There are certain people I’ve known for a long time that I feel an odd sense of pride in knowing, because I simply can’t believe how brilliant their work is and what they’ve accomplished. It shocks me that I used to sit in the back of clubs with these people, and they went on to speak to presidents and influence people in such a profound way. Jon is one of those people. He makes me proud to be in the world of comedy.
Judd Apatow: I am going to ease my way into this with you, but how much stand-up are you doing these days?
Jon Stewart: You know, these past couple of years I have not done much, but before that, I was going out one weekend every month, every other month, something like that. I try to keep it to that.
Judd: And are you still writing new material for your act?
Jon: I keep it just stale enough so that the rote memorization I had of my act was still, you know, mindful to some extent.
Judd: I just started doing stand-up again about four months ago. I hadn’t done it in twenty-two years.
Jon: Holy shit.
Judd: But one of my strongest memories from my stand-up career was the night you and I were auditioning at Stand-Up New York for the HBO Young Comedians Special. And you went on and just smoked it. And got the special. And me, I had invited all of my high school friends to come watch, because I was still in my early twenties and still did things like that. Most of them had never seen me do stand-up, and I went up and ate it so hard. I still wake up in the middle of the night and get a shiver thinking about it.
Jon: How much do you love to bomb, though?
Judd: Uh.
Jon: Oh, I love the bomb. You have to embrace the bomb. And the bigger the moment, the tastier the bomb.
Judd: Is there one in particular that wakes you up in the middle of the night?
Jon: I think maybe the most pleasurable bomb was—you know, when you’re bombing young and you’re in the Cellar. Those are the most volatile bombs. Because you haven’t quite established a baseline of confidence yet. So you really feel the sting of it. Like, I can’t understand why those Dutch sailors don’t find this amusing, you know. You don’t realize the fragility of the atmosphere in the room.
Judd: Yeah.
Jon: I remember this one time. I had already been on TV for a bit by this time. They were reopening Radio City Music Hall, so this is probably the largest crowd I’ve played. It must have been five thousand people. And it’s a big night of big stars—there’s Billy Crystal, and they’re raising him up on a platform through the stage floor, like he’s Michael Jackson. He’s leading the charge. Fucking crushing it, destroying the room. Ann-Margret is in the audience. This is like some big return to glamour for Radio City Music Hall, and I come out and there is some confusion in the audience as to why I am there. I can feel it. Six minutes into the bit, and it had not in any way dissipated. What was impressive about it was, you would think the law of averages says that if you have a room full of five thousand people, some of them are going to laugh at some point at something, even if it’s just something they whispered to their friend. You know what I mean? But it was total silence. Impressive in its discipline. At a certain point you think, like, Doesn’t anyone here have a cold? Isn’t anyone here going to sneeze? Shuffle their feet? No sound. I really felt like there was a moment of silence at some point for something; I just didn’t realize what it was. I’m coming offstage and it was truly shocking, in its unanimity and uniformity. And I turn and look and there’s Shirley Jones. She’s backstage. I don’t know Shirley Jones. She looks at me and doesn’t say anything; she just opens her arms up to give me a hug. It was one of those, like, There, there, poor boy.
Judd: Wow. I had one where—well, I didn’t perform but it felt like I had performed. I went to the AFI tribute to Mel Brooks, and I was supposed to get up and speak and I got really nervous.
Jon: You can’t win that.
Judd: The place is packed and I’m with my daughter. I’m usually with my wife at these things, because she will encourage me and say, “Don’t worry, you always do great.” But my daughter is as scared as I am. She’s sixteen and terrified for me. So I would say to her, “I’m really scared,” and she’d be like, “Oh my God.” And then the show starts. Martin Short does a medley of Mel Brooks songs. Tears down the house. Billy Crystal comes out with the most heartfelt, hilarious anecdotes. Tears down the house. Sarah Silverman comes out and does some variation of what I was going to try to do, only better. Decimates the place. I turn to my daughter and say, “I’m really scared. I don’t know if I can do it.” And she goes, “Don’t do it. Don’t do it.” I walk over to the first AD and say, “I’m not going to speak.” That was as bad as it gets.
Jon: You actually defused the bomb with, like, ten seconds to go. You fucking pulled the plug, man.
Judd: I totally pulled the plug, and then people just kept killing. The funny end of it is that special won the Emmy for best special and I thought, That’s because I ran for my life.
Jon: You know what you did? You sacrificed yourself. To give them the Emmy.
Judd: I knew Mel didn’t need me. He had enough love.
Jon: It’s always stunning how the old-school showbiz guys can crush anywhere, anytime. You realize that what we would consider the gauntlet of stand-up—the shitty clubs, the one-nighters in Jersey, the hotels in Rochester, all the shit you go through—is like a sanitized private school compared to what these guys did.
Judd: I asked about stand-up because it strikes me that you’re basically doing a fifteen-to-twenty minute stand-up set every night on your show—and one that you’ve never done before.
Jon: The show is such a different animal, though. It’s structured differently and written differently, and you have all the creature comforts of television to fall back on: The over-the-shoulder graphics, the montage, the willing audience. It’s such a different experience. It doesn’t feel analogous to stand-up in any way, actually, and maybe that’s why doing stand-up still feels pure to me. It’s like when bands get a little more established but they still want to go back and play the clubs they grew up in. Stand-up is such a visceral, direct experience.
Judd: When you think about your post–Daily Show days, do you hunger to be doing more live performance or—
Jon: I hunger for a nap.
Judd: I know. I watch the show every night and I have the same reaction every night: How does Jon keep up this level of enthusiasm?
Jon: I always have this sense, with the show, that it is a beast that just wants to get the hell away from us. And so the effort and energy that it takes to corral the beast every night—that is where your focus has to be. That being said, I guess I don’t look at the forms as exclusionary. It’s really a function of time, and I think that when I stop doing this, I will want to do stand-up. I just don’t think I’ll do it to the exclusion of other things, the way that we used to. The single-mindedness of it when we were younger is probably something I won’t return to.
Judd: Here’s the part that I am most impressed by: When I go to work in the morning, I’ll usually have someone bring me breakfast. I get somebody to make me—
Jon: Do you really?
Judd: Yeah, and I’ll—
Jon: What do you have for breakfast?