Jon Stewart by Bruce Watson

Author:Bruce Watson [Bruce Watson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / General,
ISBN: 9781612306308
Publisher: New Word City, LLC
Published: 2013-03-08T05:00:00+00:00

Fridays are slow at Daily Show headquarters in Hell’s Kitchen. As fans know, there is no show on Friday, but Stewart often comes in to wrap up the week. The pressure is off, the Times crossword is harder, and the weekend beckons. But shortly after noon on the first Friday in April 2010, a long black limo pulled up outside Comedy Central’s studio. Seems Jon Stewart had a visitor.

Stewart was accustomed to hosting cabinet members on camera, but Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was the first to visit his cluttered office. Geithner’s spokesman later explained the visit. “Jon Stewart is influential in America,” Steve Adamske said, “so we took the opportunity for the two to meet and to discuss the economy.”134 No one knows what Geithner and Stewart talked about during their ninety-minute meeting. Mortgage backed securities? Stewart’s older brother Lawrence, who had risen to become one of the most powerful men on Wall Street. What life is like for short men? (At five feet five inches, Geithner is two inches shorter than Stewart.) Or perhaps the comedian and the cabinet member did discuss the economy, with Geithner hoping to get a few laughs out of the Great Recession. At 2:00 p.m., the limo pulled away from Comedy Central headquarters, taking Geithner to an appointment at the New York Federal Reserve Board.

Stewart never mentioned the visit on his show. It remained unknown until the following fall when the Treasury Department released Geithner’s appointment book. Conservative critics had a field day, quipping that the economy itself was a joke, that ever since the meeting “the management of the Treasury has been nothing short of hilarious.”135 But whatever the motive or topic, the significance of a sitting cabinet member taking a private meeting with Jon Stewart was not lost in the laughter. “Stewart long has declared that he isn’t a journalist and has he talked down his influence,” a Wall Street Journal blog noted in reporting on Geithner’s visit. “Now, it is time to give up the pretense. Face it, Jon Stewart, you are a major cultural and political force in America.”136

Entering the Obama years, this “major cultural and political force” came to a crossroads. Except for his first year at the Daily Show desk in 1999, Stewart owed his considerable fame, audience, and influence to being anti - Anti-Bush/Cheney, anti-Iraq War, anti-Fox News, and above all, anti-dumb-as-a-fencepost-America. Then on January 20, 2009, the candidate overwhelmingly supported by The Daily Show audience, the candidate whose election had brought Stewart to tears, was inaugurated as president of the United States. It was as if the emperor, mocked for parading naked, suddenly had not just clothes but a Givenchy leather jacket. Could Stewart treat President Obama with the same disdain he had dished out to President Bush? Conservative critics were skeptical. “I don’t think Stewart has the talent or the heart to skewer his own side,” a Washington Times columnist wrote.137

Stewart had pondered the problem back in 2004. Late in the campaign, on the celebrated

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