Lisa Rogak - Angry Optimist

Harper was in good company. A 2004 survey released by the Pew Research Center revealed that fully one-fifth of Americans aged 18 to 29 said they relied on not only The Daily Show for their main source of news about the presidential candidates but Saturday Night Live as well.

Comedian Miller weighed in. “I don’t think kids even vaguely connect to guys like [Peter] Jennings and Dan Rather,” he said. “If you’re an eighteen-year-old, who are you going to trust to give you the facts? Dan Rather in that epaulet jacket where he’s just about to go fly-fishing after the show, or are you going to listen to Jon Stewart? Of course, you’re going to listen to Jon.”

“It sounds a little bit apocryphal to me, but we do repackage the news, so I suppose that we are a valid source as long as people can understand when we’re goofing and when we mean it,” said Colbert. “I think you have to have some handle on what’s happening in the world to get our jokes, because we only do the most cursory explanation of what the issue is in order to set up our punch lines. We don’t talk in depth about any stories. I suppose you could watch our show and sort of get a sense of what’s going on in the world, but you’d also be missing half of our jokes.”

“I find it hard to believe,” said Stewart. “I enjoy the show as much as the next guy, but we don’t actually give any news. If you haven’t seen the news, you probably won’t know much about what we’re talking about. We’re a cable channel. I mean, we’re beyond Spanish people playing soccer on the dial, we’re near a naked talk show. My guess is if you found your way to us, you’re a relatively savvy consumer of information.”

“Different outlets have been saying that for a while or claiming studies [demonstrate] the show’s influence on the public,” said writer J. R. Havlan. “We don’t sit around thinking about it. We don’t come in and say, ‘How are we going to affect the media landscape? Are we going to increase the number of kids who get their news from The Daily Show ?’ There’s no insidious plan.”

If anything, the show teaches viewers to think and dissect the news that’s presented to them, regardless of the medium. “The show provides people a lesson in skepticism,” said Havlan. “That’s the biggest service. I mean, we’re not even interpreting things, I think it’s more truthful than that. Network news—not just cable—has to be constantly questioned, and our show is uniquely positioned to do that.”

For his part, Stewart discounted the studies and surveys. “I’d be awfully surprised given the magnitude of media available,” he said. “Younger people are far more inundated with information than we ever were. We’re suffocating in information.”

And when it came to deciding which stories to cover—after all, with a twenty-four-hour news cycle, there are always plenty of stories out there that just beg to be satirized—there are additional issues to tackle, among them responsibility to the story and the culture. “We try to cover stories that are interesting to people and, more importantly, relevant,” said Karlin. “I think we’d be a lot more into finding something that’s inherently funny and quirky, but then we[’d] have to educate the audience a lot more. Instead, we’d rather talk about what’s on people’s minds or what’s particularly absurd of this moment or of this time.

“We try not to measure the reaction to the show as much as our own internal barometer,” he added. “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. 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.”

As the ratings continued to climb, politicians began to notice that an appearance on the show could boost their visibility with a younger demographic virtually overnight. Though some might shudder at the idea of being interviewed or featured in a story on The Daily Show , others embraced the opportunity.

“Politicians love him and they respect him because he is a very intelligent guy,” said Neil Rosen, entertainment critic at the New York Times . “But I also think they do the show because they understand that it is a very smart audience that is watching. They are also an audience who votes. And as soon as you walk onto that set as a politician you have adopted [Stewart’s] credibility.”

However, that comes with a caveat: for the most part, the politicians who flocked to the guest chair opposite Stewart were Democratic. Republicans started to complain, but Stewart maintained that he never hesitated to lash out at hypocrisy in the Democratic Party when the opportunity presented itself. He also thought that politicians made for more sparkling conversation than actors, musicians, or authors in many cases.

“I just think politicians are more interesting to talk to,” he said. “Not that I’m not fascinated with the exact date a movie is coming out, but in general, I think it’s slightly more interesting probably to talk to somebody who does something completely different from what I do.”

At the same time, given the tone of the show as well as the format, if they weren’t promoting a book or movie the majority of people who agreed to go on the show did so to make a specific point. “People don’t typically come on our show unless they’re disgruntled,” Stewart said. “Then they come on the show to express their disgruntlement. We are the last stop of the disgruntled.”

For this reason, they also made easy targets, though Stewart maintained that he always tried to resist the lazy joke. “The show is not a megaphone,” he said. “You can’t end every joke with ‘Let’s bomb the motherfuckers,’ even though that’s how I feel. But I take some pleasure in just ridiculing al Qaeda. When we got the Kandahar tape”—the video released in December 2001 in which Osama bin Laden confessed to being the mastermind of the September 11 terrorist attacks—“our first instinct was to… lay down fart noises,… because he hates to be laughed at.”

Little was sacred when considered for their crosshairs, and even Comedy Central basically left the show alone. One of Viacom’s top brass actually referred to the show as “the latchkey kid.” One of the few hard-and-fast rules they ran into was that “dildo” couldn’t be mentioned in a show four times; but three was okay.

“Humor is such a subjectively weird genre,” Stewart said. “One man’s meat is another man’s poison, it’s so hard to say this is what’s allowed, but this isn’t. So we vacillate. Some days our heels are planted firmly in the ground and we’re ready to fight, and other days we’re washing our hands thirty times because we think we have anthrax.”

All the while he was determined not to cater to the lowest common denominator. It just wasn’t his way. “There’s a certain school of comedy that mistakes edge for the obnoxious. I find that the best comedy, the most edgy stuff, is rooted in a way of thinking about something that other people haven’t come to yet. To me, that’s edgy.”

Surprisingly, advertisers didn’t mind when they fell victim to Stewart’s criticism. “If the show is going to go after an advertiser, we call the advertiser with a heads-up, but we tell him, ‘If Jon is making fun of you, it’s a plus,’” said Larry Divney, president of Comedy Central in 2002. “It means you’re being talked about!”

Besides, the exposure could be worth it. Three years after Stewart took the helm, seven hundred thousand people were watching the show each night; Kilborn had barely half the viewership. In January 2005, The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn morphed into The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson after Kilborn decided not to renew his contract and left the program.