Judd: An egg white omelet of some sort.
Jon: Look at you, with the egg white omelet.
Judd: And that’ll take me—
Jon: Maybe a little spinach in there, a little tomato, a little feta?
Judd: I’ll have a little—uh, yeah, spinach mainly.
Jon: Nice.
Judd: And I’ll sit and I’ll eat that omelet and I’ll take an hour. I’ll watch your show. I’ll watch Colbert. Okay, so there’s an hour where I’ve gotten no work done. And then I’ll just kind of wander around and chat with everyone at the office and make a couple of calls. I can easily kill until one o’clock that way. But you have to hit the ground running. Hard. Every single day.
Jon: We work in an office. You know, it’s funny. People always say to me, Ah, man, you guys—it probably must be so much fun, sitting around! And it’s like, Yeah, our morning meeting starts at nine. We have to pitch out our ideas—and in some ways that is the challenge of a show. It’s to create a factory that doesn’t kill inspiration and imagination. You try to create a process that includes all the aspects of a mechanized process that we recognize as soul killing while not actually killing souls.
Judd: That is the invisible genius that the world will never understand. We worked at Larry Sanders Show together as writers, and we’ve had friends who have worked on many shows. And I find that, on most shows, the result of a very difficult process with high standards is that everybody hates the head guy. The head guy is not a beloved figure—whether it’s Garry, Roseanne, or Cosby.
Jon: See, here’s where I disagree. I think that’s not necessary. When I was working on those other shows, I felt like there were aspects to it that didn’t need to exist in order to maintain the creative excitement. It didn’t need to be Machiavellian. You could get everybody to have common cause, and do it in a way that maintained a certain humanity. I always look at it like: Think of how much energy it takes to fuck with people. What if you try to use that energy to get the show done faster and better and get everybody out by seven? If I go into the morning meeting and I have clarity, and I can articulate that clarity, everybody’s day is easier. If that doesn’t happen, it’s my fault.
Judd: How often does it happen that something heinous happens in the world, and you walk in and say, “I have no take on this whatsoever, it’s so horrifying. I have nothing to say.”
Jon: Well, then that’s our take. And that’s where the stand-up background comes in. What’s the audience feeling right now? Let’s just articulate back to the audience what they’re feeling so at the very least, they get a recognition laugh as opposed to bringing them some sort of analysis. None of us may have a take, but if you maintain your ability to recognize a good idea, at the very least you know everybody is up for it. We’ll sit in those meetings and we may come in with nothing, but at some point, it’s sort of like it’s a refinery. We’ve been here sixteen years, so we’ve sanded out every rough aspect of the process. Any extraneous energy that would be spent on things other than trying to make the show good have been removed.
Judd: I just always felt, and I don’t know if this is your take on things, but when we did the last-season The Larry Sanders Show, life got very stressful.
Jon: It was tough.
Judd: It was tough for many reasons, but a big part of it was that the show was so personal to Garry. It was hard to crack what he would like, and he was acting so much that he needed the staff to come through for him so he could have time to sleep and do his work. There was a tension that couldn’t be removed, which is: You were never going to nail it and it was always going to be painful for Garry because then Garry would have to say, “Okay, just come to my house on Sunday so I can rewrite the script.” There was some pain to that. But as I’ve watched the evolution of The Daily Show, I thought that something about the experience of being at The Larry Sanders Show, and being around Garry, as complicated as it was, must have inspired you in some way.
Jon: No question. Well, first of all, Garry is brilliant. The biggest thing, and this is not necessarily what comes through on The Daily Show, but the biggest thing that I picked up from Garry was the difference between character and caricature. That idea of, you know, it would have been very easy for us to solve almost any story problem we had with Hank walking in and calling someone a cocksucker. We knew that would kill, and it would move, but it would reduce everyone to two dimensions. Garry also taught me about intention. Intention is a really big thing at this show. We always want to know where’s the intention and, now, let’s find a path to that intention. Those were positive lessons. But then, there were the negative lessons, too—it’s where I learned the importance of trying to create an atmosphere that was maybe slightly less volatile.
Judd: Yes, well, there was always that—the struggle that comes when certain people are trying to please their boss. My approach was always: This is an impossible job for Garry. I’m just going to try and help him in any way I can. But other people, when they would pitch a joke that didn’t get through, would get angry at Garry. And that was destructive.
Jon: It’s so important to remove preciousness and ownership. You have to invest everybody in the success of the show, and to let them feel good about their contribution to it without becoming the sole proprietor of a joke. There has to be an understanding that that may be a great joke, but it might not serve the larger intention, or the narrative, of the show. You have to make sure that everybody feels invested without feeling that type of ownership. The other side of it is doing twelve episodes is a very different process from having to set up something that can serve a hundred and sixty episodes, and I think you can get away with more volatility in that other environment.
Judd: And the storytelling requires that people go to some deep place, emotionally, which makes them vulnerable and raw. And on a show like Larry Sanders, you had the sense that the episodes are going to hang around for a long time, and be seen more over and over again, so you really can’t bear to have a crappy one.
Jon: Correct. The fact that The Daily Show is ephemeral makes the process so much more forgiving. The idea that you’re crafting twelve unique, careful episodes is very different than the feeling of, like, Okay, well, that one sucked, but who’s on tomorrow? It gives you a cushion you might not have elsewhere.
Judd: Looking back, one could say that the final season of Larry Sanders is almost perfect, in its story line, with the young guy, played by you, pushing Garry out.
Jon: It’s All About Eve.
Judd: And it is exactly what happened with Leno and Conan.
Jon: We created this template. People used to say to me, Larry Sanders is a satire on the dark underbelly of show business. And I always felt like, Oh, you have no idea. You have no idea of the darkness of the underbelly of show business.
Judd: How has the way that you look at The Daily Show changed over the years? Do you have a different sense of its purpose now?
Jon: I never think about its purpose. I think about its process, and that has changed dramatically. In other words, the evolution has been less about: What is our job here, or what is our purpose of being here? It’s about: How can we make the show better, more distinct, with different voices? The two areas where I think the show has evolved the most are through the integration of new technologies, obviously—you know, search engines that didn’t exist when we started, and that help us find material. When we got here, we used to cut the show in an online room. You could use maybe five rolls for an act and if you cut that montage and you got one of them wrong, you had to go back and start again. And I also think we have a better understanding of the diversity of voice. We’ve moved it from more of a strict, periodic structure into something that could become more essayistic.