Lisa Rogak - Angry Optimist

For his part, Stewart’s role as host and executive producer meant he was tired all the time, especially due to his habit of micromanaging every last detail, not only of the show but also of the employees. “He asks about every tiny detail of things that are important in your life,” said Smithberg, “and he isn’t feigning. He knows the eating habits of everyone, and he knows when all the camera guys are pooping.”

And then came September 11, 2001. Perhaps Stewart’s finest moment came in a moment of horror and poignancy and great uncertainty for the future of The Daily Show .

It had seemed like just another Tuesday morning. He and Tracey had recently celebrated their first wedding anniversary, and he was getting ready to head uptown from their Soho apartment to the studio to start working on that night’s show when he heard a thundering crash.

Then he looked out the window and saw one of the World Trade Center towers on fire. Twenty minutes later, they grabbed the cat carriers and a few belongings, and evacuated their apartment, heading uptown.

And then a horrible thought occurred to him:

How could he be funny at a time like this? And how could the show possibly continue?

“Everyone was so scared and on tenterhooks,” said Brian Farnham, editor-in-chief of Time Out New York. “How could you be funny about something that was so terrifying? Jon Stewart and The Daily Show were one of the first shows to say, ‘You know you can make fun of anything if you do it the right way.’”

“It was a fragile time for everything,” Stewart acknowledged. “People talk about the Holocaust as the greatest inhumane times. But my guess is that even at Auschwitz people were telling jokes. It’s human nature to find light in darkness somehow.”

During the first week after the terrorist attacks, the networks and many cable channels pulled their regularly scheduled programming to focus on airing news updates and live broadcasts from Ground Zero. On September 17, David Letterman was the first of the late-night talk shows to return to the air. The Daily Show went back on the air on September 20, and Stewart began the show without the music, without the roaming cameras, and without the wildly cheering audience.

It was one of the best monologues of his life, which he delivered in a stilted yet straightforward manner without his typical slightly ramped-up tone. Throughout the almost nine-minute talk, Stewart occasionally had to pause to regain his composure. The funny man was nowhere in sight. “They said to get back to work, and there were no jobs available for a man in the fetal position,” he said. “We sit in the back and we throw spitballs—never forgetting the fact that it is a luxury in this country that allows us to do that.

“The view from my apartment was the World Trade Center. Now it’s gone. They attacked it. This symbol of American ingenuity and strength and labor and imagination and commerce and it is gone. But you know what the view is now? The Statue of Liberty. The view from the south of Manhattan is now the Statue of Liberty. You can’t beat that.”

He’s said that he only watched the segment once, and that he vowed never to watch it again, it was too painful.

Over the nine days that the Show didn’t air, a quarter of viewers passed up the reruns and switched to channels that offered more hospitable comfort-food kinds of shows, like Nick at Nite. But after the new shows resumed, not only did regular viewers return but new ones watched as well, in part because Stewart was intent on serving as a teacher of sorts, to teach viewers about certain elements of this strange new fragile world while still conveying it through the lens of humor.

And his image and influence changed from that point on.

“OUR ENTIRE DAY is focused on taking the un-fun we have and turning it into fun when it gets on the air,” said Stewart. “Because we function, actually, very similarly probably to a news show in that we have sort of an editorial meeting in the morning. It’s a really structured day. We actually do have a very good time doing it, but it’s sort of relentless, and the structure of our day is a lot more rigid, I think, than people would imagine.”

Looking at a day in the life at The Daily Show reveals that putting together each program is a never-ending process. The first bit of work starts around 7 A.M. when a team of producers settles in and starts to review TiVo’ed videos and news stories from the day before for potential images, sound bites, and stories that would make good fodder for that evening’s show. They also thumb through all three of the local New York papers—the Post is “our paper of record” according to one writer—for ideas and obscure and entertaining news stories as well. In addition, several television sets broadcast live feeds from all of the morning news shows from ABC, NBC, CBS, and cable networks like CNN and Fox News.

The writers start to wander in shortly before 9 A.M. when they gather in the writers’ lounge for a meeting that is known around the studio as “our morning cup of sadness.” That first hour is basically spent cracking jokes about the major news stories from the previous day while munching on bagels from H&H, a long-established New York bakery. It’s during that crucial hour when the first nuggets start to emerge. “We get specific about what angles we’ll be taking and we’ve all agreed to,” said writer J. R. Havlan. “We’re joking around from nine to ten, and those jokes frequently end up on the show.”

The team then breaks up to start writing that night’s show. Here, the joking out loud basically ceases as the writers focus on the task at hand. They are able to crank out a first draft of that night’s show in about ninety minutes. “We know exactly what we need to get done at any period of time,” said writer Jason Ross. “We’ve seen the videos and we know there are four good sound bites for the story. It’s pretty laid out for you.”

Producer Rory Albanese, for one, marvels at the writers’ speed. “They’re really fast and real good about it,” he said, adding that, as is the case with anything, practice enhances both skill and speed. “You get better at it. It’s a muscle and you work it out. It gets stronger.”

“You get good at knowing what you need to attack,” Havlan added.

Around 11:30, producers and research staff start to gather the scripts from the writers so they can begin to do their work, from selecting news clips to run alongside Stewart’s comments to locating props—occasionally making them from scratch—to accompany a monologue or sketch.

The next three hours pass in a blur as Stewart and the production team edit and tighten the scripts, further refine the jokes, and offer up suggestions to the research staff. Along the way, the tech staff plans their camera angles and video shifts, altering them with each new script draft that comes in.

The Daily Show writers and producers also have to be careful not to duplicate anything going on at The Colbert Report, which spun off from The Daily Show in 2005. Despite the distinct tone of the two shows, there is bound to be at least some crossover. “The game they’re playing is a slightly different one from us, so we don’t trip on each other that much,” said Stewart. “And let’s put it this way: This ain’t the Serengeti. There’s plenty of food to go around.”

When Ben Karlin was executive producer of both shows, he visited the two studios several times a day to check for any duplication. For example, when the Mark Foley sex scandal first broke in the fall of 2006, in which the Republican congressman from Florida sent explicit notes to a sixteen-year-old male page, Karlin green-lighted stories for both shows.