Lisa Rogak - Angry Optimist

“You can see the strain in his interviews,” said a former Daily Show writer. “It used to be, ‘Hey, we’re a comedy show.’ Now it’s, ‘What we do is so hard.’ And it is hard. One of the reasons I finally left is that we were running out of targets. I was like, ‘Do we really want to make fun of Fox & Friends again? Really?’”

Eighteen months into Obama’s first term as president, though, the bloom was definitely off the rose as far as Stewart was concerned. “Obama ran as a visionary and leads as a legislator, which has been the most disappointing thing about him,” he said. “People were open to major changes, and they didn’t get it. I mean, he was pretty clear about some shit: ‘We’re not gonna sacrifice values for safety. I’m closing Guantanamo.’ [But] he’s more than willing to sacrifice someone to the voraciousness of the news cycle than to any sense of what his narrative is.”

Stewart even went on The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News of all places to express his disappointment, though it wasn’t the first time he’d appeared there; the two have frequently gone on each other’s show through the years. “I thought we were in such a place we needed a more drastic reconstruction, perhaps, a destruction of the powers that be. I thought this may be a chance to do that. I have been saddened to see that someone who ran on the idea that you can’t expect to get different results with the same people in the same system has kept in place so much of the same system and the same people. There was a sense that, ‘Jesus will walk on water,’ and now we’re just looking at it like, ‘Oh, look at that, he’s just treading water.’”

Despite his disappointment and outward criticism, on October 27, 2010, Stewart welcomed President Obama to The Daily Show as the first sitting president to come onto the show. The appearance was supposed to be a midterm check-in as to Obama’s progress since he’d been elected, and the two spent the full half-hour gently chiding and joking with each other, although the exchange was as far from a typical Stewart interview as you could get, with Obama speaking at length without interruption from Stewart and the host failing to mug for the cameras as he typically did during his opening segment. After the show aired, Stewart would complain that despite prodding from him, the president didn’t unleash his humorous side.

Indeed, correspondent Wyatt Cenac said that Obama was a “terrible improviser and Stewart sort of likes to improvise these jokes.”

In the end, perhaps the most poignant aspect to come out of the segment was that both concurred that changing America was harder than it initially looked when Obama first came to office:

“‘Yes we can,’ given certain conditions,” said Stewart.

“‘Yes we can,’ but it’s not gonna happen overnight,” the president replied.

To temper the everyday sameness of producing a grueling schedule of a show four nights a week, Stewart continued to pull back a bit and turn to other projects, all radically different from one another.

First, in early 2010 he announced that he had purchased the film options to the life story of Maziar Bahari, an Iranian-Canadian journalist and filmmaker who was arrested by the Iranian government on suspicion of being a spy, a suspicion that had originated in a Daily Show segment from 2009 where correspondent Jason Jones—dressed as a spy—interviewed him. Once Bahari returned to Iran, he was held at the notorious Evin Prison—“every Iranian’s nightmare,” as another detained journalist called it—where he was tortured and interrogated for 118 days before his release. He returned to London and wrote a book about his time in prison and also incorporated his family history into the story. Then They Came for Me was published in 2011 and hit the New York Times best-seller list; Bahari also appeared on the June 6, 2011, episode of The Daily Show, in part to promote the book. Stewart started to write the screenplay and also planned to produce and direct the film.

“One of the things that appealed to me about the story is that it does have lighter moments,” said Stewart. “One of the things that kept Maziar alive was his ability to keep his sense of humor—to remember about joy and laughter—and see the absurdity of his situation.”

Next, Earth (The Book): A Visitor’s Guide to the Human Race, was published in September 2010, the second book Stewart created with his Daily Show roster of writers. He welcomed the novelty of writing the book in contrast to writing for the show. “The show can feel very ephemeral,” he said. “You work really, really hard every day to put it out there, and some days you’re successful with it and some days you’re not. That can be forgiving as a process, but there’s not much time to savor anything either.”

Just like its predecessor America (The Book), Earth hit the top of the New York Times bestsellers list the first week it came out. The premise of the book was to serve as a guide to help aliens understand earthlings—who, by the way, have become extinct according to the book—again patterned after a standard high school textbook. Publishers Weekly gave the book a starred review, writing, “In place of skits there are elaborate, color illustrations accompanied by captions written with his trademark deadpan humor; for instance, a photo of a mother and baby elephant holds the caption, ‘advances in contraception and industrialized food production allowed modern couples to have fewer offspring, while leaving the total weight of families constant.’”

New York Times critic Janet Maslin recommended the book, albeit with a few reservations. “The book, like the show, is best when it takes on subjects of real substance,” she wrote. “The funniest material is about religion and science… the calendar of December religious holidays for all persuasions [and] the claim that the word Torah is ‘German for kindling.’”

Yet other reviewers weren’t as impressed. “The main problem might be the conception itself,” noted critic Steve Weinberg in the Christian Science Monitor . “A posthumous pseudo-document for discovery in the future by vaguely imagined aliens probably seemed like a superb idea when conceived. But it is actually an idea that stretches credulity, even in a book that does not need to feel ‘real.’”

Meanwhile, Stewart maintained his regular schedule of putting out The Daily Show . “Free time is death to the anxious, and thank goodness I don’t have any of it right now,” he said. He was also thinking of another project, and though he knew it was a long shot, Stewart began to openly ponder the idea of launching his own news network, one that would stray from The Daily Show ’s formula of fake news and deliver real news through a filter that was not found anywhere on television.

“If somebody wanted to start a twenty-four-hour news network that would focus on corruption and governance as opposed to the politics of it, do you think that that would have a chance to be successful and change the way debate occurs in the States?” he asked.

In lieu of starting his own news network, Stewart opted to take a baby step in the interim by instead launching the Rally to Restore Sanity, which most people saw as a satirical response to a “Restoring Honor” event that Fox News commentator Glenn Beck held in August 2010. Beck’s rally went head-to-head against another rally managed by Al Sharpton that same day to honor the Great March on Washington that Martin Luther King, Jr., spearheaded forty-seven years earlier.