Jon Stewart (The Daily Show host, 1999-2015): 
 
 My wildest dream for The Daily Show when I started was “This will be fun. Hopefully we’ll do it well.” Success for me would’ve been feeling like I figured it out. That I got to express the things I wanted to. It was never “I want this to be a cultural touchstone . . . but only for a very small portion of America.” And I was hoping to stay on TV longer than nine months this time. 
 
 The Daily Show premiered on Comedy Central on July 22, 1996, at 11:30 P.M. The format loosely tracked that of a conventional newscast: five or so opening minutes called “Headlines,” read by former ESPN anchor Craig Kilborn, followed by “Other News,” then usually a pre-taped “field piece” with a correspondent, and finishing up with Kilborn interviewing an actor or a musician. 
 
 Some segments played off the hard news of the day, like the presidential contest between Bob Dole and Bill Clinton. “There was more of a pop-culture-and-lifestyle component only because what we were satirizing—particularly local news—was doing a lot of that stuff,” co-creator Lizz Winstead says. “We would make fun of the conventions of news. Like when TV reporters talk, how do you create drama in a story that doesn’t exist?” 
 
 The day-to-day creative process of the first few years of The Daily Show centered on Winstead, fellow co-creator Madeleine Smithberg, and the writing staff. “My first day on the job,” Winstead says, “I have to pull the writers into my office and say, ‘Guys, you can’t have your mushroom dealer come up to the office.’ ” Kilborn came up with the signature “Five Questions” conceit for guest interviews, but otherwise largely read from the script. 
 
 In November 1996, Comedy Central’s executives moved The Daily Show to 11 P.M., to replace Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect, which had jumped to ABC, but also to counter-program the late local news. 
 
 Kilborn’s Daily Show would peak at a nightly average of 357,000, yet Kilborn’s audience was growing, and the show was generating critical buzz. Perhaps more important than the chatter was the fact that it was indeed reaching the younger male viewers Comedy Central president Doug Herzog had targeted in the first place. The combination caught the attention of CBS, and in 1998 it offered Kilborn the slot following Late Night with David Letterman, at 12:30 A.M. 
 
 “He starts to get a little heat, we’re starting to get a little attention with The Daily Show,” Herzog says, “and then the next thing you know Kilborn goes and signs with CBS without even telling us.” 
 
 Panic, followed by auditions: David Alan Grier, Michael McKean, Greg Proops, Bill Weir, and Mike Rowe came to the studio and sat in the host’s chair. Daily Show correspondents Beth Littleford and Stephen Colbert got tryouts, too. But Herzog and other Comedy Central executives wondered about a black-leather-jacket-wearing stand-up comic, a guy who had hosted a short-lived MTV talk show produced by Smithberg. He had lost out to Conan O’Brien as Letterman’s NBC replacement; he had written a book of satirical essays; he had played Eve Harrington to Garry Shandling’s Margo Channing on The Larry Sanders Show; and lately he’d had some supporting roles in Hollywood rom-coms. Herzog didn’t think the highly regarded, slightly adrift comedian would be interested in the job. But, hey, what did he have to lose in buying lunch for Jon Stewart? 
 
 From The Neal Peters Collection. 
 
 JAMES DIXON (manager for Jon Stewart, 1987-): 
 
 After The Jon Stewart Show was canceled, he was . . . not burnt on being on TV, but he wanted to kind of wet his feet with film. We had this nice deal with Harvey Weinstein. 
 
 JON STEWART: At the time, I was obviously making my mark in such films as Wishful Thinking and Dancing with Architecture, or Dancing About . . . Oh, no. They ended up calling it something else. Playing by Heart, I think it was. 
 
 Getting fired from the talk show was the real turning point for me. Because I thought that, after appearing on Letterman, now I’m a made man. I thought losing The Jon Stewart Show meant I was an unmade man. I realized you still have to make your act better. The goal is to produce, the goal is to make things. So I spent some time writing and performing on The Larry Sanders Show, and I learned a lot from Garry Shandling. 
 
 JUDD APATOW (stand-up comic, writer, director): 
 
 Garry had the foresight to write about the talk-show wars and this very subtle aspect of it, which is you support a young comedian, and slowly the network likes him more than it likes you, and then that younger guy, in ways that he understands and might not understand, slowly pushes you out of your job. Similar to what really happened with Leno and Conan and Fallon. So there was a moment when Garry was considering continuing The Larry Sanders Show and changing the name of it to The John Stewart Show, with an h so it wouldn’t really be Jon. Everyone was excited about it for a while, but it went away. 
 
 JON STEWART: The Daily Show wasn’t necessarily on the radar. I think they called and said, “Hey, man, would you be interested in talking about this?”—something along those lines, something as romantic as that. 
 
 JAMES DIXON: I definitely advocated for him to do it. I just said to him, “You can put this through your prism. You can make it smarter and different than what it’s been.” Now, I definitely didn’t see the show becoming the political lightning rod that it evolved into. 
 
 DOUG HERZOG (executive, MTV, 1984-95; president, Comedy Central, 1995-98; executive, Viacom, 2004-): 
 
 In the summer of ‘98, when we announced that Jon was going to take over The Daily Show, we had a little press conference in the lobby of the old Comedy Central offices. And Stephen Colbert showed up, as a member of the press representing The Daily Show, wanting to know why he didn’t get the job. 
 
 STEPHEN COLBERT (correspondent, 1997-2005): 
 
 “You told me he wasn’t funny.” That’s what Jon said to Doug Herzog. 
 
 MATT LABOV (publicist for Jon Stewart, 1994-2008): 
 
 The stakes for Jon were fairly high at that point, because he’s not a super-young guy anymore, and he’s had shots, and people easily disappear and go into the woodwork. He didn’t get the Conan job on NBC; he didn’t get the 12:30 job after Letterman. If this doesn’t work on fucking cable, then where would Jon have ended up? 
 
 JON STEWART: A couple of months before I officially started as host there was a meeting with the writers and producers. Let’s call that “Jonny’s surprise party.” I knew that the people working on the Kilborn show were rightfully proud of it. It had done well. It was not the sensibility that I thought was right for me, and so when they approached me for the show, I was pretty clear about the direction I thought I wanted to take it. Seemed like everybody was on board with that, and so this was my first chance to meet with all the people who, I had been told, were so excited about that. So excited. They’re so happy you’re here. 
 
 And I walked in, and it was a room full of people who, as it turned out, were annoyed that I had an idea about where I wanted to go, who thought that I was going to MTV it up. I was told, “This isn’t about bands. We do a real show here.” I just sat there like “Oh, fuck.” It felt a little bit like “Wow, none of this was in the brochure. The brochure said that this was oceanfront property.” 
 
 JAMES DIXON: I had to talk Jon down. Not from a tree—from a skyscraper. Because they basically said to him, “Welcome aboard. This is how we do shit here. Grab a chair.” It was bullshit. 
 
 PAUL RUDD (actor): 
 
 Technically I was Jon’s first Daily Show guest interview. I went to the University of Kansas, and my roommate, Stewart Bailey, became a segment producer who was with the show from the very beginning. I’d been on Kilborn’s Daily Show. When Jon replaced Craig, they wanted to do a test show so Jon could get used to the format. 
 
 Stewart made his debut on Monday, January 11, 1999. His first joke was that Kilborn was “on assignment in Kuala Lumpur.” His first headline, “The Final Blow,” was about the Senate impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. His first guest was Michael J. Fox, then starring on ABC’s Spin City. But Stewart looked, for the first months, very much the guest himself. Other than a new couch and desktop—and blue script pages for Stewart to scribble on portentously, replacing Kilborn’s white paper—the set design was largely unchanged. The theme song, Bob Mould’s “Dog on Fire,” was the same. And Stewart’s suits were so ill-fitting that they looked like they were inherited from his much taller predecessor. 
 
 By Mike Blake/Reuters. 
 
 JUSTIN MELKMANN (post-production supervisor; segment producer; later supervising producer, video department; 1997-): 
 
 During the Kilborn era, it was about “How can we seem like we’ve gone too far?” With Jon, we went from creating the news—creating funny spoof headlines—to making fun of the news. That was a big change. 
 
 MO ROCCA (correspondent, 1998-2003): 
 
 Shortly after Jon arrived, we had done a bit about Dana Plato dying, and Jon felt bad about delivering a joke when the end of her life had been so pathetic. We had a meeting where he said he had resolved that the show needed to have a point of view and couldn’t just be the kid at the back of the classroom throwing spitballs in all directions. I remember people trading the kind of glances that said, “Oh shit, this is going to be a disaster.” 
 
 JON STEWART: To be fair to the writers who stayed from Kilborn’s show, they had a successful thing going. They thought of it as a continuation of their show. I thought it was a new show. To me it wasn’t edgy or provocative to just take napalm to a bush for no reason. You wanted it to be pointed, purposeful, intentional, surgical. 
 
 I felt like I walked in there with a very open “O.K., so this will be great,” and it was “Hey, motherfucker, you came here to kill a baby.” 
 
 KENT JONES (writer, 1996-2001): 
 
 Well, I would not agree with that. I don’t remember any of this being as hostile as it has been portrayed. I just don’t. 
 
 MADELEINE SMITHBERG (co-creator; executive producer, 1996-2002): 
 
 Because of the point of view that had been created by Craig Kilborn sitting in the chair, the writers’ role had inflated. Yeah, they were spoiled rotten, because almost every show in late night is talent driven. They got too big for their britches. 
 
 JON STEWART: Six or eight weeks in, the writers called me into their office. They’re like, “You can’t change our jokes anymore.” I didn’t know what to say. 
 
 So after a weekend of pacing and smoking and having tremendous Lincoln-Douglas debates on the couch by myself, I went back in, and it was horrible. I basically told them all to fuck off. “You work for me. And if you don’t like the direction, O.K. I get that. Don’t work here.” 
 
 “THERE WERE POINTS WHERE I THOUGHT . . . I’VE GOT TO LEAVE,” SAYS STEWART OF THE EARLY TURMOIL. 
 
 There were points where I thought, I made the wrong decision. I’ve got to leave. But I don’t give up very easily. It was open hostility, which is so enjoyable. It became that sense of “O.K., let’s arm-wrestle.” This will give you a hint of my personality of grudges. 
 
 I didn’t really have a game plan. I knew what I didn’t want. But then turning it into what you did want was the next scenario, and that was going to take time, and effort, and accomplices. What I needed most were accomplices. 
 
 BEN KARLIN (head writer, later executive producer, 1999-2006): 
 
 I was living in Los Angeles, working with a bunch of guys from The Onion, selling pilots and doing punch-up on movies. We did a pilot for Fox called Deadline Now, at about the same time The Daily Show was launching. We kind of did the exact opposite. We didn’t want to be winking at the audience. We wanted to play it straight and not really acknowledge we were a comedy show. We hired actors and went about trying to produce a news show that was very much in the spirit of the Onion newspaper. And, frankly, we were quite scornful of the Kilborn Daily Show. 
 
 Our template host, when we’d come up with show ideas, was always Jon Stewart. We loved Jon Stewart. So when it was announced that Jon was taking over The Daily Show, our little comedy-snob nerd group thought it was a bad move. For him. Comedy Central was still pretty second-tier, and that might even be nice. And Jon was the Letterman heir apparent. 
 
 I got a call from my agent saying, “Listen, Jon is looking for a new head writer, loves The Onion, has heard that you’re kind of the de facto leader of the Onion guys’ group out in L.A. Would you be willing to come out to New York and meet with them?” 
 
 JON STEWART: I really liked his sensibility. Ben seemed to be concerned with hypocrisy and the silly façades of politics. He seemed to know where the absurdity was, and that was an important change in focus for what we wanted to do. There’s also a certain steeped-in-neurosis bathos that probably was a rhythm that we both clicked on. That similar Jewie Jewerman from Jewville. 
 
 The big thing was to find somebody who had thoughts, who cared, who had an opinion. Part of what The Onion is, and part of what Ben was steeped in, was the idea of deconstruction as your first step of re-creation. So Ben was a natural fit, although he had not had the TV experience. 
 
 From Comedy Central. 
 
 BEN KARLIN: I was friendly with Bob Odenkirk and David Cross. They were kind of like the grand Pooh-Bahs of the alternative-comedy scene in L.A.—Sarah Silverman, Janeane Garofalo, Patton Oswalt. It was that whole wave of comics. Bob and David said The Daily Show sounded like a great opportunity. So I sublet my apartment, sold my Harley, found someone to take my dog for a while, and came to New York with three duffel bags. 
 
 JON STEWART: Ben walked into a buzz saw. 
 
 BEN KARLIN: I’m not going to talk shit about anybody. But the staff had its allegiances, and the things that they liked to do, and the way they liked to do it. Now you’ve got this guy, Jon, who is a writer, who has a strong point of view. 
 
 LIZZ WINSTEAD (co-creator; head writer, correspondent, 1996-1998): 
 
 As much as I loved the original writers, I created some little monsters. Once Jon realized he needed to take charge, you can’t afford to have people who are not in the Jon Stewart business. And so there’s a bit of Kool-Aid drinking that has to take place. 
 
 Karlin arrived as head writer in April 1999 and quickly formed a complementary duo with Stewart. Karlin pushed for a higher quotient of righteous anger in The Daily Show’s jokes; Stewart had an innate sense of what would get big laughs. 
 
 BEN KARLIN: We were very kindred spirits, with very similar points of view, and my critique of the show was very much in line with his problems with the show: Why are we going after these helpless targets? Maybe we should focus the power of this kind of big news show on things that are actually newsworthy, rather than just look through the paper for what seems funny. 
 
 Clashes, pitting Stewart and Karlin against some of the holdover Kilborn writers, would flare for the next year, with one confrontation—which became known inside the show as “the fuck-you meeting”—being leaked to the New York Post’s “Page Six.” 
 
 JON STEWART: I think that was the meeting where I said, “You’re not a group. You’re not a unit. You’re not ‘the writers.’ You’re individual writers that have been hired, and you will be judged within that.” It was just an attempt to reclaim some semblance of order. It was an absolute flat-out power struggle, but one that I felt blindsided by. 
 
 BEN KARLIN: At one point during the battle for the heart and soul of the show, one of the writers snuck into Madeleine’s office and replaced some of the items on the board that tracks the stories we’re doing with personal insults. Some of them were about me; some were about other people. It was the most juvenile thing in the world. Jon and I used to have this thing: crazy out, sane in. We wanted to try to build a show of smart, funny, reasonable people with a similar vision who were hard workers. 
 
 An enormous step in that direction was Karlin’s first addition to the writing staff: a dizzyingly fast-thinking, cheerfully caustic 27-year-old who would become a major figure in the creative life of The Daily Show. 
 
 DAVID JAVERBAUM (writer, later executive producer, 1999-2010): 
 
 I’d gone to Harvard and written for the Lampoon and Hasty Pudding, then I went to graduate school for musical-theater composition, at N.Y.U. It’s arguably the most useless master’s degree even by master’s-degree standards. I had a lot of creative things I was interested in, but I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was temping for three years at law firms and Merrill Lynch. 
 
 I knew Ben Karlin from a teen tour that we were on together, the thing where Jewish middle-class kids go around the country and pretend to rough it for six weeks. Ben, after college at Wisconsin, wound up working at The Onion, and he said, “Do you want to contribute?” So I began writing a lot of Onion headlines and some articles, and I had the idea for the book Our Dumb Century. 
 
 Then I spent a year at Letterman as a writer, and I hated that. Not the people, per se, but it all comes from the top down, and Letterman, even at that point, which was ‘98 to ‘99, was just a detached, aloof figure who would stay there for, like, 13 hours a day for no reason. And I quit. I was making six figures. I’d never made the upper half of five before, but it just was not worth it. It was crushing my soul. 
 
 Ben was hired as the head writer for The Daily Show, and once again he called me and said, “Are you interested in writing?” So I owe Ben for both of those opportunities. I think I was Ben’s first writing hire, in July 1999. 
 
 BEN KARLIN: D.J. has genius-like qualities, almost to the point where—it’s not Asperger-y, because he’s a funny, normal guy. But the way he can hold information, the speed with which his mind works, it’s almost like he’s got a broken brain that works really well in this way. I’ve known him since he was 16 years old. He always was like this. 
 
 Usually in a writers’ room you know that this guy is my joke guy, that one is my story guy, that’s my structure person. And D.J. has the ability to pitch individual jokes that are funny; he can come up with overarching structures that are funny; he can take over someone’s script and make it better. 
 
 In Karlin, and now Javerbaum, Stewart had hired invaluable off-camera allies. But he quickly recognized that he had inherited an indispensable on-camera co-conspirator. Stephen Colbert had a subversive streak that was greatly abetted by the fact that he looked like a trustworthy middle-American insurance salesman. 
 
 By Al Levine/Comedy Central. 
 
 STEPHEN COLBERT: It was a complete happy accident that I ended up at The Daily Show. I had been working for ABC at The Dana Carvey Show in 1996. That show got canceled, my wife wasn’t working, and we had a baby. I desperately needed a job. Someone from the entertainment division recommended to the news division that if they were looking for somebody who was funny but looked really straight, for a correspondent for Good Morning America, that they should consider me. They hired me. I did exactly two reports. Only one of which ever made it to air. 
 
 After those two reports, I pitched 20 stories in a row that got shot down. At the same time, my agent, James Dixon, who also represented Madeleine Smithberg, said, “You should meet with Madeleine. She’s doing this other show, and I bet that they would do those stories.” They had me on for a trial basis, and for the next nine months I worked at The Daily Show occasionally, during Craig Kilborn’s second year. But it was totally a day job. I never expected to stay, because I did sketch comedy and I wrote, and I really didn’t think that The Daily Show was going to go anyplace. 
 
 JON STEWART: The first bit Stephen did on the show after I arrived, I think it was something about baby-back ribs. You could just feel: “This guy knows how to perform in a scene, is present, has an ease with language.” The key then was “What do we do with that?” 
 
 STEPHEN COLBERT: I don’t really know why Jon and I worked together so well. It’s hard to quantify, but it happened very early. When Jon first got there, he had a rough ride with some of the people who had worked with Craig. But I immediately knew he was a guy I should listen to. I saw how thoughtful he wanted to be about political comedy and how he invited us to have our own thoughts, invest the jokes with our own beliefs. And maybe he thought he could trust me. 
 
 Changing the lineup of correspondents and contributors, the on-air faces of the show, was crucial, if less contentious. A. Whitney Brown and Brian Unger left when Kilborn did; Colbert, Rocca, Beth Littleford, Frank DeCaro, and Stacey Grenrock Woods stayed on. Stewart’s first correspondent addition was Vance DeGeneres. Then Colbert helped recruit another major talent. 
 
 STEVE CARELL (correspondent, 1999-2003): 
 
 I got a call from Stephen Colbert. He and I were on The Dana Carvey Show together in the spring of 1996, and one of the sketches that we did was called “Waiters Who Are Nauseated by Food.” And Madeleine Smithberg, who had hired Stephen onto The Daily Show, saw that and asked who I was—asked Stephen—and then Stephen called me and said, “Would you be interested maybe in doing a field piece?” And then Madeleine called and followed up and asked if I’d do a field piece out here in Los Angeles. Nancy [Walls Carell] and I were living out here at the time, and I had a holding deal with ABC. So we were just watching a lot of the Game Show Network. 
 
 “I REALLY DIDN’T THINK The Daily Show WAS GOING TO GO ANYPLACE,” SAYS COLBERT. 
 
 We decided to stage the field piece right underneath the HOLLYWOOD sign, up in the Hills, and that I was going to do the walk-and-talk as I was essentially walking up the side of a mountain, and obviously play up the fact that I was really out of shape, that it was a very bad correspondent to have chosen for a walk-and-talk. 
 
 Apparently Madeleine really liked that moment within the piece and thought that that was a good choice. They asked if I’d move out to New York and be a regular on The Daily Show. 
 
 No one was really familiar with this show. My agent didn’t see it as a positive step in my career. Let’s put it that way. They just saw it as a little nothing cable show. A job, but nothing that was going to amount to much. Jon had just become the host about six months before. 
 
 JON STEWART: Carell, I knew very little about him. These guys didn’t come from stand-up. I knew stand-ups. I knew Dave Attell, I knew Lewis Black. I did not know Vance, Mo, Steve, Stephen. 
 
 BEN KARLIN: So much of the writing of The Daily Show actually comes down to brainstorming and coming up with the big-picture ideas. Once we started realizing what an incredible tool Carell and Colbert were, we said we’ve got to bring more of that into the studio. Let’s not just see them once a week or once every two weeks in a field piece. Let’s get both those guys on the show several times a week in one form or another. They’re too talented. 
 
 What Stewart and his colleagues could not have known was that they had arrived at the perfect moment, with the media and political worlds on the cusp of upheaval. When Stewart first sat behind the fake anchor desk, the anchors of the real news were still a trio of white male eminences: Tom Brokaw at NBC, Peter Jennings at ABC, and Dan Rather at CBS. But the network news hegemony had been rattled by the arrival of CNN, and especially by its coverage of the 1990 Gulf War. Now Fox News and MSNBC—both launched, coincidentally, within months of The Daily Show’s 1996 debut—were rapidly expanding their footprints on cable systems. Soon the Internet would flatten the traditional TV news industry. And a wised-up, postmodern generation of viewers was hungry for what The Daily Show would soon deliver. 
 
 The turn of the century was also a boom time for network newsmagazines. NBC was airing Dateline five nights a week. ABC had 20/20 and Primetime; CBS had 48 Hours. Syndicated shows including Inside Edition added an even cheesier, tabloid flair to the genre. The TV-newsmagazine formula—leaning heavily on sensationalized crime stories, breathless celebrity profiles, and consumer-product scares—was ripe for parody. As were the self-serious anchor-reporter stars of TV newsmagazines: the style of The Daily Show’s correspondents drew special inspiration from the overinflated gravitas of Dateline’s Stone Phillips. 
 
 MADELEINE SMITHBERG: I always say that Stone Phillips deserves a “created by” credit for The Daily Show, because I was obsessed with the guy, and we studied him. 
 
 RORY ALBANESE (production assistant, later executive producer, 1999-2013): 
 
 Colbert will tell you his character for years was just Stone Phillips. 
 
 In the Kilborn era, field-department pieces frequently featured obscure eccentrics—say, a man who pulled his own teeth and replaced them with driveway gravel. Those kinds of bits didn’t go away immediately under Stewart. 
 
 KAHANE CORN COOPERMAN (field producer, later co-executive producer, 1996-2015): 
 
 I produced a field piece, with Stacey Grenrock Woods as the correspondent, about a guy, Alexander P., who had been a rock star in Ukraine and came here and was now a waiter in a hotel restaurant in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This piece may well have been in the works before Jon arrived. But it airs, and after the show you have a postmortem. And Jon was not happy. He said, “Your targets are just wrong. They shouldn’t be people on the fringe. Our targets need to be the people who have a voice, and that’s politicians, and that’s the media.” 
 
 STACEY GRENROCK WOODS (correspondent, 1998-2003): 
 
 I heard Jon was very unhappy with that piece, and I don’t blame him at all. I didn’t like it, either, but it was given to me. I think it ended up being a policy-changing piece. 
 
 STEVE CARELL: The correspondents had their own little thing going on with the field pieces. Jon left it up to us in terms of what sort of characters we were developing. 
 
 I saw my character as a former local-news anchor who had been demoted to reporting on a nondescript cable news show and was a little bitter about it. Everyone to a certain degree had different variations on blowhard or idiot reporter. But I mean, let’s face it—we didn’t know what we were doing. 
 
 NANCY WALLS CARELL (correspondent, 1999-2002): 
 
 No. 
 
 STEVE CARELL: None of us are correspondents. None of us have backgrounds in journalism. 
 
 NANCY WALLS CARELL: Mo was pretty knowledgeable, actually. 
 
 STEPHEN COLBERT: There was a very specific way we were supposed to present ourselves when we set up field pieces: “I’m from The Daily Show.” “What’s The Daily Show?” “Well, it’s an alternative news-and-entertainment program.” “What channel is it on?” “Well, I don’t know what channel it is where you live. Where we live it’s Channel 29.” Anything other than saying the words “Comedy Central.” We were never allowed to lie, but let’s not advertise we were on Comedy Central, because not being a famous show was really useful to us in the early days. 
 
 I was the first correspondent to be sued. After a piece ran, a guy claimed I claimed I was from CNN. I never said that. But if you make a man comedically look like Hitler and it turns out that he is a retired lawyer with a lot of time on his hands, you’re going to get sued. That’s the lesson for today, children. 
 
 STEVE CARELL: The field pieces with eccentrics and oddballs, those were uncomfortable. For all of us. I almost didn’t . . . I won’t say I almost didn’t do the show, but I had some major reservations about doing it for exactly that reason, because I didn’t like the idea of making fun of people only because they were eccentric or different, and . . . 
 
 NANCY WALLS CARELL: Duping them. 
 
 STEVE CARELL: Yeah. Shooting fish in a barrel is easy. When you go after someone who is intolerant or racist or has any sort of hateful nature, that’s a different story. I think that’s fair game. So part of what I tried to do with my character is put the impetus on myself, the comedic impetus, that I was the bigger idiot. 
 
 During his first year as host Stewart devoted far more energy to retooling the staff and the process inside the building. But it was the field department, in a series of excursions to New Hampshire to “cover” the presidential primaries, that really began pointing The Daily Show’s tone and point of view in a new direction. Initially intimidated by the straight political media pack, correspondents Rocca, Walls Carell, DeGeneres, and Carell played jester. 
 
 Photograph by Annie Leibovitz. 
 
 STEVE CARELL: When we went up to the first Republican debate we had our jackets with “The Daily Show” embroidered on them, and we’re walking around with microphones. It was terrifying because people didn’t know that we were fake. So we could get away with a lot of stuff. Bush looked at us like we were insane. 
 
 CINDY McCAIN (wife of Senator John McCain): 
 
 All of a sudden there were these guys in these crazy jackets, popping up at campaign events, and nobody knew who they were. But they were funny. 
 
 STEW BAILEY (field producer, later co-executive producer, 1996-2005): 
 
 There was a Republican debate in New Hampshire, so we were going to do a piece from the spin room. And the spin room even then was acknowledged as the least newsworthy event of all time. Our premise was that it’s essentially a parlor game, and if that’s the case, let’s really turn it into a parlor game. I had each of the correspondents asking questions from Trivial Pursuit to the candidates. 
 
 MO ROCCA: All of us were nervous as hell, and so I just went for it: “Senator McCain, who became the hottest pop star to come out of Iceland in the mid-1990s?” 
 
 STEW BAILEY: Immediately our other correspondents start yelling, “Don’t skirt the question, Senator! You have to answer!” 
 
 MO ROCCA: And McCain showed why he almost upended George W. Bush in that race, because he played along, making this silly face. I remember the CNN people looking at us like, “O.K., that was funny. But who are you guys?” 
 
 JON STEWART: When we went up to New Hampshire we were under the mistaken assumption that we had to integrate ourselves with the political media’s process and become them to parody them. Turns out we didn’t have to do that. We had thought, Oh, you’re a political reporter on television, which must mean something. Turns out it doesn’t mean anything. All it means is that somebody pointed a camera at you and lit it. So that was a revelation, and not a positive one. 
 
 Then, in December 1999, came a breakthrough—a five-minute segment that pushed past the silly and into the satirical. Carell climbed onto McCain’s bus and changed the entire trajectory of The Daily Show. 
 
 STEW BAILEY: Remember, McCain that year was a huge deal. He won the New Hampshire primary. That was really his moment. And his big gimmick was his bus, the Straight Talk Express. 
 
 I was supervising in the field department. Our idea was that we were trying to get on the Straight Talk Express, but we couldn’t. There was a secondary press bus. If you’re in the rollover bus you just don’t feel like you matter. So the premise was going to be: if Steve Carell finally does get on the Straight Talk Express, that means we were at the table with all the big important players. To get on McCain’s bus was a coup for us; it meant that somebody was going to allow us to bring our reindeer games into a legitimate political moment. 
 
 CINDY McCAIN: The actual press bus, which was completely different from ours, was really awful, in fact. Steve Carell was talking about, did we feed the press, or did we just lock them in the bus? They were pleading with me—is there any way I can get them on the main bus? They were a hoot to be around, so John invited them on the Straight Talk Express. 
 
 STEW BAILEY: We needed to then have Carell basically ask one question that is going to get us kicked off. The idea was going to be we had a brief moment of glory, we asked a question, and then we lost our privileges. 
 
 STEVE CARELL:) [On board the Straight Talk Express, reading from a legal pad as McCain grins.] Let’s do a lightning round: your favorite book? 
 
 SENATOR JOHN McCAIN: For Whom the Bell Tolls. 
 
 STEVE CARELL: Favorite movie? 
 
 McCAIN: Viva Zapata! 
 
 CARELL: Charlton Heston? 
 
 McCAIN: Marlon Brando. 
 
 CARELL: Close enough. If I were a tree, I would be a . . . 
 
 McCAIN: If I were a tree, I would be a root. [Pause.] What does that mean? 
 
 CARELL: Senator, how do you reconcile the fact that you were one of the most vocal critics of pork-barrel politics and yet while you were chairman of the Commerce Committee that committee set a record for unauthorized appropriations? [Four seconds of silence that feel like four hours.] I was just kidding! I don’t even know what that means! [McCain looks at ceiling, shrugs in relief, awkwardly slaps hand to his own face. Carell shuffles sheepishly down the bus stairs and out the door, then stands on a highway median.] Oh, they all laughed at my little question. But two things were abundantly clear. It was the wrong question to ask, and I was going to be walking. 
 
 STEW BAILEY: Carell and Nick McKinney, the producer, had pulled the question out of Time on the way there, driving to the shoot. Just the fact that Steve Carell can get those words out of his mouth and that it sounded like something a smart person would say really threw McCain off. There was such a delay. 
 
 STEVE CARELL: It was really funny because all of McCain’s handlers . . . you could feel the whole bus tense up. I thought McCain might just laugh it off, or probably give me some sort of joke response. 
 
 BEN KARLIN: I remember seeing it in the editing room. I remember Jon called me down, and seeing it and thinking, Yeah, this is what we should be doing. This is the goal. It was one of Carell’s most incredible moments. He asks McCain a question in a way that no journalists were talking to the candidates. And it was like, Oh shit, we are able, in this weird, unintentional way, to add a level of insight to the process that doesn’t exist. That was really, really exciting. It meets the standard of being funny; it meets the standard of being relevant. 
 
 JOHN McCAIN (U.S. senator, Arizona, 1987-; Republican presidential nominee, 2008): 
 
 That was great. I still remember Steve Carell on the bus. I was certainly aware of Jon and the show early on, and knew they would try to have some fun with us. I wanted to be funny. I wanted these young people to know that I’m a guy with a sense of humor. I’m not some dull, dry, old senator. 
 
 BEN KARLIN: That moment, it was the beauty and the weakness of The Daily Show. You had this incredibly pregnant moment where you forced a politician to go off-book, and it was uncomfortable, and it was honest. Then, because of our role as a comedy show, you have to take the air out of it, and it let McCain off the hook. 
 
 STEVE CARELL: Yeah, to press it—we really hadn’t set ourselves up in that context to start going after him. It was making fun of a gotcha moment. And I think that a lot of what we do on The Daily Show is making fun of journalistic tropes, and I think that was one of them. 
 
 MO ROCCA: That was the first time we were in The New York Times—in a news-analysis piece, not the TV column. 
 
 JON STEWART: The real revelation for the show, covering the 2000 campaign, was that before everything that happens publicly in politics there’s a meeting—so what’s that meeting? That’s what’s interesting. It always struck me as “We’re always covering the wrong thing. We’re always covering the appearance, but we’re never covering that meeting.” When you watch that pack of cameras follow a presidential candidate, you go, “That’s not interesting. What’s interesting is to stand behind them and watch that,” because then you learn a little bit about the process. 
 
 That’s when the idea of deconstructing the process came to the fore of how we were going to make the show. Before, it was just . . . we were making jokes. Some of them were insightful; some of them were not. The show came to exist in the space between what they’re telling you in public and the meeting that they had where they decided to do it that way. Seeing that was the aha of “That’s the show.” 
 
 CINDY McCAIN: I still have those jackets, by the way. I talked them out of their big New Hampshire jackets. They were around John so much, and I finally said, “Look, these jackets are too good. I’ve got to get one from you, please.” They gave them to me. It’s a great souvenir. 
 
 Adapted from The Daily Show (The Book): An Oral History as Told by Jon Stewart, the Correspondents, Staff and Guests, by Chris Smith, with a foreword by Jon Stewart, to be published this month by Grand Central Publishing; © 2016 by Busboy Productions. ||||| 1 of 26 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Jon Stewart leaves ‘The Daily Show’ View Photos After 16 years on ‘The Daily Show,’ Jon Stewart has departed. Caption After 16 years on ‘The Daily Show,’ Jon Stewart has departed. Nov. 30, 2011 Jon Stewart is seen on stage during a taping of "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" in New York. Brad Barket/AP Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue. 
 
 UPDATED: 
 
 Jon Stewart, who pushed political comedy into a new realm with a show that relayed news by parodying the news, will leave “The Daily Show” later this year after 16 years at the helm, Comedy Central announced Tuesday night. 
 
 To a younger generation of viewers who stopped watching network news, his late-night “fake” news show — which particularly delighted in skewering politicians and the media — made him a trusted messenger to millions. 
 
 [Here’s how Jon Stewart told “The Daily Show" audience he’s stepping down] 
 
 Since its launch with Stewart as host — he took over the program in 1999 from Craig Kilborn — “The Daily Show” has routinely racked up awards. It won the outstanding variety series Emmy for 10 years in a row. 
 
 Stewart, 52, who often emphasized that he is a comedian rather than a news anchor, truly made his mark during the 2000 presidential election with his “Indecision 2000” coverage of the George W. Bush and Al Gore recount in Florida. Afterward, everything on the show clicked, and Stewart emerged as the star of the comedy network — especially during the Bush administration, when the stentorian and seemingly exasperated host would take on the policies of Bush, vice president Dick Cheney and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. 
 
 Stewart broke the news of his departure to his audience during the show’s taping in New York. Almost immediately on social media, the tweets started from people who witnessed the announcement. One of them was David Axelrod, a former adviser to President Obama: 
 
 Just had the honor of being the great Jon Stewart's guest on @TheDailyShow, where he announced he's leaving. Emotional night. #jonstewart — David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) February 11, 2015 
 
 Over the years, Stewart’s team of deadpan “correspondents” also became comedy stars, including Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Steve Carell, Larry Wilmore, Ed Helms, Samantha Bee and Jason Jones. Colbert went on to star on “The Colbert Report” for nearly a decade before departing in December to take over for late-night veteran David Letterman on CBS. 
 
 [Jon Stewart’s hardest truth – The time has come to wrap up the joke] 
 
 “The Daily Show’s” steady rise coincided with the popularity of Internet video, as clips from Stewart’s broadcast frequently circulated on the Web the following day. They often featured him mocking the 24-hour cable news cycle, and he became known for taking aim at Fox News Channel and CNN. As such, Stewart became a serious pundit in his own right — albeit one who amply punctuated his commentary with expletives. 
 
 “Jon has been at the heart of Comedy Central, championing and nurturing the best talent in the industry, in front of and behind the camera,” the network said in a statement Tuesday. “Through his unique voice and vision, ‘The Daily Show’ has become a cultural touchstone for millions of fans and an unparalleled platform for political comedy that will endure for years to come.” 
 
 A darling of liberals, Stewart made headlines for his ongoing self-proclaimed “feud” with Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly, which culminated in a live debate called “The Rumble in the Air-Conditioned Auditorium” in 2012. 
 
 Stewart’s impact could also be measured off-screen. His 2010 Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington brought hundreds of thousands to the Mall to see Stewart and his fellow Comedy Central star Colbert take the stage and encourage people to participate in politics and civil discourse despite the seemingly hopeless partisan gridlock in Washington. 
 
 [Act Four: Pop culture needs Jon Stewart now more than ever] 
 
 As for “The Daily Show,” some suspected that Stewart’s departure appeared imminent last summer when he took three months off to direct a feature film, “Rosewater,” about journalist Maziar Bahari’s imprisonment in Iran. 
 
 In an interview with The Washington Post in November, Stewart wouldn’t discuss future career plans other than joking that they included “a nap.” He also dismissed the suggestion that he would run for political office, and laughingly shot down the idea that people — even those who see him as a trusted figure — would vote for him. 
 
 “You don’t know that,” he said, “except in the way that people would vote for a second-string quarterback to take over for the first-string quarterback if they are feeling frustration at their team’s goals.” 
 
 The specific timing of Stewart’s departure was not announced. The network statement said only that the host would leave “later this year.” His contract expires in the fall. 
 
 Losing a marquee host is a tough loss for Comedy Central, though the statement made sure to note that the program — which regularly attracts about a million viewers a night — “will endure for years to come.” 
 
 It is the latest in a long line of changes in the Comedy Central late-night lineup. Besides Colbert’s departure, John Oliver — who at one point appeared to be Stewart’s likely successor — also left last year to host the breakout hit “Last Week Tonight” on HBO. Larry Wilmore, also a potential hosting option as a “Daily Show” standout, recently started his own “Nightly Show” on the network, replacing Colbert. 
 
 [Why Jon Stewart and Brian Williams should just switch jobs] 
 
 Here’s Comedy Central’s full statement: 
 
 RELATED 
 
 Video: Late-night laughs ||||| Stewart’s decision to retire as host of the satirical news show after 16 years has left liberal America in mourning. So why is he leaving just before an election – and what will happen when he steps out from behind the desk? 
 
 There was no one moment when Jon Stewart knew it was time for him to leave what he describes as “the most perfect job in the world”; no epiphany, no flashpoint. “Life,” he says, in the lightly self-mocking tone he uses when talking about himself, “doesn’t really work that way, with a finger pointing at you out of the sky, saying, ‘Leave now!’ That only happens when you’re fired, and trust me, I know about that.” 
 
 Instead, he describes his decision to quit The Daily Show, the American satirical news programme he has hosted for 16 years, as something closer to the end of a long-term relationship. “It’s not like I thought the show wasn’t working any more, or that I didn’t know how to do it. It was more, ‘Yup, it’s working. But I’m not getting the same satisfaction.’” He slaps his hands on his desk, conclusively. 
 
 “These things are cyclical. You have moments of dissatisfaction, and then you come out of it and it’s OK. But the cycles become longer and maybe more entrenched, and that’s when you realise, ‘OK, I’m on the back side of it now.’” 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Stewart announces he is to leave The Daily Show 
 
 Stewart and I speak twice in the space of a few months. The first time last October, when he flew from New York to London with his family for the premiere of his directorial debut at the London Film Festival. Rosewater is an engrossing and pacy film that tells the true story of Iranian-born journalist Maziar Bahari, who was arrested and tortured in Iran in 2009, after sending footage of street riots to the BBC. 
 
 The second time, we speak soon after Stewart announces his retirement from The Daily Show. He is in his office in New York, preparing to shoot a Friday-night episode, and the difference in his mood is striking. His voice is about an octave lower, and he sounds weary, weighed down. 
 
 But talking about his film in London, he is animated to the point of hyperactivity, gleefully pointing out the pretentious decor in the hotel room where we meet (“A photo of a submissive woman with a cigar in her mouth! Just what every room needs!”). He notes, in a tone that is both sincere and satirical, and that will be familiar to fans of The Daily Show, the lavishness of the food: “My compliments to the prop master, because that really is a beautiful tomato and mozzarella salad,” he intones solemnly to a bemused waiter. 
 
 It was heartbreaking interviewing Obama... that's what the gig is 
 
 Like every TV celebrity, in person, Stewart is both better-looking than you expect and smaller, with his long torso making up most of his 5ft 7in, giving the illusion of height from behind his studio desk. He is dressed casually, and after years of watching him on TV wearing a suit, seeing him in a T-shirt and casual trousers feels almost like catching my father half-undressed. 
 
 At 52, Stewart has the bouncy energy of a man half his age and, unlike most in the public eye, has an aversion to compliments. If I tell him I liked something about the film, he will immediately deflect the compliment and insist it was all down to Bahari, or the film’s star Gael García Bernal, or the crew. For all the claims of his detractors that Stewart is the epitome of East Coast elitism, there is more self-deprecating New Jersey grit here than arrogant Manhattan elan. 
 
 Much as he might wince to hear it, for the past 16 years Stewart has occupied a place in America’s cultural and political life far greater than the small audience of his cable show would suggest. The Daily Show’s simple format consists of a mix of reports from roving reporters (who have included Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert and John Oliver), monologues delivered by Stewart and an end-of-show interview. Over time, Stewart has evolved from a satirist to a broadcaster celebrated as the voice of US liberalism, the one who will give the definitive progressive take on a story. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Stewart on the Charlie Hebdo murders 
 
 His moving monologue after the Charlie Hebdo killings in January was widely shared; his frequent on-air support of Democrat senator Elizabeth Warren helped her evolve in the eyes of the public from Harvard professor to dream 2016 presidential candidate – particularly among those who find Hillary Clinton too centrist and hawkish. Stewart’s energetic campaigning on behalf of the 9/11 first responders (the emergency services who were first on the scene, many of whom later suffered debilitating illnesses), prompted the New York Times to compare him to Walter Cronkite and Edward R Murrow, the most revered newscasters in American history. It is a delicious irony that in the world of American TV news, one populated by raging egotists and self-aggrandisers, the person who is generally cited as the most influential is Stewart – a man so disinterested in his own celebrity, he often didn’t bother to collect his 18 Emmys, preferring to stay at home with his family. 
 
 When George Bush left office in 2008, some worried that Stewart would run out of material. This proved as shortsighted as the hope that Obama would be America’s grand salvation. Stewart, who describes himself as “a leftist”, has always hammered the Democrats with the vigour of a disappointed supporter, and subjected Obama to one of his most damaging interviews during his first term: the president admitted that his 2008 slogan probably should have been “Yes We Can, But...” At the time, Stewart laughed, but today he admits with a shrug, “It was heartbreaking. It’s generally heartbreaking – that’s what the gig is.” 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Stewart gave Barack Obama one of his toughest interviews, suggesting his 2008 election slogan should have been ‘Yes we can, but…’ Photograph: Empics Entertainment 
 
 His seemingly effortless interview with Tony Blair in 2008 cut through Blair’s crusader mentality in a mere six minutes, as Stewart calmly rejected Blair’s theory that any kind of military action can keep the west safe. As Blair stammered, huffed and shifted in his seat, Stewart concluded that: “19 people flew into the towers. It seems hard for me to imagine that we could go to war enough, to make the world safe enough, that 19 people wouldn’t want to do harm to us. So it seems like we have to rethink a strategy that is less military-based.” This was Stewart at his best; it’s also fair to say that some of the interviews, generally those with actors and authors, seem like mere puffery, a point with which Stewart agrees (he embraces criticism as eagerly as he deflects compliments). 
 
 How often does he really connect with his interviewees? “Have you seen the show? Mostly, I’m not even listening. But I can bullshit anyone for six minutes.” 
 
 When we meet in October, I ask if he is thinking of leaving The Daily Show because he seems increasingly, well, bored, making frequent references to the fact he’s been doing the show “for 75, 80, 1,000 years”. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tony Blair gets the Jon Stewart treatment on The Daily Show in 2008. 
 
 He bats away my question with a joke: “Are you offering me a job?” 
 
 Well, I might be able to get you Guardian work experience. 
 
 “Aww, I’m too shitty a writer for that.” 
 
 But he doesn’t reject the idea entirely (of leaving The Daily Show, that is. I think The Guardian will have to wait): “[If I left the show,] I would do what I’m doing. Whether it’s standup, the show, books or films, I consider all this just different vehicles to continue a conversation about what it means to be a democratic nation, and to have it written into the constitution that all men are created equal – but to live with that for 100 years with slaves. How do those contradictions play themselves out? And how do we honestly assess our failings and move forward with integrity?” 
 
 When I catch up with him again, I ask if he knew he’d be leaving when we had that conversation. 
 
 “No, no – but some of it had been in the back of my head for quite some time. But you don’t want to make any kind of decision when you’re in the crucible of the process, just like you don’t decide whether you’re going to continue to run marathons in mile 24,” he says. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Watch a review of Rosewater 
 
 He switches to a chewy exaggeration of his native Noo Joi-zy accent, deflating his seriousness with a comedy voice. “You wait until you’re done, you have a nice cup o’ water, you put the blanket on, you sit and then you decide.” 
 
 I had assumed that, as well as the metaphorical cup o’ water, he had decided to quit because he had so much fun making Rosewater. But Stewart says not. 
 
 “Honestly, it was a combination of the limitations of my brain and a format that is geared towards following an increasingly redundant process, which is our political process. I was just thinking, ‘Are there other ways to skin this cat?’ And, beyond that, it would be nice to be home when my little elves get home from school, occasionally.” 
 
 He has a 10-year-old son, Nathan, and a nine-year-old daughter, Maggie; Stewart and his wife, Tracey, have been married for almost as long as he’s been doing the show, after Stewart proposed to her via a crossword puzzle. 
 
 If anything, it was the prospect of the upcoming US election that pushed him to leave the show. “I’d covered an election four times, and it didn’t appear that there was going to be anything wildly different about this one,” he says. 
 
 Ah, but who could have anticipated the excitement over Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails? 
 
 “Anyone could, because that story is absolutely everything that it’s supposed to be about,” he says, with a groan; as a revelation, it managed to be at once depressing and completely unsurprising. “I also felt that, for the show, you don’t want to leave when the cupboard’s bare. So I think it’s a better introduction when you have something providing you with assisted fuel, like a presidential campaign. But really, the value of this show is so much deeper than my contribution,” he says. 
 
 If Oprah can leave and the world still spins, I honestly think it will survive me 
 
 Stewart likes to credit “the team”, but given that he has always been deeply involved in the script (unusually for a host), writing and rewriting drafts right up to the last minute, the show will be a pretty different beast without him. He has described his successor, the South African comedian Trevor Noah, as “incredibly thoughtful, considerate and funny”, and defended him when it was discovered, to widespread fury, that Noah had in the past tweeted offensive jokes about Jews, overweight women and transgender people. 
 
 The furore over Noah’s tweets reflects just how high Stewart has set the bar. There was such an outpouring of grief when he announced he was stepping down, that he mused on air the following day, “Did I die?” Even the normally dispassionate New Yorker magazine claimed, under the headline Jon Stewart, We Need You In 2016, “the last hope for bringing some rationality to the 2016 Presidential field died”. Not since Oprah Winfrey announced her retirement from network television has a US TV host’s departure received such international coverage, but Stewart bridles when I make the Winfrey comparison: “If Oprah can leave and the world still spins, I honestly think it will survive me.” 
 
 And it should be noted that not everyone was distraught. Fox News, displaying its mastery of making colour-based accusations about the kettle from its pot-based position, reported that Stewart was “not a force for good” and that his sustained criticisms of the right “had no foothold in the facts”. The Daily Show duly responded with a Vine of Fox News’ best factual distortions. 
 
 Stewart’s 2011 interview with Donald Rumsfeld is one of the few he now regrets: ‘I should have pushed, but he’s very adept at deflecting.’ Photograph: Comedy Central 
 
 Does he have any regrets? Stewart recounts one big disappointment – an anodyne interview with Donald Rumsfeld in 2011 that failed to claim the former secretary of defence’s scalp. “He just went into the general gobbledegook.” Stewart puts on a pretty good imitation of Rumsfeld: “‘Mnah mnah mnah, well, you have to remember, it was 9/11 mnah mnah.’ I should have pushed, but he’s very adept at deflecting.” He looks genuinely crushed for a moment, then rallies: “That interview with Rumsfeld went shitty, but it’s still just an interview. He’s the one who has to live with the repercussions of what he really did, so there’s nothing that could happen on my show that carries that same level of regret.” 
 
 In 2010, Stewart hosted a Rally To Restore Sanity in Washington DC, attracting 215,000 people, who cheered him on as he berated the media, or “the country’s 24-hour politico–pundit-perpetual-panic-‘conflictinator’.” I covered the rally for the Guardian and, as enjoyable as Stewart was, he didn’t look especially comfortable up on the stage, ginning up the people. He agrees that entering politics “is not my bag”: he’d rather make sense of the mess than get into it himself. 
 
 He can be brutal about the leftwing media, too (CNN has been a frequent target, for being mediocre and too attached to pointless computer graphics). MSNBC, the liberal 24-hour news network, is, Stewart says, “better” than Fox News, “because it’s not steeped in distortion and ignorance as a virtue. But they’re both relentless and built for 9/11. So, in the absence of such a catastrophic event, they take the nothing and amplify it and make it craziness.” 
 
 My biggest objection to Fox News, I say, is not the scaremongering, it’s the way it’s reshaped the Republican party. It will misrepresent social and economic issues, and promote the more extreme elements of the party, politicians such as Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, in a way that is hugely detrimental to American politics. (For the record, Rupert Murdoch disagrees, and last year claimed that Fox News “absolutely saved” the Republican party.) “Watching these channels all day is incredibly depressing,” says Stewart. “I live in a constant state of depression. I think of us as turd miners. I put on my helmet, I go and mine turds, hopefully I don’t get turd lung disease.” 
 
 With Maziar Bahari, the Iranian-born journalist imprisoned by Tehran for filming the 2009 anti-government protests. Photograph: Rex Features 
 
 Now that he is leaving The Daily Show, is there any circumstance in which he would watch Fox News again? He takes a few seconds to ponder the question. “Umm… All right, let’s say that it’s a nuclear winter, and I have been wandering, and there appears to be a flickering light through what appears to be a radioactive cloud and I think that light might be a food source that could help my family. I might glance at it for a moment until I realise, that’s Fox News, and then I shut it off. That’s the circumstance.” 
 
 About a week before we met last year, Piers Morgan, who had just lost his nightly interview show on CNN, loudly blamed news anchor Anderson Cooper, whose show ran before Morgan’s, for his low ratings. Stewart shakes his head in wonder at this claim. “That guy may be the biggest – I mean, isn’t there a room underneath the Tower of London where you can just lock him up? He’s upset because he got shit-kicked. Who’s he going to blame – himself? That would mean self-reflection, of which he is incapable.” 
 
 We talk a little about what were then mere rumours that phone hacking had taken place at the Daily Mirror while Morgan was its editor. (It has since been alleged in the high court that hacking was carried out “on an industrial scale” during Morgan’s tenure.) “Right, that is a guy who is a bad person, which is fine – bad people are everywhere,” Stewart shrugs. “But where does something like that come from? Is there a secret fountain of doucheyness somewhere?” 
 
 Since he asked, I tell Stewart how Morgan and Simon Cowell became friends in the 1990s, after Morgan helped promote the Cowell-produced singing duo Robson & Jerome in the Sun. When Morgan was fired from the Mirror, Cowell returned the favour by casting him as a judge on his talent shows and, in turn, introducing him to an American TV audience. 
 
 Stewart’s face is frozen into a parody of Munch’s The Scream, and he is briefly speechless. “Well,” he eventually says, “all I can say is, ‘Damn you Robson and whatever the other guy’s name was.’ Just awful.” 
 
 *** 
 
 Jon Stuart Leibowitz was born in New York and raised in New Jersey, the son of a teacher and a professor of physics. He grew up in the shadow of the Vietnam war and Watergate, events that left him, he has said in the past, “with a healthy scepticism towards official reports”. He jokingly recalls the time his older brother fired him from his first job at Woolworths as one of the defining, “scarring events” of his youth. But his parents’ divorce when he was 11 was clearly more so, prompting him to drop his surname and eventually legally change it to Stewart. He has described his relationship with his father as still “complicated”. “There was a thought of using my mother’s maiden name, but I thought that would be just too big a fuck you to my dad,” he says. “Did I have some problems with my father? Yes. Yet people always view it [changing his surname] through the prism of ethnic identity.” 
 
 Stewart with his children, Nathan and Maggie, in 2011. Photograph: Getty Images 
 
 So it was a family thing as opposed to a Jewish thing? “Right. So whenever I criticise Israel’s actions it’s [he puts on a Yiddishy accent] ‘He’s changed his name! He’s not a Jew! He hates himself!’ And I’m like, ‘I hate myself for a lot of reasons, but not because I’m Jewish.’” 
 
 After college, Stewart performed on the standup circuit in New York, landing his own talkshow on MTV in the 1990s. In 1999, he took over the then little-loved Daily Show on Comedy Central, turning it from hit-and-miss satire to the news- and politics-focused programme it is today. Coming to it at 38, he says, the job was so ideal, “I couldn’t have created one better”. 
 
 Since Stewart announced his departure, much has been written about him being the most trusted news source for young Americans. Stewart kiboshes this as “conventional wisdom. In the sea of information that surrounds people of that generation, I’d be truly surprised if their only news comes four days of the week, for a few minutes a night.” He laughs when I describe him as a celebrity (“I’m not Madonna!” he hoots, raising an eyebrow). The only restriction fame has put on his freedom, he says, is “I don’t hang out on the Upper West Side during Sukkot”. Isn’t he being a bit faux modest, I ask, especially when he insists that what he does is comedy and not news? That comes with a certain profile. He thinks about this for a few seconds. “It’s not that I… I mean, it’s satire, so it’s an expression of real feelings. So I don’t mean that in the sense of, ‘I don’t mean this.’ What I mean is, the tools of satire should not be confused with the tools of news. We use hyperbole, but the underlying sentiment has to feel ethically, intentionally correct, otherwise we wouldn’t do it.” 
 
 ‘Would I watch Fox News? If it was a nuclear winter and it might help my family’ 
 
 If Stewart ever needed proof that his show has an impact, he got it in pretty much the worst way possible in October 2009, when he discovered that Iranian guards had arrested Maziar Bahari shortly after he gave an interview to The Daily Show in Iran. “And not just Maziar, but everybody we interviewed there had been arrested. So, being American, we thought, ‘This must be all about us!’” he says. 
 
 The Daily Show spoke to the prisoners’ families and asked what they could do to help, and the response was unanimous: keep talking about the arrests on the show. So Stewart did. Ironically, the reason The Daily Show had gone to Iran in the first place was to undermine Bush’s description of the region as “the axis of evil”: Stewart wanted America to see a country populated by “people with families who are wonderful”. And although they found those, the project turned out to be, he says, “a very, uh, sobering experience”. 
 
 When Bahari was released after 118 days, Stewart learned that his Iranian guards had cited the (completely benign) Daily Show interview he gave as a justification to torture and imprison him. “And that,” he says, with some understatement, “just stunned me.” 
 
 At the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, in 2010. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP 
 
 He and Bahari became friends; when Bahari was in the US, they would meet for breakfast in Manhattan, near Stewart’s Tribeca home. Bahari said he hoped someone would make a movie of his book about his experience, Then They Came For Me. Stewart helped Bahari contact screenwriters, only to find that most were already busy, and he started to get, he says, “impatient with the process”. So, over oatmeal in a coffee shop, he and Bahari decided Stewart would write and direct the film himself. 
 
 Rosewater focuses primarily on the relationship between Bahari (Gael García Bernal) and one particular jailer, played by Kim Bodnia (Martin in Scandinavian TV thriller The Bridge). The movie wears its liberal heart on its sleeve, but reins in the tub-thumping for the sake of the story. Experts in Iranian relations will no doubt find the depiction of the government a little simplistic, and Stewart, characteristically, agrees. 
 
 “Look, it’s a film about Iran made by a New York Jew – it’s going to be reductive for those who are from the region. But hopefully, for an audience that is more western and more accustomed to films like Not Without My Daughter, this will appear to be a relatively nuanced portrayal. I got a whole pantheon of Sally Field references in here,” he grins, tapping his head, a reference to the hysterically anti-Iranian 1991 film. 
 
 A more obvious criticism is the lack of Iranian actors: Kim Bodnia, as Rosewater, is Danish and Bernal is Mexican. Stewart, again, concedes the point. “If I was Iranian, I’d probably look at [Bernal] and be like, ‘Really? Those Rs? Come on, man.’ But Maziar was our touchstone, and if he wasn’t bothered by it, I wasn’t bothered by it. My original vision was, ‘Maziar, we’re going to do this in Persian and use real prisoners and it’s going to be only Iranians!’ And he was like, ‘Don’t you want people to see it?’” 
 
 He did, but ultimately not that many people did, at least in the US. The film got decent reviews, but made only $3m – it turns out not that many Americans want to see a film about an Iranian prisoner. For once, perhaps, Stewart was just that little bit too progressive, something he has joked about on The Daily Show, mock weeping. 
 
 How disappointed was he? “Oh, sure, I would have liked more people to have seen it. But it’s a ridiculous thing to say. We got to prepare this incredible meal and then at the very end say, ‘Aww, I wish more people came.’ I don’t actually feel that way. I always knew the movie wasn’t The Hunger Games. But I hope it finds a little foothold in the UK.” 
 
 For the next few months, Stewart will focus on The Daily Show, handing over to Trevor Noah later this year and trying to convince viewers that it will be just fine without him. He has, he says, “a couple of other projects on the burner” – he would like to make more films – and it’s impossible to imagine him in fallow retirement. But it won’t be quite the same for us fans, getting to watch him every night, having him translate the day’s news for us. Stewart would scoff, but, for liberals who care about American politics, his departure from The Daily Show marks the end of an era. 
 
 “Honestly,” he says, “the country will survive.” And he’s right, it will. But even as he says it, it sounds, somewhat heartbreakingly, as if he’s already out that door. 
 
 
 
 • Rosewater is released on 8 May. The Daily Show is on Comedy Central (times vary).
– Jon Stewart took over as host of the Daily Show in January 1999, but when did the program truly start becoming the Daily Show that legions of fans would come to love? Try December of that year, when Steve Carell boarded John McCain's campaign bus "and changed the entire trajectory" of the show, writes Chris Smith at Vanity Fair. The article is a fascinating oral history of the show's beginning that includes interviews with Stewart, Carell, Stephen Colbert, and pretty much everyone involved. The first year was rough for Stewart as he fought with the holdover writing staff from previous host Craig Kilborn and sought to put his stamp on the show. Things came together in that Carell interview, in which he peppers McCain with softball questions, then springs a policy zinger. After a few seconds of awkward silence, Carell says, "I was just kidding! I don’t even know what that means!" And the tense moment subsides. (See the clip.) Carell: "It was making fun of a gotcha moment. And I think that a lot of what we do on The Daily Show is making fun of journalistic tropes, and I think that was one of them." Head writer Ben Karlin: "I remember seeing it in the editing room. I remember Jon called me down, and seeing it and thinking, Yeah, this is what we should be doing. This is the goal. It was one of Carell’s most incredible moments. He asks McCain a question in a way that no journalists were talking to the candidates. And it was like, Oh s---, we are able, in this weird, unintentional way, to add a level of insight to the process that doesn’t exist. That was really, really exciting." Click for the full piece, in which Stewart talks about how that 2000 campaign provided his "aha moment" of how to present the show—by "deconstructing the process."