Lisa Rogak - Angry Optimist

Hallie Haglund, who started working as a Daily Show writer in 2009 after working in several other positions on the show since 2006, offered another perspective. “I do think there is a huge element of shared experience,” she said. “So much of our show is comic book shit that I have no idea what people are talking about, or something from Star Wars I’ve never seen. And I can come in and help out on Sex and the City guest questions like I did yesterday.”

Maybe the only women who could succeed in writing late-night comedy have a thick skin or grew up in a house full of brothers… or both.

Writer Jonathan Bines helped launch Jimmy Kimmel Live in 2003, and even he admitted that “late-night writers’ rooms are not fabulous places to be. They’re miserable for everyone.” But that doesn’t mean female comedians don’t want to be there, and those who make it in the door know what they’re getting into.

“That’s what’s fun, that’s why we get into comedy: to mess around with comedians all day,” said Ali Waller.

“If you’re not comfortable with sexual humor or with crudeness or with… people being really honest about certain emotions, then… this job is not for you,” said Daley Haggar, a female comedy writer whose résumé includes The Big Bang Theory and South Park .

“It’s a very aggressive medium, and it’s not the medium for fragile flowers,” said Janis Hirsch, a veteran comedy writer whose résumé includes Frasier, Modern Family , and Will & Grace . “It’s a job, it’s not a perfect world. Women have to either nut up and get into the spirit of it or not look for a job on a show that’s all about men.”

To be sure, female writers have never been found in great quantities on most late-night talk shows. And 80 percent of late-night hosts are male, Chelsea Handler being the exception. “When you’re writing for late night, you’re writing through one person’s prism, and that person at the shows you’re looking at is always a dude,” said Hallie Haglund.

“It’s the law of averages,” said Lizz Winstead. “More guys than women are in comedy.” In fact, when she and Smithberg started The Daily Show in the pre–Jon Stewart days and solicited writers to work on the show, they received over a hundred résumés, but “only about three or four were from women.”

So while former female employees and correspondents—as well as members of the general public—may often complain about the boys’ club at the show, the truth is that the atmosphere behind the scenes at The Daily Show is not that different from other talk shows of its ilk. And given the cutthroat competition to snag a job at one of these highly popular programs, there will always be another person—male or female—willing to put their concerns aside in order to become part of a successful and visible franchise.

In addition to women on the show feeling slighted, some critics of the show believed that the overall tone of The Daily Show sometimes crossed an unnecessary line in the name of comedy, verging on the edge of nastiness just to get a laugh. Stewart disagreed wholeheartedly.

“We rarely do ad hominem attacks,” said Stewart. “In general, it’s based in frustration over reality.”

“We claim no respectability,” added Colbert. “There’s no status I would not surrender for a joke, so we don’t have to defend anything.”

At the same time, even though the overall tone of The Daily Show is satirical, “The show is our own personal beliefs,” said Stewart. “That’s the only reason why we go to work every day. You try not to let it become didactic, you always remember it’s a comedy show more than a political satire, but we very much infuse it with who we are.”

Though he had no straightforward news reporting experience, Stewart thought he approached his work in the same spirit, if not sometimes better than the professionals. “I think what we do is relatively well thought out,” he said. “And while there are times we step over a line when things are happening fast and furious, the truth is, as fake journalists, we exercise far more restraint than the journalists I see.” He cited how the media handled the aftermath of the Columbine shootings, where TV crews essentially mobbed students and their families. “I had never seen anything like that,” he noted. “We didn’t make one joke about it, so as far as our comedy being in the depths, I think we’ve got a long way to go toward the bottom until we take on the actual ethics of real journalism.”

“He doesn’t want to rip the curtain back and let people see that there is medicine being delivered here,” said Devin Gordon, formerly a senior writer at Newsweek. “He also doesn’t want to sound too pompous and say, ‘Hey, I’m just telling jokes.’ They just happen to be about the headlines, but anybody who watches the show knows that there is a core of anger that is driving the entire enterprise.”

And sometimes that anger is unleashed on the staff. Comedian David Feldman worked as a writer on The Daily Show and his memories of Stewart are anything but warm and fuzzy. “In my opinion, Stewart is very manipulative,” he said. “He’s a crowd pleaser and [only] gives the illusion of taking chances. I’m a staunch member of the Writer’s Guild of America and Jon Stewart fought his writers when they wanted to go union [in late 2006]. They went union and [he] has been punishing them ever since. If you watch the show, he doesn’t really do well-crafted jokes. He’ll throw a couple in, but it’s mostly mugging and shouting. He’s funny, but he’s punishing his writers. He doesn’t use his writers’ stuff because he’s mad at them for going union.”

“My boss is like if you took Willy Wonka and mixed him with Hitler,” added correspondent Ed Helms in one Daily Show segment, but he delivered the line in a way that it looked like at least part of him wasn’t joking. “He’s crazy like Willy Wonka and he’s psycho like Hitler. But he doesn’t have a mustache.”

Writers are not the only ones with stories to tell. A staffer recalls the time when Stewart’s temper got the better of him and he hurled a newspaper at Smithberg during a story meeting while screaming inches away from her face. He later excused his behavior by saying, “Sorry, that was the bad Jon… I try not to let him out.”

“When I tell people that I used to work for Jon… they ask…, ‘Oh, is he nice?’” said former Daily Show correspondent Stacey Grenrock-Woods. “Now, I would never think of Jon Stewart as ‘nice.’ He’s a comedian, and comedians aren’t always particularly nice people. But these people look so hopeful…. So I always say, ‘Yes, he’s very nice.’ And they always say, ‘Oh, thank God. I don’t know what I’d do if he wasn’t.’”

“There’s a huge discrepancy between the Jon Stewart who goes on TV every night and the Jon Stewart who runs The Daily Show with joyless rage,” said an anonymous former executive.

It was something that Bob Wiltfong witnessed on a daily basis during his tenure at the show, and he blames Stewart’s tendency toward anger as one of the reasons why he only worked there a short time. “When I look at the show now, I can see the anger come out in his comedy, and I’m not like that,” he said. “I’m much more positive about the world. So in a way, I didn’t fit the core principle there.”

Indeed, when it surfaces publicly, Stewart’s anger has seemed misplaced and just a little bit self-righteous. Actor and comedian Seth MacFarlane created Family Guy , among other top-rated comedy shows, and right after the 2006–2007 writers’ strike, he incorporated a brief snippet—a very inside-the-industry joke—into the animated show that ragged on Stewart for going back on the air while the writers were still out on strike. After the Family Guy episode aired, Stewart called MacFarlane and proceeded to scream and yell at him for a full hour, saying he had no right to call him out for that.