The Most Trusted Name in News

Not that Stewart would ever make such a grandiose claim for himself or his show. Or rather, he does, but with The Daily Show's patented irony. "I think we've changed the world dramatically," he says. "When we were picked up for broadcast by CNN International -- I don't want to say a week later, but maybe two weeks later -- the border between Pakistan and India stood down. Direct correlation? I don't know what else you can point to." In other words, forget trying to get Jon Stewart to display the kind of smug self-importance he ridicules in star TV news reporters. "We're a comedy show" is his constant mantra. "We consider ourselves scolds who are good with a pun. Skilled in the art of the premise punch line. We write the premise, we wait two seconds and then we deliver the punch line -- usually something surprising, or ending with a vulgarity." Yes, like most comedians, Stewart is pretty much always kidding. Which doesn't, of course, mean that he is not dead serious.

Given his loathing of media cliches, it's not surprising that Stewart dislikes talking about his less than idyllic childhood. Let's just say that the early biographical data does not deviate sharply from that of every other person who ended up telling jokes for a living. Born forty-one years ago in New York, the only child of a physicist father and a mother who taught gifted children, Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz was raised in Lawrence Township, New Jersey, the only Jewish kid in his middle-class suburb. He was relentlessly bullied. "They will find what is unique about you and destroy you for it," he says cheerfully. "So if you're Jewish and most people aren't, 'OK, let's go with that.' But it just as easily could have been because I was short." Then his parents divorced when he was ten. This hit him hard and has left him feeling, he says, "probably less than adequate." He does not speak about his father for publication. "We're not in touch," he says. "So I just think it would be unfair." He was raised by his mother, Marian, who, at seventy, is a successful education consultant and a woman whom he describes as having always been "passionate about education and current events." This rubbed off on Stewart. "I always had an interest in politics and public policy," he says, "and I've always had a disdain for politicians. I don't like theater. And that goes for theater theater, too."

Graduating from Virginia's College of William and Mary in 1984 with a degree in psychology, Stewart staged puppet shows for disabled kids, worked as a contract administrator at City University ("like working in cement") and tended bar. Though he'd always had a knack for generating jokes, which he calls "a brain dysfunction that you're trying to take to your advantage," it was not until 1986 that he finally moved to New York and made an assault on the comedy clubs, dropping his last name -- allegedly because MCs mispronounced Leibowitz (in New York comedy clubs?) but actually, he has hinted, because of lingering paternal frictions. He soon became a fixture at places such as the Comedy Cellar. "I, like almost every other female in the comedy community, had a crush on him," says Janeane Garofalo, one of the other up-and-coming comics in the late Eighties stand-up boom. "He's just one of those guys everybody likes." Garofalo remembers Stewart as an incisive social critic, but he didn't "hit politics especially hard" in his act, she says. Back then his stuff hinged on what he calls "the holy trinity of comedy: sex, religion and death." When the first Gulf War broke out in 1991, Stewart was less likely to attack the politicians and the media than to make wry, Seinfeldian observations about the three-day ground war. "They were afraid this was going to be another Vietnam," he told audiences, "and it turned out it wasn't even another Woodstock."

But it was perhaps precisely such polite, prime-time-friendly joking that landed Stewart his first huge break, in 1993: his own talk show on MTV, The Jon Stewart Show. A year later the show was syndicated. But Stewart proved singularly ill-adapted to a standard talk-show format. He seemed in pain, shrinking ever deeper into the cushions of his armchair. There seemed to be no way to turn it around. "It was a talk show," he says. "Am I suddenly going to discover some unbelievably interesting way of talking to Maria Conchita Alonzo?" It took a year for the show to die -- slow torture for Stewart. "That show was a watershed," Stewart says, "and I don't mean comedically. I mean emotionally. I was playing scared. I was playing not to lose." Stewart would remember this when he got The Daily Show. But first he had to negotiate four years in the comedy wilderness.

(Excerpted from RS 960, October 28, 2004)