Jon Stewart Interview

Faking Sense of the World
Hartford Advocate June 12, 2008

According to a 2007 Pew poll, Jon Stewart is one of the five most-respected broadcast journalists in America. It doesn't matter that he began his career not as a sleeves-rolled-up, coffee-swilling print journalist but as a comedian whose resume includes residency at Manhattan's Comedy Cellar, a cameo in Half Baked and three short-lived MTV shows.

The Daily Show started out as news parody, but with Stewart at the helm since 1999, it has grown increasingly sharp and political. Stewart is not just a smart-ass; he's actually smart. And while he can be glib, he's arguably one of the most moral people on television news.

One of the few people who don't take Stewart seriously these days is Stewart himself. When accused of committing journalism by Bill Moyers last year, Stewart countered that he's only a comedian. Stewart dismissed his own work as that of "a tiny, neurotic man, standing in the back of the room throwing tomatoes at the chalk board."

Stewart is amazingly punctual—he called exactly at the scheduled time—and extraordinarily nice. As a former chain smoker who went cold turkey in 2000, he gave me useful advice about quitting cigarettes and talked freely about every other subject—but still wouldn't admit to being anything other than a working comedian who happens to have one of the best TV shows on the planet.

Advocate: Is your stand-up work mostly current events-driven or do you use it as a chance to get away from what you do on TV?
Stewart: It's a combination: It's events material, or it's a story about something horrible that might have happened to me on the drive up. And obviously, bits I've been working on over the years. I weave everything in and out, and hopefully present a nice little evening of comedy.

I might do a Q&A, or maybe just be a sing-a-long. It could take all kinds of shapes: charades, Pictionary.

So it's like a traveling, troubadour kind of show.
That's exactly right. It's like a minstrel show, except without any conceivable musical talent.

Or blackface.
Right. It's the old-world style of minstrel show, not the modern racially driven version. I think it's a chance to make some larger observations—if I have any larger observations to make. It's not as tied to current events as the show, and it's a different format. I'll be standing, for one thing. It'll give people an opportunity to see what stumpy legs look like.

I'm sure you're sick of this question ...
Sagittarius.

Nice. I was going to ask if it's difficult to adjust to comedy in a post-Bush world.

Oh. As a comedian, as a person, as a citizen, as a mammal—in all of those areas, I am looking forward to the end of the Bush administration with every fiber of my being.

You're tired of the "subliminable" jokes?
Yeah, there are times when you play on the lack of erudite commentary from the President. But that's not the heart of what we do. I am sick of deconstructing their propaganda, because it's pretty much the same as it's always been. It's just repeating something over and over again until we believe it and we hope that you believe it.

[Comedian and Conan O'Brien writer] Robert Smigel said in a recent interview: "For Obama, it could be a John Kennedy situation where everybody is going to invest all this hope and optimism, idealism." He was saying that satire might be more difficult under an Obama administration. Do you think that's true?

I think that the satire of what that is would be tough. But certainly the interplay between that idealism and the established cynicism would work for satire. If someone was to introduce hope and idealism into our political system, I think the tension that would create in other areas would certainly be ripe. You would think that if you bring oxygen to the organism, the organism lives. But there may be other organisms in there that thrive in darkness and in a more anaerobic environment. Watching those creatures writhe will always be interesting.

Larry King asked you on his show if it would be terrible for you as a comedian if everything was good.
I was a little stunned by the question. It was a little crazy, the idea that I absolutely would cheer for the destruction of mankind if it would give me three to four minutes of jokes every night. But to be fair to Larry King, I don't think he was really paying attention. It was more like, "How long do we have left in this segment?"

That describes the last two decades of his career, doesn't it?
[Laughs.] Don't mess with the King, baby. You mess with the bull, you get the suspenders.

Is it fair to call The Daily Show liberal?
I think the metric by which television is considered liberal is literally based on the metric of liberalism in each person's soul. Peoples' senses of humor tend to go about as far as their ideology. There are people who believe I say things they didn't agree with because it's too liberal, and there are people who don't agree with things I say that believe I'm a conservative shill. I don't get wrapped up in peoples' definitions of what we're doing here.

You've said you're not a warrior for anyone's cause. I imagine that you get criticism from both sides.
I reject the idea there are just two sides. I think that with the amount of ideas and thoughts there are, it's not even going to be consistent with the same person. People can hold liberal and conservative dogma points at the same time. They're not living their lives via platforms. They're living their lives. The whole thing is an awfully tired construct.

I'm sorry I asked.
[Laughs.] You didn't make it up. It exists. Unless, are you the guy that invented it? Then this is an entirely different interview.

When you're interviewing someone like [neoconservative former Department of Defense official] Douglas Feith or [National Review Online editor] Jonah Goldberg, and are basically calling bullshit on them, is it difficult to keep yourself under control enough to have a civil conversation?

In trying to have a discussion, there are moments where I probably lose my cool or train of thought. Or my ability to blink. And it's creepy. But I think it's hard to have any conversation that has purpose to it on a talk show in front of an audience with commercial breaks. I think there are probably much better ways to accomplish that. A six-minute interview isn't the best place to make or debunk a case. So what people get are bastardizations of arguments and perversions of discussions. That's what we specialize in.

So you're saying that you shouldn't be doing what you do every night?
The format of the show suits me. But I think that if you're looking for the kind of discussion that's worthwhile to have, this is not the best format for it. I think there are better formats and better people to do that than me [laughs].

Do you find conservative writers are hesitant to go on The Daily Show? Is there anyone that turned you down you wish could have been on?
Oh, I'm sure. You know, it all goes so fast. We have a woman here that's in charge of getting guests. We make requests all the time. And people are out of town, or they don't want to do it or they want you to have lunch with them first, and you end up being like, "fuck that."
But I don't think it's necessarily conservatives who are avoiding the show. We have a pretty good representation there as we do in anything. I just think it's not a comfortable format for a lot of people.

But people have got to sell books, right?
Yeah. I think that's the only reason people come on the show. People have gotta sell books, people gotta get votes. I don't think anybody comes on the show just because they think it looks like fun. Well, every now and then, we get someone deluded.

Has Stephen Colbert taken the heat off you? There was that Rahm Emanuel memo warning Democrats not to go on his show—do you look easier by comparison?
I'm going to let you in on a little secret, here: Stephen's playing a character on his show. He might not admit this himself, but in real life, he's a very sweet, reasonable man. I don't want to blow anything out. I don't know if you want to put that in there. It might not be for public consumption.

Wow. I feel like Bob Woodward.
Exactly. I'm not going to say where you got this information. I'm just telling you. I'm an anonymous source. Take this to the bank.

But has having The Colbert Report on after The Daily Show changed The Daily Show?
We're definitely of the same genetic material. I think there's a nice complementary relationship. In some respects, it works in the way that the more staid news works with the cable-type news. They're parodies that are increasing the reach of the other parties. The shows paint in different colors, but use the same material.

When [Supreme Court Justice] Antonin Scalia called your show "childish," did that smart at all?

I can say this: he's childish. And shut up. No, that doesn't bother me. It does bother me when Antonin Scalia says he doesn't want to discuss cases like Bush. V. Gore anymore because, you know, we should just get over it. That upsets me more than comments that he makes about our show. You can make a better case that our show is childish than he doesn't have to discuss Supreme Court decisions he's made.

Do you see what you just did? You took on the appearance of childishness to make an astute, well-reasoned point. That's something you do on The Daily Show all the time, and that's why it bothers me, as a fan, that he referred to the show as childish.

Here's the difference: I'm thinking about him, but he's not thinking about me. What he said was reflective of nothing other than the glibness. And in some ways it reflects the seriousness with which he should take our show, which is not at all. What we wish he took more seriously are the decisions he made. But I don't think in any way, "How dare he say that, what does he think he's doing?" I get it.

You've been criticized for trying to have it both ways, acting as a media critic and then retreating by saying you're just telling jokes.

I think that stems from how my interviews don't live up to the standards I ask of news people. And what I'd say in response to that, is, "Why should I do their fucking jobs?" I have a job and my job is on Comedy Central. If I took a job at CNN, I think I'd to have a different perspective on what I do. But I don't do a news show.

It's not a news show, but it's pretty newsy.

I'm working with the tools that are the best for me. People would like to place a standard on our show that doesn't exist. We're not set up for reporting; we don't have an apparatus for that. We're discussing things that hopefully people might get something out of, but it's wildly inconsistent. Just because we hit on points that resonate, or people think are real complaints—that doesn't make us journalists.


You're seen as one of the most trusted names in journalism, according to a recent poll. On The Daily Show, you guys talk about how perception dictates reality. Do you think this is one of those cases?
I think we are so far up our own asses about our own importance. I think that people are arguing about something that doesn't matter. The real issue is that TV news can either bring clarity or noise. And it tends to not seem to know the difference between them. ... We do a show that doesn't try to bring noise. I think that we have a more consistent point of view than most news shows, I'll say that.

What's that point of view?
That theater doesn't make for authentic public
discourse. Read more!

Futurama Review

Futurama is Back
The seminal science fiction cartoon returns on DVD
Hartford Advocate Dec. 07, 2007
Futurama returning in any form is great, but a direct-to-DVD version is nearly perfect. The animated show's creators, including Simpsons progenitor Matt Groening, invented a multi-layered television comedy show that looked both backwards and forwards. Steeped in science fiction minutia, the show portrayed a future where every conceivable science fiction scenario had come true, where the incredible is mundane and where everything is possible, but nothing seems to work.

Bender's Big Score, the first of four DVD exclusive Futurama films — they're going to be split up and broadcast as 16 half-hour episodes on Comedy Central in 2008 — is both innovative and antiquated. The format allows them to bypass broadcast television, and include a wealth of special features that reward the obsession the show inspires in its fans (including a full episode of Everyone Loves Hypnotoad, and an equally inscrutably hypnotic Futurama-focused higher math lecture). But considering Blu-ray, Bit Torrent, video iPods and such, DVDs frankly seem like a dying technology. Which is perfect for Futurama.

Even Futurama's biggest fans should acknowledge why the show had limited success in its 72 episode run (seven episodes fewer than the original Star Trek. Or was it? Have at it, nerds.). Certainly it was mishandled by the Fox Network, who shuffled its time slot and ultimately canceled it, but the show had a fundamentally narrow appeal.

It rewarded science fiction literacy, referencing pure mind sugar for geeks like the 1939 World's Fair, Invasion of the Saucer Men and the Grandfather Paradox, but presented them with twitchy, irreverent humor. America just doesn't have the hipster nerd resources to sustain such a project.

There's also a matter of tone. Where the show's most immediate ancestor, The Simpsons, centered on a family and occasionally broke up its nihilism with sentimental warmth, the only mainstream concession Futurama made was the broad humor of an alcoholic misfit robot with criminal tendencies. It might as well have "cult hit" written in binary and Klingon in the opening credits.


Freed from the constraints of pretending to have mass appeal, the Futurama team mine the show's mythology and history for Bender's Big Score, packing the screen with obscure references to past Futurama episodes, and meta-references to the Family Guy (another show retired, then revived by Fox) and South Park. The plot, a giddy mix of Primer-style time-travel anomalies, alien con men and a surprisingly affecting romance, would have been pretty much impossible with broadcast television's constraints on time and ambition.

A lot of it's very funny — I mentioned the alcoholic misfit robot, right? — but more importantly, it's viciously smart. The speculative ideas are precise and fully realized. As the creators explain in the commentary track, every complicated time leap was fully sketched out, and scrutinized for logic and clarity. Time travel paradoxes aren't just acknowledged, they're exploited for punch lines.

If after watching Signs you angrily questioned why an alien race allergic to water would invade a planet with water covering two thirds of its surface, Bender's Big Score will be extremely satisfying. If you never considered that, well, maybe Futurama isn't for you. On the bright side, re-runs of Everybody Loves Raymond are on TV, like, all the time now! Read more!

Sarah Silverman Review

Hartford Advocate Sept. 27, 2007

It can be hard to say why something is funny, but sometimes it's just as difficult describing why something isn't funny. In both instances you run the risk of looking humorless, uptight or obtuse.

Take the curious case of Sarah Silverman, whose Comedy Central show The Sarah Silverman Program is entering its second season. She's a dirty alt comedienne, endorsed by some of the greatest comedy forces of the day (David Cross, Vice Magazine). Respecting publications, from Vanity Fair to The New Yorker, have lavished her with praise. By saying she's not funny, you risk looking like a prude, or someone out of touch with the comedy zeitgeist of the moment.

But Silverman has never been and never will be funny. She's like Jenny McCarthy, except less blonde and more wry. Like McCarthy, Silverman's an avid student of four of the most wretched forms of comedy: fart jokes, fake dumbness, zany faces and bad puns. Of course, The New Yorker would never run a glowing review of McCarthy under the headline "Quiet Depravity."

Of course, she's not exactly Jenny McCarthy. Silverman is good looking, but approachable, so dudes think they have a chance with her and women don't hate her for looking like a cartoon version of sexual attractiveness. But more importantly, Silverman's vapidness is presented ironically. Even when a joke flat-lines — which happens constantly in her stand-up act and television show — it doesn't really flat-line. It was meant to flat-line, and that's the gag.

The fake filth performs the same function. Silverman and her writers seem to believe that a joke doesn't have to be well crafted or even make sense if it has the appearance of being potentially insulting. Let's pick an issue and display horrible taste about it.

It makes for frustrating television. The first episode of the second season of her show contains a key scene where she fondly remembers past abortions. I wasn't insulted. I was impatient, waiting for the jokes to start. A couple of great comic talents are wasted on the show, including Brian Posehn and Jay Johnston, who, like Silverman, got their start on HBO's Mr. Show. They're miscast and typecast, respectively — Posehn's big galoot persona is muted playing a domesticated gay man and Johnston plays an awkward, stiff cop like he did on several Mr. Show sketches and episodes of Arrested Development.

In her stand-up, Silverman acts like an eight-year-old who just learned her first swear word. On the show, she also adopts a faux-naive persona, but adds an unhealthy dollop of faux cluelessness.

It seems like a female variation on Chris Elliot's destructive idiot man-child shtick from Get a Life. That show worked because it was a dark deconstruction of the then-dominant family sitcom genre. The Sarah Silverman Program isn't a parody of anything — it's a platform for absurdist edgeless "edgy" jokes.
Even when the show wades into a deeply fraught issue, like abortion, it's just an excuse for subpar jokes about how clueless Silverman's character is. It's both as subvervise and pleasant as a migraine. Read more!

Sin City Law review

Viva Las Violence
New Sundance documentary series explores the consequences of crime in America's playground
By Adam Bulger
Hartford Advocate September 6, 2007

What happens in Vegas does not always stay in Vegas. Debt, STDs and criminal charges travel. As the new Sundance Channel reality series Sin City Law implies, a more honest marketing campaign for the city of sin might be billing it "the unhappiest place on earth."

The show takes place in the innards of the Clark County criminal court system. The gleaming surface of Las Vegas is present mainly in short shots that cut between scenes, with glitz providing ironic contrast. The eight-part documentary series focuses on four notorious court cases, and while the courthouse is strikingly well designed, the show's primary aesthetic is unadorned honesty.

The series doesn't gradually wade to progressively more intense tragedy, it tosses the viewer into the deep end with the first case, which follows Beau and Monique Maestas, siblings accused of stabbing a three-year-old girl to death and paralyzing the girl's 10-year-old sister in a crystal meth-induced mania.

I don't throw around the word "evil" a lot, but stabbing children over crank? That's pretty much evil distilled to its most petty and human form.

The Maestases seem like Jerry Springer guests, poor and poorly educated, with misplaced priorities and a hair trigger sense of indignity. They're products of a jaw-droppingly awful childhoods, illustrated by the comments their sister makes about family visits to their incarcerated father. Looking at a photograph, she casually says "this is when we visited him and he put his hand up my shirt."

Beau pleads guilty, and, in an attempt to save his sister, claims that he full responsibility for the attack. However, evidence indicates that Monique shared responsibility.

The moral center in this first trial is public defender Alzora Jackson, who represents Monique. A soulful black woman in her 50s, Jackson not only provides Monique the best defense possible, but also helps to pick out an outfit for the accused child murderer to wear during her hearing. She also gives Monique extremely good advice, advice that seems to have unfortunately come several years too late, when she tells Monique that during the trial "you have to control your impulses."



Interspersing news footage and images from newspaper articles, Sin City Law touches on the darkness at the center of the modern soul more than any reality show. The series is an onslaught of pure sober truth. In the second case, Pascual Lozano's mother puzzles over why her surrogate son would rather be executed than rat out his fellow gang members during his trial for the 2002 murder of a 9-year-old girl.

The crimes of Sin City Law aren't reenacted or illustrated with fancy graphics or edits. Sin City Law is mostly set in courts. The bare bones presentation of emotional subject matter makes the show all the more effective. Attorneys argue the fate of a murder in a back room of the court where cameras weren't allowed. Instead, they film a woman wiping computer screens with the attorney's conversation playing as an audio track. It's a surreal and chilling moment. Read more!

Lil' Bush Review

Bush Bash
The decider-in-chief rendered as a shrimpy little cartoon on Comedy Central
By Adam Bulger
Hartford Advocate, June 21, 2007

It's weird. People talk about Comedy Central cartoon Lil' Bush like it's an audacious gut punch to the president. While the show's not without its charms, it's far from revolutionary. Bush is as popular as salmonella right now. Mocking him almost smacks of lazy writing. It's Leno territory.

Nobody thinks of Bush as the megaphone-toting cowboy standing on rubble on 9-12 anymore. He's the strutting idiot in the "mission accomplished" flight suit. Sure, it's interesting there's a whole animated TV show devoted to mocking him, but it would be a lot cooler if it was better.

The show's central conceit — portraying Bush and his staff as toddlers — is its biggest problem. First, it's confusing. Bush 41 is in office in the show, yet references to current events — like Bush 43's war in Iraq — are referenced constantly.

Many of the gags are predicated on juxtaposing the Bush administration against the formulas of cartoon shows, which doesn't work. The first episode features an extended Josie and the Pussycats-style musical scene that's more distracting than funny. Adult Swim has been on TV for six years — does anyone in America still think Hanna-Barbera parodies are clever? I was shouting at the TV, demanding more Abu Graib references.

All of which would be fine if the show was more precise. The cartoon features a Donald Rumsfeld character, six months after his real life counterpart was shitcanned. Voiced by Iggy Pop, Lil' Rummy is Lil' Bush's most trusted advisor — couldn't the Godfather of punk voice a larval version of Karl Rove instead? Meanwhile, Jeb Bush, the brightest of Herbert Walker's awful spawn, is portrayed as a feral manchild. Lil' Bush at one point chastises the Condoleeza Rice character for using fuzzy math, a reference to a seven-year-old presidential debate. Even worse, there's a tepid Monica Lewinsky gag dating back to the Mesozoic era.

Lacking cutting edge South Park style topicality, the show falls back on gross-out humor. In the second episode, Lil' Cheney not only has sex with Barbara Bush, he gets lodged inside her uterus afterwards. Maybe that's water cooler fodder, but it's a cheap gag that detracts from the smarter jokes the show occasionally attempts.

Lil' Bush isn't the first time Comedy Central show devoted to mocking G Dubs. That's My Bush, produced by South Park's Matt Stone and Trey Parker, aired on the network in the spring and summer of 2001. Starring a befuddled-looking Timothy Bottoms as Bush, the show was a satire of sitcoms, not politics. It featured a sassy maid, and a Larry Dallas-style wacky neighbor. Bottoms reprised the roll, minus the 30-yard stare, in the 2003 hagiographic made-for-television movie DC 9/11: Time of Crisis.

It's unlikely that anything from Lil' Bush would likewise be re-purposed as praise for the decider in chief. But in order for the show to succeed as the comedic assault on Bush it's intended to be, it needs to evolve into a much darker beast.

There are some inspired riffs, particularly showing Baghdad's Green Zone as a scene out of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. Also, even though the Lil' Bush's character utters his fair share of malapropisms, his most prominent character trait is misplaced self-assuredness, not stupidity. The character believes his own bullshit — there's a perfect moment when he declares his love for tatter tots, pauses slightly and says "decisive."

That's a joke worth being jealous of. More of that, please. Read more!