Lisa Rogak - Angry Optimist

In fact, he credits his short stature with helping him to decide to pursue a life of comedy, though it would still be a few more years until he fully committed himself to that career. He theorizes that if he’d even been a few inches taller he’s not sure if he would have gone into comedy at all. “I don’t know if I would have tried so hard,” he said. “I had this vision that life would be peach pies and candy creams if I was six foot two. But if I had been physically bigger, I probably would have wasted even more energy than I did, thinking I was going to make sports my life.”

“Those are the makings of a great comic,” said Chuck Nice, a fellow comedian. “You’re bullied, you’re smaller. What you end up doing to survive is to develop a great rapier wit and the ability to make people laugh.”

“I think there are virtually no comedians out there who are handsome, well-adjusted, popular, or come from extremely loving, wealthy families,” said Devin Gordon, formerly a senior writer at Newsweek. “Those people tend not to go into comedy.”

Stewart began to study how famous comedians of the time operated, their style, particularly his idols Woody Allen, George Carlin, Steve Martin, and Lenny Bruce. But despite watching them on talk shows, Jon didn’t think to aspire to become a talk-show host. “I never watched talk shows when I was a kid and thought, ‘Wow, that’s a cool thing to do,’” he said. “Like, if I was watching Carson or something I was more impressed with the fact that I was up at eleven o’clock at night.”

He was also making his first forays into learning about politics, and testing the waters to discover what his own views were. Before then, he’d only thought about causing trouble. When he was nine years old and traveling with his big band to concerts, he was in a Manhattan hotel room looking down at the street where a van for President Nixon’s reelection campaign was parked directly below. “I was thinking, ‘If I spit from here…’”

Now, though, his ideas were more well-formed. He described himself as being “left-leaning” and “very into Eugene Debs,” a union leader and five-time presidential candidate running under the Socialist Party banner between 1900 and 1920. During a debate in a high school class, Stewart had to pretend he was Ronald Reagan, at the time a presidential candidate whose worldview and political affiliation was the polar opposite of Debs. “I had to defend my increased military spending,” Stewart remembered.

Then, at the age of fifteen, he had his first epiphany about how his life could be different, courtesy of another New Jersey native, Bruce Springsteen.

“The first time you hear Darkness on the Edge of Town, you begin to plan how to move out of New Jersey,” he said. “When I listened to his music I didn’t feel like a loser, I felt like a character in an epic poem about losers. You felt like there was possibility. That here is a guy who grew up like you grew up and had that same feeling of, I bet if I just fucking get in the car and drive, there will be an opportunity for something different and better—an opportunity to be something that I want to be.”

And he was starting to think that that “something” involved making people laugh. He was encouraged when he was voted “best sense of humor” in the 1980 graduation class at Lawrence High School.

He hoped that the next four years, which he’d spend at The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, would help him figure that out.

“ICAME TO William and Mary because as a Jewish person, I wanted to explore the rich tapestry of Judaica that is southern Virginia,” Jon Stewart joked as he accepted an honorary doctorate at the College of William & Mary’s 2004 graduation ceremony. “Imagine my surprise when I realized ‘The Tribe’ was not what I thought it meant.”

Though “The Tribe” is often used to describe the Jewish community, in this case at William & Mary, the term was also used as a moniker for the college’s athletics department, in the way that other schools use the names of animals like tigers or cougars for their various teams.

William & Mary was founded in 1693, and has long had a reputation as being academically stringent and considered to be one of the “public Ivy League” schools, as it’s a state university. Since it’s located in Williamsburg, Virginia, far from any significant urban nightlife, social activities on campus relied heavily on Greek life, and the school’s racial and ethnic diversity left much to be desired. This is true today as well as when Stewart was a student from 1980 through 1984.

William & Mary at the time was an unusual choice for a Jewish boy from New Jersey: in 2013 the percentage of Jewish students was between 2 and 4 percent, and the student-run Jewish campus organization lacked an advisor, a physical building, and an association with a local synagogue. In 1980, these numbers were significantly lower.

If he felt like an outsider in New Jersey, he was about to get a bigger shock: many of the students Stewart encountered at the college had never met a Jewish person in the flesh before. He was their first. He described them as “boys with eight first names, which also happened to be the names of Confederate generals, but who just went by ‘Trip.’”

But Stewart didn’t pick the prestigious Southern university for either its academics or religious life: instead, he chose William & Mary so he could play soccer, which was much more important to him than studying and attending classes. He dreamed of playing professional soccer after graduation.

Head coach Al Albert had built a strong nationally recognized men’s soccer team at the school, with numerous players going on to pursue successful professional careers after graduation, which would include Scott Budnick, Wade Barrett, and Jeff Agoos. This attracted Stewart’s attention.

Plus, following the idea planted by Springsteen, at least it got him out of New Jersey.

Once he was ensconced at the school, his life had an anchor in the form of daily practices and regular games. He started with the junior varsity team as a freshman before Coach Albert invited him to join the varsity team when he became a sophomore. Besides being a starter for the team, he even coached a local boys’ high school team at the nearby Gloucester High School. In fact, it was the first time in his life that he focused on just one activity: soccer. “My years with Tribe soccer were the best of my college experience,” he said.

“I didn’t know how to be friends with girls; I knew how to hang out with guys in a bus traveling to soccer games, so that was my idea of fun,” Stewart continued. “The games were exciting, and there was a lot of passion, and for those ninety minutes it was wonderful.”

But it didn’t come without a few bumps in the road. “Soccer was a gentlemen’s game, and occasionally there were times where the slur would be used,” Stewart recounted. “And my last name was Leibowitz and my nose was twice the size of my head, so it was not hard to figure out my ethnic background.”

“His overall experience at William and Mary wasn’t as positive as a lot of people’s,” Albert said. “If it wasn’t for soccer, he would have left school. But soccer kept him in here. His connection through the school is the program.”