Chris Smith - The Daily Show

My wildest dream for The Daily Show when I started was, This will be fun. Hopefully well do it well. Success for me wouldve 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.

Jon Stewart

It was the summer of 1998 and I was riding a wave of dizzying show business success. I was a thirty-five-year-old New York City standup comic with a canceled talk show, an unproduced screenplay, a book of unpublished essays, and two upcoming roles in Independent Films critics would almost unanimously hail as speaking parts. Life was good. People didnt randomly shout on weed at just any old jackass on the street. No. They shouted it at me. The Enhancement Smoker from Half-Baked. Did I have any starring roles lined up? Any so-called mainstream successes? or creative focus? or ideas? Maybe not. But between the time I hosted a show on MTV to the time Josh Hartnett jammed a pen in my eye in The Faculty, I bet there wasnt a Dennys in the entire country I couldnt walk into at three in the morning and not have someone want to get high with me.

So when my old MTV bosses, Doug Herzog and Eileen Katz, and my old talk show EP [executive producer], Madeleine Smithberg, called to talk about the soon-to-be-vacated hosting job at Comedy Centrals The Daily Show, I was relatively cool on the idea. I actually was. My last foray in the real world of television hosting (fake hosting with Larry Sanders not withstanding) had ended with my face on a dartboard in the New York Post with the headline STEWART JOINS LATE NIGHT LOSERS . Thatll leave a mark. So present lack of success didnt quite mitigate fear of future failure. My girlfriend at the time, and now wife, Tracey, felt differently. She knew Id been a bit rudderless and creatively unmoored, and she thought this could be a chance to reengage a mind that, when unfocused, generally turned and kicked the living shit out of its owner. Traceys good like that. She knows things that I dont yet know but will, and she waits patiently for me to know them, too, all while not displaying the I-know-things-you-dont-know-yet-but-will face.

It was a big decision. The kind you can only make while down the Jersey Shore over pie. So sitting at the big Horseshoe counter at Holiday Snack Bar, Long Beach Island, Tracey and I made a list of the Pros and Cons.

Pro: Its a job. For cash money.

Con: Got to get up early and wear a tie.

Pro: Only have to wear a tie for like twenty minutes a day.

Con: Wasnt sure the show was my sensibility.

Pro: Maybe it could be.

Con: If I screw this one up, the president of Show Business might kick me out, this time for good.

Pro: (from Tracey) It seemed like an incredible chance to make a funny, smart show about things I really cared about.

Con: The rightness of her position meant I couldnt have any more pie.

After the decision, the next sixteen and a half years are a bit of a blur. I know we enjoyed some incredible highs, endured some terrible tragedies, saw friends and colleagues come and go I may have called the president Dude at one point and gotten a gospel choir to sing Go fuck yourself as a joyous refrain

I dont miss the grind. I miss my friends. We may not have hit the mark with each bit, definitely left some laughs on the table, but damn, Im proud of that place. We never forgot what a privilege it was to have a platform. I believe we treated the opportunity with the respect it deserved and we worked our asses off to get better at doing the show. And damn! The talent that I got to work with day in and out! And somewhere along the line the process of making that show became the mechanism by which I worked through my own emotions about the world. Thats hard to replace. That morning meeting when we plotted the day. Writers, producers, correspondents PAs and interns. Always interesting, often illuminating, sometimes challenging, occasionally heated, and once or twice ferocious. It was a process that forced us me to evolve. To grow and learn. To disappoint myself, only to have an opportunity for redemption the very next night. Not just on the show but in the hallways and offices. The people there made me be better. And every night we got to present the meal wed made. There really was nothing like waking up in the middle of the night, feeling anxious and angry and hurt. Feeling like the institutions of our great nation were no longer functioning, that the entire political/media landscape was an incestuous circle jerk of inoperable self-interest, ignoring even the simplest of solutions for a status quo that cannot and should not hold and coming in to work the next day to have that complex goulash of sadness and fear drained by having Justin [Chabot] build a giant wheel of dildos for that nights program.

This show was and will always be the honor of my professional life. I could never wrap my head around putting it or my experience there in any coherent context. Favorite memories? Moments? What were we trying to do? Did we help? hurt? It was too big a meal for me to even try to digest. Im really grateful to Chris for taking on the challenge. In casting as wide a net as he could to bring as many voices as would speak to the task. I look forward to reading this book and finally finding out what it was really like to work at