Jon Stewart’s departure from The Daily Show leaves us with a montage of memories

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This article was published 06/08/2015 (4087 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For 16 years, The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart has provided TV viewers with a nightly dose of political commentary and razor-sharp comedy unlike anything else on television. For news junkies on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border, he has been the satirical voice of a generation.

We invited Free Press staffers to recall their favourite Daily Show moments and reflect on the real-world impact of Stewart’s fake-news contributions. Here’s what they had to say:

 

Sept. 20, 2001

What a horrible tragedy, to Americans and to the world, yet there was Stewart, trying to cope while doing what he does best: putting a smile on the faces of those watching him who are just looking for a chance to escape, for a hour, a minute or a second.

“We’ve have an unenduring pain here… an unendurable pain. And… I wanted to tell you why I grieve, but why I don’t despair,” Stewart said, choking back tears. After a short pause to try compose himself, he continued. “Luckily we can edit this.”

It was a powerful moment.

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— Scott Billeck, Free Press sports reporter

 

Oct. 15, 2004

A bit of a cheat, because this one didn’t take place on The Daily Show, but Stewart’s takedown of CNN’s Crossfire hosts, Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala, on their own show surely ranks as one of his finest moments.

They thought Stewart was going to bring his comedy act and a plug for his book, America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction, but instead he ripped the duo for hurting America with their partisan hackery, telling them, “You have a responsibility to the public discourse and you fail miserably.”

Whether Stewart’s appearance can be directly linked to the show’s demise is open to discussion, but Crossfire was cancelled just a few months later.

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— Brad Oswald, Free Press TV writer

 

Feb. 13, 2006

Jon Stewart started this episode moaning about how there just wasn’t enough going on in the world to find material for his show.

Then U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney shot a man, Harry Whittington, in the face while hunting quail on a ranch in Texas. For Stewart, it was comedy gold.

The fact the hunting trip was on a ranch where quail had their wings clipped so they couldn’t fly well added to the humour.

“Thank you, Jesus,” Stewart quipped, unable to contain his glee following a montage of television news clips about the story.

The episode gave rise to the parody “Cheney’s got a gun” (a riff on the Aerosmith song Janie’s Got a Gun) and included live hits to correspondent Rob Corddry as a “vice-presidential firearms mishap analyst” and Ed Helms, “live from Corpus Christi,” supposedly outside the hospital where Whittington was recovering.

They all made sure to say repeatedly “the man Dick Cheney shot in the face.”

— Mia Rabson, Free Press Ottawa correspondent

 

Sept. 14, 2006

Jon Stewart has had plenty to say about politics and society, but people tend to forget it’s a comedy show and he was always willing to set comedian guests up for a few minutes of laughs.

Canadian standup comedian Norm Macdonald has made a career out of creating uncomfortable comedy, and he left Stewart in stitches with his too-soon jokes about the death of Steve Irwin the Crocodile Hunter, and a bizarre summit between Peter Mackay, Canada’s former foreign affairs minister, and former U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice.

“Please don’t make me laugh at this,” said Stewart, left squirming in his host’s chair.

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— Alan Small, Free Press arts and life editor

 

March 19, 2010

Jon Stewart broke with the typical Daily Show format for a sustained quarter-hour takedown of Fox News pundit Glenn Beck. It was one of those rare TV events where you felt you had to wake up the kids and bring ’em in to watch, so they could bear witness to a segment that was nothing less than comedy greatness.

Stewart’s pseudo-rant was a surgically precise deconstruction of Beck’s pedantic rhetorical style, including the blackboard, the scary symbols and the insane leaps in logic.

“This is Glenn’s blackboard so we have to play by Glenn’s rules, which are: if you subscribe to an idea, you also subscribe to that idea’s ideology, and to every possible negative consequence that that ideology implies when you carry it to absurd extremes.”

Find it. To quote Stewart’s solemn intro at the beginning of the piece: “You could miss it. But if you miss it, you’ll die.”

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— Randall King, Free Press movie writer

 

Dec. 16, 2010

When Republicans in the U.S. Senate used filibustering tactics to block voting on a bill to fund health care for 9/11 first responders, Stewart broke with form and used the entirety of his final show of 2010 to focus on the issue, first calling out senators for their tactics and mainstream media for ignoring the impasse, and later doing an extended sit-down interview with a panel of 9/11 first responders who spoke openly about the frustration they felt over being betrayed by the country they had so courageously served. “These guys are dying,” Stewart observed, “and yet we are abandoning them.” Other media, including constant Daily Show target Fox News, took notice of Stewart’s effort and added their voices to the Senate-shaming effort. The bill passed before the governing body’s Christmas break.

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— Brad Oswald, Free Press TV writer

 

Nov. 13, 2013

Jon Stewart has always been a proud New Yorker, and often slips into an over-the-top New York accent when he needs to come to the defence of his home city. So when a celebratory story about New York City’s One World Trade Center becoming the tallest building in the U.S. ended with news anchors declaring Chicago still has the better pizza, Stewart tore into Chicago-style pizza in perhaps his best rant as Daily Show host

“Deep-dish pizza is not only not better than New York pizza, its not even pizza — it’s a (bleeping) casserole.”

“You know the expression ‘There’s no such thing as bad sex or bad pizza?’ Your pizza is like sex with a corpse made of sandpaper. This is not pizza, it’s tomato soup in a bread bowl.”

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— Marc Lagace, Free Press copy editor

 

Nov 14, 2013

I was a local news editor in Toronto when the only thing that seemed to be happening was Rob Ford, Rob Ford and more Rob Ford. Or as Jon Stewart called him, “Toronto mayor and intrepid intoxicant aficionado” Rob Ford. This was shortly after the mayor had publicly admitted to smoking crack cocaine after months of denial, and the U.S. media were having a field day.

The American coverage of the Ford story ranged from buoyant mockery on every late-night talk show to endless fascination on every news channel — with few exceptions, it was covered superficially by journalists tucked away on the other side of the border.

In Toronto, it wasn’t so easy to laugh, so there was something about Stewart’s early segment on Rob Ford that was cathartic — the humour was on point, as always (see Stewart’s physical reaction to a notorious Ford quote that the comedian deemed “a closer”), but there was a message, too. Between punchlines, he questioned the mayor’s behaviour. He wondered (and in later episodes, demanded to know) why Ford wasn’t taking time off to get help. It was fresh perspective, it was funny and it was responsible. That was his gift.

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— Sarah Lilleyman, Free Press associate editor

 

Oct. 3, 2014

Ever since Jon Stewart appeared on air, he’s been difficult to watch because he’s often so bloody perfect.

Stewart and his team of writers so excelled at the task of political satire, they served as a disincentive for anyone else foolish enough to attempt a foray into the genre.

When you stare at the Mona Lisa, you’re not inspired to say, “Meh, I can do better.” More likely, you’re content to see the apotheosis of the artform in question.

Stewart didn’t invent political satire, but his opening monologues may very well serve as the finest collection of their kind, in any format.

Now that he’s going off the air, the bar won’t be set as high for hacks who dare to follow in his shadow.

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— Bartley Kives, Free Press reporter-at-large

 

March 12, 2015

Of all the times I watched Jon Stewart on TV, none of them left as much of an impact as seeing the man live.

Only a month after Stewart had announced his retirement, my boyfriend and I managed to finagle two seats in the front row for a Daily Show taping.

The production was a well-oiled machine, with bulky security guards running over the rules — no phones once the show starts, if you leave to go to the bathroom you won’t get back in, we will kick you out if you videotape anything — you know, the usual.

Then Stewart came out, charming as ever, and spent a solid 30 minutes taking questions from the audience. Some were serious, some were hilarious, but all were treated with the same amount of thought and wit from Stewart, who regaled us with backstage stories and glimpses into his personal life.

He is just as funny and clever on the spot as you’d expect him to be, and it’s clear the Daily Show is something in which he takes a tremendous amount of pride.

The guest that day was Rob Corddry, a former Daily Show correspondent, who spent most of his time talking about what life was like after leaving the show (less CSPAN, more cocaine) — an appropriate conversation, sure, but one that felt too soon for those of us who were counting down the days until Stewart’s retirement with supreme sadness.

After 60 short minutes, it was all over, every audience member leaving with a smile on his or her face, yelling, “That was so good!” as they skipped to the subway.

I hope Stewart reacts the same way on his final day, 17 years surely blowing by for him as quickly as those 60 minutes did for us, skipping to the subway, yelling, “That was so good!” on his way home for the last time.

— Erin Lebar, Free Press multimedia producer