Lisa Rogak - Angry Optimist

He also worked to hone his comic chops on his teammates. “Some of the best people I have ever met, I met down here,” he said. “This was the first place I developed my humor.”

It was the rare player who would attempt to out-joke him. “Jon’s wit was famous within the team,” said Albert. “No one would dare even then engage him in verbal combat. None of us imagined he would take things to the level that he has, but he was, even in college, a very funny guy.”

“Everybody was… afraid of messing with Jon because he was so quick-witted,” agreed David Coonin, who played alongside Stewart.

But even he admitted that not everyone appreciated his sense of humor. “[College] was the process where I was somehow trying to hone obnoxiousness into wit,” he said. “That is a process that doesn’t go easy, a lot of peaks and valleys. In general, William and Mary got more of my obnoxiousness than wit. But I had a great deal of pride in working my way onto the team and becoming a starter. It gave me the confidence that there was a correlation between working hard and success and results and getting better at something.”

Despite the rigors of carrying a full course load at a demanding school, Stewart did the bare minimum when it came to academics. Though his initial major was chemistry, he switched to psychology before graduating.

“Apparently there’s a right and wrong answer in chemistry, whereas in psychology, you can say whatever you want as long as you write five pages,” he joked. “The psychology degree comes from the fact that I was a chemistry major and they kept wanting the correct answer, whereas in psychology you basically write whatever you want, and chances are you get a B.”

He also joined a fraternity, Pi Kappa Alpha, but ended up resigning after only six months because much of frat life revolved around the enforced bullying of both himself and others, and he had had enough of that during childhood. Unlike then, however, no amount of jokes could deflect the abuse.

“Greek life [offered] a false sense of friendship and was an abusive relationship under the guise of camaraderie,” he said. “There are things that are good, but as fun as it was to have parties in that house, it wasn’t worth the pressure of living up to someone else’s expectations as to what you’re supposed to be, and going to meetings where they had parliamentary procedure to discuss a toga party.”

After he quit the frat, he moved into a college-owned house at 111 Matoaka Court where the number one rule was, “Don’t touch the carpet.”

“My college career was waking up late, memorizing someone else’s notes, doing bong hits, and going to soccer practice,” he said.

He also found time to date and, according to some, had a great deal of success despite his self-consciousness about his height. “Jon was very popular… and dated some very attractive women in college,” said John Rasnic, who played soccer alongside Stewart and also was his roommate for a time.

At least with some other students Stewart’s Jewish background was never forgotten. Teammate Rasnic recalled that a player on an opposing team from Randolph-Macon College, another Virginia-based school, called Stewart a kike. “Jon was a little upset, I think, perhaps a bit surprised, but he didn’t let it bother him,” said Rasnic.

One time, a group of students on an opposing team made a comment about the size of Stewart’s nose. Stewart responded that size had never been an issue for him, which elicited a roar of laughter from the crowd and instantly changed the atmosphere.

“From that point on, every time he touched the ball they cheered for him,” Albert remembered. “And that was his ability to make people laugh and to win people over without making them agree with him. He was not a polished player and he didn’t have the pedigree the other players had, but he had some talent and I think he made the most of the talent he had.”

In only two years of varsity play, Jon had developed into such an excellent athlete that Coach Albert invited him to join the U.S. squad of the best young Jewish soccer players from all over the country who were heading to the 1983 Pan American Maccabi Games in São Paulo, Brazil, the penultimate step before the World Maccabiah Games, essentially the Olympics for Jews. The World Games are held every four years in Israel with four different competitive classes including Open, Masters, and Disabled, while the Pan American Games rotated between countries in North, Central, and South America, also every four years.

“When we walked on[to] the soccer field, they called us gringos, they wanted to know if we knew how to play,” he said. “After that, they no longer called us gringos.”

Stewart’s accomplishments over four years of soccer primarily as a midfield defender at William & Mary were prodigious: in addition to scoring ten goals overall, he also made an impression in the 1983 ECAC tournament championship over the University of Connecticut by scoring the winning goal to defeat them 1–0. It was only the second time that the college won the conference championship.

As graduation approached, however, his dream of playing professionally was growing dim. Injuries had plagued Stewart throughout his college career, and toward the end of his final season, he injured his knee to the extent that he was unable to play.

However, despite the camaraderie he felt with the other members of the soccer team, Stewart spent much of his college years feeling like he didn’t fit in. And though he continued to use humor as a relief valve, he worried about his future despite his success on the soccer field. “I just didn’t know what the fuck I was doing with myself,” he admitted. “I was uncomfortable in my own skin, let alone being with kids who were not. So that in itself was probably annoying.”

When he received his psychology degree in 1984, he had very little idea what his next step would be.

“When I left William and Mary, I was shell-shocked because when you’re in college it’s very clear what you had to do to succeed,” he said. “You knew what you had to do to get to this college and to graduate from it. The unfortunate yet truly exciting thing about your life is there is no core curriculum. The entire place is an elective.”

As he saw it, his only choice was to pack up and return to New Jersey.

Once he was back in the Garden State, he picked up right where he’d left off and began adding to the wide variety of jobs that he held in high school.

“I’ve had an amazing amount of [lousy] jobs,” said Stewart.

In 2013, genealogist Megan Smolenyak researched Stewart’s ancestral roots for the Huffington Post, and what she uncovered about his relatives’ diversity of occupations could be used to describe his occupational history precomedy as well. “His forebears have held one of the more eclectic mélange of jobs I’ve seen,” she wrote, “including taxi driver, fruit and vegetable peddler, furrier, shoe store proprietor, and window cleaner.”

Though Stewart didn’t return to the Quaker Bridge Mall to check off the remainder of the shops and restaurants he could get fired from, he came close.