“You Have To Understand Jon Stewart Is Just Like Everybody Else: He Can Be A Dick”

September 16, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

I don’t agree with the great Esquire writer Tom Junod that Jon Stewart has lost his sense of humor over the years, but here’s an excerpt from his interesting new profile of TV’s most-lauded truth-teller:

“Now, you have to understand Jon Stewart is just like everybody else: He can be a dick. His father took off when he was a kid, leaving a hole in his heart approximately the old man’s shoe size. He’s damaged and is capable of doing damage in return, especially in close quarters. There are plenty of Daily Show staffers, present and former, who love and revere their boss for his difficult brilliance. There are also plenty — mostly on the former side — who have been, well, fucked up by him and his need to dominate. When he arrived at The Daily Show in 1999, its humor was goofy and improvisational, based on the interplay between the fake-news host and the fake-news correspondents and dependent on whimsy and happenstance. But Stewart knew what he wanted right away, and it wasn’t that. He wanted the show to be more competitive, almost in a news-gathering sense, and he wanted it to have a point of view, which happened to be his own. There are writers and producers from the first five years of the show, both male and female, who are described as ‘battered wives’; hell, there are people who used to work for him who are scared to talk about him because they’re scared of not being able to work again. And before he pushed out the show’s cocreator, he notoriously threw a newspaper at her in a story meeting and then, according to a staffer, apologized to her later with the words ‘Sorry, that was the bad Jon — I try not to let him out…'”

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Jon Stewart in less complicated times:

Interviewing Anna Nicole Smith, 1994.