Jon Stewart left our soul on a hanger
Are you laughing yet? I’m not laughing. Will that be all of us in 2020, still not laughing? Will we be blank-faced Ivanka Trump cyborgs in ice-coloured shift dresses leading those on The List to their quietus?
In the meantime, I’m still panning for bright spots like a lonely miner a year after the Klondike Gold Rush ended. The Amazon.com reviews of presidentelect Donald Trump’s tiny red Make America Great Again baseball hat tree ornaments — Trump sells them on his weird website too — are helpful.
The reviewers were irate. “I found it grabbing the crotch of Mrs. Santa.” “It keeps moving around on the tree.” “It tried to put my nativity figures into an internment camp. Would not buy again.”
Chris Smith’s The Daily Show ( The Book), is out for Christmas reading, or crying. It calls itself an oral history but take it for what it is: a bedtime story for Americans left clinging to the wreckage.
My stages of grief when Jon Stewart left us (me): a) I don’t need you, I’ve got Colbert. b) Oh. c) 2016 is going to be great d) Oh. e) You picked a fine time to leave us, Jon.
I learned many things about my favourite ex-show. It began as a chock full o’gags mess but the Little Comedy Engine That Could kept raising its game, which you can do when no one’s watching. It was always a guy’s show, written, performed and staffed by guys, until Stewart realized this had to change, which it did, a little, towards the end.
The Daily Show required a particular kind of writer, said the show’s co-creator, Lizz Winstead, “a hybrid kind of human being who eats, drinks, and breathes not just the news, but politics and history, that is funny and can write, and then can translate that funny into the tone and the voice of Jon.”
There are not a lot of people like that. But for a while, they were allowed to do their thing on American cable.
We would still be watching The Daily Show and its spinoff, The Colbert Report, in 2016 — possibly sans Trump — except for one man, Philippe Dauman, thenchair of Viacom, corporate parent of Comedy Central. He was a “fiscally minded” man who did not understand the popularity and cultural significance of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. They were a team and Dauman personally entered the negotiations with them.
“I don’t think he in any way saw what we do as special,” Stewart said. It was easy for Dauman to crush them.
Stewart wanted a summer off to make his movie Rosewater. Viacom was petulant and punitive. The two even offered to sign for four more years.
“I’ll guarantee through the 2016 election,” Colbert told Viacom in 2012. “No, just two (years),” was the answer. “I’m done, that’s it,” Stewart said, shocked and hurt.
As the New York Times reported, Viacom went into a deep slump and Dauman was out in August. He got a $72-million (U.S.) settlement — “nothing” in corporate terms — after trying to have Viacom chairperson Sumner Redstone declared mentally incompetent. This had not gone over well with the board. Colbert now says he’s glad. The timing of the cut-off gave him Letterman’s show, in which Colbert, a wonderful man of astounding verbal quickness, now humiliates himself for a mass audience for a great deal more money, betraying his fine mind and his viewers.
I am haunted by some chilling advice Colbert says he offered early on.
Some Daily Show correspondents hated field work in which they had to travel far to interview monsters and/or stupid people to make them look monstrous and/or stupid, which they were. It was factual work but difficult for comedians. (This is why the Democrats lost. They aren’t shameless and implacable, like Republicans.)
Colbert advised them: “What you’re going to want to do is get a nice hanger — like a wooden hanger, something with padded shoulders. Take your soul off and hang it on the hanger. Don’t forget where you put it. Then when you come back to New York put your soul back on when you watch the footage. Because then you can exercise your ethics over what you did in the field.”
Stewart is gone and Colbert has his soul on a hanger. What if he puts it back on $100 million later and it doesn’t fit?
One day we’ll all laugh at the Trump years. In the interim, our souls hang in a closet somewhere.