Why Jon Stewart Almost Bailed on the Daily Show
Forbes
America, we almost lost Jon Stewart.
Or to put it more precisely, the Jon Stewart we love on the Daily Show might not have been if he had followed his original instinct.
Which was to quit.
“What I did not realize is, a lot of the people who worked there were assholes,” Stewart said.
It’s actually a cautionary tale of what happens when a creative person starts a new job and runs into resistance from an old guard that likes doing things the old way.
Under a withering interrogation by Stephen Colbert, as reported by Third Beat, Stewart recalled the time in 1999 when he was about to take over the Comedy Central show from Craig Kilborn. He had talked to the bosses about making the Daily Show more satirical.
But when Stewart met with the writing staff a month before the handoff, he told an audience in Montclair, N.J., he got some serious pushback.
“I walk in the door, into a room with the writers and producers, and the first thing they say is ‘this isn’t some MTV bullshit’…. And then I was told not to change the jokes or improvise.”
Stewart called his agent and told him to “get me the f*** out of this. These people are insane.” (His words were not bleeped like they are on TV.)
Colbert followed up: “How close were you to saying that was it, you weren’t going to do it anymore?”
“I had to be talked down from a moderately high cliff,” Stewart said. He told the crowd it took 2-1/2 years for the “naturally winnowing process” to leave him with a fully supportive staff.
The rest, as they say, is history. Had things taken a different turn, maybe Stewart would be doing standup these days.
Meanwhile, what does it say that Colbert is leading a poll in South Carolina, with 20 percent, as the top pick to succeed Jim DeMint in the Senate?
That the voters have a great sense of humor, I guess. You hear that, Nikki Haley?
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