Lisa Rogak - Angry Optimist

“I was really kind of in shock more than anything else,” MacFarlane told Piers Morgan on CNN. “It was kind of an odd Hollywood moment. I was a huge fan of his show, and here I was getting this angry phone call.” MacFarlane added that Stewart then asked him, “Who the hell made you the moral arbiter of Hollywood?”

Morgan then replied, “But not if you’re the self-appointed moral arbiter of Hollywood, which is exactly the position he plays. There’s a certain irony in Jon Stewart ringing up haranguing you for mocking him.”

Then again, perhaps Morgan was just getting back at Stewart for the time a year earlier when Stewart appeared on Larry King’s show on CNN and criticized the network’s decision to bring in Morgan to take over King’s show; after all, MacFarlane was visibly shocked when Morgan initially brought up the angry phone call on his show. Before then, he hadn’t mentioned it publicly.

Even after the first few years, the Daily Show schedule was so relentless and taxing, more than a few staffers wondered how long Stewart could keep it up. “Doing The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is creatively and physically exhausting,” he admitted just six months after starting as host in 1999. Yet, at the same time, he admitted that exhaustion had its benefits.

Our work “is actually enhanced by a certain sleep deprivation, because it’s the part of your brain that you’re not really in touch with until something’s desperately wrong,” he said.

“There are a lot of days when we walk off that show and go, ‘Ewww, we were putrid,’” he said. “I feel like when you watch that show, it shouldn’t look like we’re working hard on it, but we are.”

He’d worked his tail off to get the opportunity to host the show, and once there he’d be damned if he’d let anything or anyone interfere. But even he admitted that sometimes he thought it was too much. “Even if you’re eating delicious chocolate cake, there are moments you feel like, ‘I’ve had too much,’” he said. “Now replace ‘chocolate cake’ with ‘shit taco’ and you know what our day is like every day.”

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.