We feel a frustration with the way politics are handled and the way politics are handled within the media.”

He also changed his tone about the show, softening his take a bit in a subtle way. “It’s not fake news,” he added. “We are not newsmen, but it’s jokes about real news. We don’t make anything up, other than the fact we’re not actually standing in Baghdad. The appeal of doing the show is that it’s cathartic.”

Some may have been surprised by the change, but there may have been a good reason behind it: Stewart was now a father. Nathan Thomas Stewart was born on July 3, 2004—Jon and Tracey named him after Stewart’s grandfather. Almost from the beginning they called him Little Man.

He now had the chance to prove that he was a better father than the one who had deserted him.

He barely had time to adjust to life as a new father before a series of events in the fall of 2004 raised his profile along with his workload.

In the wake of the conventions—indeed, even while they were still going on—The Daily Show got noticed in a big way. Even though ratings and reviews were both growing, the buzz was getting even louder: on September 19, 2004, right in the middle of the election coverage, The Daily Show won two Emmy Awards for Outstanding Writing for a Variety, Music or Comedy Program as well as for Outstanding Variety, Music, or Comedy Series.

Approximately 1.1 million people viewed each episode of The Daily Show, an increase of 20 percent for 2004 alone. But what was even more satisfying was that the show achieved a 0.74 rating for the third quarter; The O’Reilly Factor was just slightly ahead at 0.76.

Best of all, in the first nine months of 2004, Comedy Central added fifty new advertisers. “The Daily Show is a good piece of that,” said Hank Close, Comedy Central executive vice-president of advertising sales. “It’s a very, very strong driver of our revenue.”

“It’s an advertisers’ sweet spot,” said Brad Adgate, senior vice-president of corporate research at Horizon Media. “Young people are the least likely to read a newspaper or watch TV news, and The Daily Show is one show that really has found a niche.”

When some TV shows become successful, occasionally advertisers will request that the producers clamp down on including anything in the show that could be viewed as controversial or negative toward the product. While former Daily Show correspondent Bob Wiltfong had seen that this was often the case in his days spent in traditional TV news, he said he never saw any signs of this happening at The Daily Show. “The show was so successful, they didn’t dare touch it,” he said. “As a former TV correspondent, I felt like there was less concern about what advertisers thought while we were in the editing room or writing, and there was never any talk of whether Comedy Central would lose advertising revenue if we made this joke. ‘Do we need to take off the gloves with this guy but not with that guy because of his connections with Viacom?’ No, that never happened, while when I was working on a real TV news show, it did occasionally come up: ‘Run this, and we’ll lose this advertiser.’ But never at The Daily Show, and I was surprised. I thought, this is the way real journalism should be.”

However, perhaps the most surprising bit of information to come out of the studies was that though the show—and Comedy Central—was long known as an efficient way for advertisers to reach the 18–34 demographic, after the conventions ended and the election season heated up, the average viewer actually began to grow older. According to Advertising Age, the median age of the average Daily Show viewer for the third quarter of 2004 was 35.7; in comparison, the median age for news shows on the three major networks was a whopping 60-plus. The age of the average O’Reilly viewer was pegged at 58.

The day after the Emmy ceremonies, Jon Stewart and the writing staff from The Daily Show released America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy, a mock high school history textbook that hit number one on The New York Times best-sellers list in its first week of release. While Walmart banned the book because it contained fake naked pictures of the Supreme Court justices—reimagined as cutout paper dolls—Publishers Weekly named it the Book of the Year.

“So much of what was out there already were polemics, books of emotional destruction,” said Stewart. “The idea of this is to be the emotional opposite. What’s the coldest, most analytical book you could write? A textbook! We wanted this to be an overview of the system, as opposed to a personal kick in the [balls].”

Even though the book’s publication was a personal coup not only for Stewart but for the show he had built and nurtured, perhaps the most personal and heartfelt accomplishment came when he appeared on the CNN show Crossfire on October 15, 2004, though it was at times painful to watch his exchange with host Tucker Carlson and cohost Paul Begala.

In the years since 1999 and Stewart’s debut on The Daily Show, whenever he appeared on other talk shows, he did it out of a sense of duty and obligation. Even though it was clear he’d rather be somewhere else, he was always a good guest and never ruffled any feathers. So Carlson and Begala expected nothing different despite the fact that Stewart occasionally raked the show across the coals on The Daily Show.

What had escaped everybody’s notice was that Stewart planned to do the same on their show.

When Stewart agreed to appear on the show, coming on the heels of the publication of his new book, everyone from the producers on down thought it would be a nice easy visit. Some lighthearted jabs would undoubtedly ensue, but at the end of the fourteen-minute segment, everyone would grin, shake hands, exchange a few gracious words for the sake of the audience, and then go their merry way.

But that’s not what happened at all. The first person to have a clue was Begala, who met with Stewart in the green room before the show for some chitchat. He thought that Stewart’s demeanor seemed off in some regard.

He later realized that Stewart had planned to go on the offensive from the very beginning, and in fact it was the reason why he agreed to appear on the show in the first place. “I thought he was going to push his book that had just come out, but he wanted to be more serious,” Begala remembered.

From the beginning, Stewart was out of character and unusually humorless; he didn’t smile once when speaking with Carlson. During his diatribe, he pushed his overall philosophy that claimed politicians and media are bad, and attacked both sides while saying that Crossfire was “hurting America.”

The main sticking point of the show was when Carlson accused Stewart of playing softball with Kerry on The Daily Show, the same sin Stewart was hurling at Carlson on Crossfire. “You have him on your show and you sniff his throne and you are accusing us of partisan hackery?” asked an incredulous Carlson.

“Absolutely,” Stewart replied.

Carlson: “You have got to be kidding me!”

“You are on CNN,” said Stewart, “the show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls. What is wrong with you?”

After several more volleys exchanged between Stewart and the cohosts, Carlson whined, “I thought you were going to be funny.”

“No,” said Stewart, “I’m not going to be your monkey.”

Later on, Carlson reflected on the segment. “I knew he had these kinds of pretensions about being a political thinker, but I didn’t take him seriously and I don’t take him seriously now,” he said. “I was shocked by the preachiness of it, and was kind of embarrassed for him.”

Whatever Carlson thought, the exchange attracted the attention of viewers, critics, and CNN.

“When Stewart snapped at Tucker that way, it was one of those flash points in television,” said David Hinckley. “We’ve got this era now when reality TV means anything but reality, so you get a moment like that on Crossfire and think, whoa. It’s like you’ve been slapped in the face. This was real.”

However, other critics weren’t buying Stewart’s defense. “The puppet thing is just his way of deflecting,” said Rachel Sklar, lawyer and former editor at The Huffington Post. “The fact is that The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are more than just shows that go on at eleven o’clock at night to a specific number of viewers. They’re picked up the next day on YouTube. They’re picked up by blogs. And they’re picked up as… genuine news stories on the Associated Press.”

Sklar wasn’t done. “He’s a good interviewer and he knows his stuff. And when people are on the show, they have genuine discussions, and sometimes they break news.”

Looking back, it’s not like the Crossfire host hadn’t been warned. In the weeks leading up to his Crossfire appearance, Stewart had appeared on several shows—including National Public Radio’s Fresh Air—touting the same ideas as a warm-up.

“Political parties are basically dedicated to figuring out how to game the system… and are actively exploiting that loophole,” he told host Terry Gross.

And his criticisms had existed years before, when Stewart characterized the tone of his show just a week into his tenure back in 1999: “The Daily Show seems to be a nice sort of pin in the balloon,” he said.

Crossfire had expected him to be the typical convivial, slightly smirking talk-show host always ready with a quick retort or arch comment or observation to poke fun at someone in the news. But he’d shown up with a more serious agenda. In any case, while the highly charged exchange brought out the critics in some corners, it only served to cement Stewart as a hero in others.

Stewart had only two regrets about his appearance. “The reason everyone on Crossfire freaked out is that I didn’t play the role I was supposed to play. I was expected to do some funny jokes, then go have a beer with everyone.” He also noted that some critics thought he had a personal beef with Carlson because of the caustic back and forth between them, but Stewart maintains he was specifically criticizing the tone and format of the show and not the hosts.

What happened next surprised even Stewart: Crossfire was canceled shortly after his appearance. Jonathan Klein, the recently hired president of CNN, succumbed to pressure from advertisers—which was nonexistent before Stewart went on the show, though the show had also experienced lower ratings over the previous year—and announced that he’d cancel the show. “I guess I come down more firmly in the Jon Stewart camp,” he said. “I doubt that when the president sits down with his advisers they scream at him to bring him up to date on all of the issues. I don’t know why we don’t treat the audience with the same respect.”

In the wake of Crossfire, however, some other members of the media were beginning to publicly take issue with Stewart’s constant finger-pointing and his harangues directed toward them and their supposed lack of integrity.

“The Jon Stewart backlash should start right about now,” said Wonkette founder Ana Marie Cox after news of the cancellation hit. “Stewart has pretty much painted a target on his chest with his Crossfire appearance. To say his is just a comedy show is a cop-out in a way. He’s gotten so much power. So many people look to him that you can’t really be the kid in the back throwing spitballs.”

“Jon gets to decide the rules governing his own activism and the causes he supports and how often he does it,” said Brian Williams, anchor of the NBC Nightly News. “And his audience gets to decide if they like the serious Jon as much as they do the satirical Jon.

“He has chronicled the death of shame in politics and journalism, and many of us on this side of the journalism tracks often wish we were on Jon’s side,” Williams added. “I envy his platform to shout from the mountaintop. He’s a necessary branch of government.”

Veteran newsman Ted Koppel also stepped into the fray. “Jon feels [journalists] should be more opinionated, not less, and he feels I have a responsibility to get in there and tell the public, ‘Look, this guy is lying’—although maybe not quite that blatantly,” he said. “I disagree with that only in part. In a live interview you can say, ‘That doesn’t sound right,’ but you don’t automatically have all the facts at your disposal. Jon is really profoundly concerned and angry about real issues, but a satirist gets to poke and prod and make fun of other people, and when you say, ‘What about you, dummy?’ he says, ‘I’m just a satirist.’”

For Stewart’s part, at this stage in his life, all the criticism just tended to roll off his back. “I really feel like I have gotten to this weird place where rejection is a good kind of pain,” he said. “Like you get a shot to the ribs sometimes and you go, eh, I’m alive, you know what I mean? Like you get to a certain baseline where you feel confident in your ability to do that tiny little thing that you do. And the other stuff that you’ve been allowed to do is sort of gravy, and if it doesn’t work out, that’s really all right.”

Some serious journalists continued to cheer him on. “Jon Stewart doesn’t claim to be a journalist, and when he says he’s not we should believe it,” said Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. “His interviews are in the tradition of Johnny Carson, where he’s polite, at times deferential, and behaves in the interviews like a well-brought-up young man.” In Thompson’s view, that’s where they part company and Stewart morphs into something totally unique. “When all the news guys were walking on eggshells [during the Iraq war], Jon was hammering those questions about WMDs. That’s the kind of thing CNN and CBS should have been doing.”

Even the formidable Bill Moyers, a veteran newsman who served as press secretary to President Lyndon B. Johnson before launching a decades-long career in political journalism in network news and public broadcasting, weighed in with effusive praise that was unusual for him. “When I report the news on this broadcast, people say I’m making it up, but when Stewart makes it up, they say he’s telling the truth,” said Moyers. “When future historians come to write the political story of our times, they will first have to review hundreds of hours of a cable television program called The Daily Show. You simply can’t understand American politics in the new millennium without The Daily Show.”

As the presidential campaign of 2004 ran on, the lines between real and fake news continued to blur in Stewart’s world, as well as on the show.

First, John Edwards went on the show to announce his presidential candidacy. Stewart quipped, “We are a fake show, so you might have to do this again somewhere.”

Then Stewart announced that he planned to vote for John Kerry. While it wasn’t a total surprise given that the most frequent targets on the show happen to be Republicans, the fact that he aired it in public made it appear to be an endorsement coming from not only him but the show, which was an unusual move.

“There’s no question that at a certain point that we were leaning toward a certain election result,” he said. “That 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.”

Even though he continually maintained that he had no power, it was crystal clear that he wished to have an impact on the business-as-usual politics and the media. However, to his great dismay, both just dug in their heels and became more entrenched, sensationalistic, and polarized. On the show the night before the 2004 presidential election, he had this to say:

“Tomorrow when you go to the polls, make my life difficult. Make the next four years really hard, so that every morning all we can do is come in and go, ‘Madonna is doing some kabbalah thing, you wanna do that?’ I’d like that. I’m tired.”

Perhaps as the result of the combination of all of these things, an interesting thing happened: Stewart was no longer the funniest guy on the show, the clown. He morphed from the zany one on the show and turned into the calm one, the occasionally austere older anchor while all around him the—mostly younger—correspondents acted out of turn, went for the cheap joke or visual or pratfall. Though he may deny he is anything but a comedian until the day he dies, Stewart had turned into an authority figure along the way.

The Daily Show had made a star out of its host, and now the same thing was starting to happen with its correspondents.

After the success of his costarring role as Evan Baxter in the 2003 Jim Carrey movie Bruce Almighty, Steve Carell was already getting more movie and TV offers from Hollywood. He left The Daily Show in the spring of 2004 to begin work on the American version of The Office, based on a popular BBC series, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, a movie that would be released in 2005. After Carell’s departure, Colbert became the next in line, but it was clear that Stewart wasn’t going anywhere soon.

However, in addition to his hosting and producing duties, Stewart was actively searching for new projects for his Busboy Productions to take on. He had recently signed a deal with Comedy Central to pursue new projects, and they didn’t have to look far.

And then just like that, it was Colbert’s turn.

“At that time, he was a total rock star among correspondents,” said Bob Wiltfong. “When any of his stories ran, there was a huge reaction from the audience. The feeling among the rest of us was, why is this guy still on the show?”

Besides, Colbert was getting restless. “I couldn’t imagine how much longer I could do it,” he said. “I still liked it, and I didn’t want to not like it.”

“If your name’s not Jon Stewart, there’s only so many places you can go on The Daily Show,” said executive producer Ben Karlin. “Steve Carell and Steve Colbert were the first two we identified as giant talents with breakout potential, but we didn’t have the mechanism in place when Steve Carell started getting offers, so he left. With Stephen, we didn’t want to have him go off and become a huge star without working with him.”

“He’d been there a long time,” added Karlin. “He was never going to be the host, it was Jon’s show. But we didn’t want to lose him, so we tried to figure out what else someone like Stephen could do.”

They remembered those fake promos for the fake Colbert Report that had aired several times on The Daily Show. One day in the fall of 2003, when working on scripts for The Daily Show, the producers and writers had discovered that one segment was running a bit short.

Why not run a fake ad for a fake show starring a fake news correspondent?

They ran it by Colbert, and it sounded good to him. The writers came up with a promo for the imaginary Colbert Report despite the fact that the show didn’t exist.

“I tried to ape whoever was the loudest and rightest in prime-time cable news,” he said. They produced four of these promos, which ran through 2003 and 2004, and thought nothing more of it.

Executives at Comedy Central were looking to extend The Daily Show franchise, as were Stewart and Karlin for Busboy Productions. Perhaps the fake promos had planted the seed, but building a show around Colbert’s character seemed doable.

The O’Reilly Factor with Stephen Colbert was how they pitched it.

Once they started to flesh out the show, Colbert said, “But I can’t be an asshole.”

“You’re not an asshole,” said Stewart. “You’re an idiot. There’s a difference.”

Colbert agreed. “The audience wouldn’t forgive Jon for saying things most comedians would want to say,” he said. “But we can say almost anything, because it’s coming out of the mouth of this character.”

“The challenge of these things is how to evolve and keep it fresh and keep people from being bored with your voice,” said Stewart. “We were lucky to have the guy as long as we had him. In fact, one year we kept him because we hid his keys.”

The deal was made and announced in the spring of 2005: Stephen Colbert would host his own show starting in the fall. And Stewart’s Busboy Productions would serve as executive producers.

The first episode of The Colbert Report went on the air on October 17, 2005.

“It became so clear so quickly that it was going to work that it was kind of astounding,” said Comedy Central president Doug Herzog. “When the show debuted, I remember thinking that it had been birthed fully baked. That’s so rare. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it before. The whole thing fits him like a glove. It’s really a virtuoso performance.”

“The Colbert Report depends on Stephen’s ability to process information as this other person,” said Stewart. “Watch Colbert and it’s like the first time you use broadband: ‘How the fuck did that happen?’ He’s rendering in real time. He’s basically doing his show in a second language.”

After only eight shows, Comedy Central renewed The Colbert Report for an entire year.

For all of the critiquing and finger-pointing he was doing at the media and politicians, it turned out that in his private life—which he still heavily guarded—Stewart was turning into one big softy.

“When I look at Nathan, I think, I could kill someone for him. In fact, I could do it almost every day,” he admitted.

“I am a neutered cat, which is a very contented and warm feeling.”