Ah, fame. it gets comedian Jon stewart the best seats in restaurants -
like this charming, only slightly greasy Formica perch in the window
of New Pizza Town, with its romantic view of the corner of 78th and
Broadway.
Fame also brings fans, like the quartet of twentyish stockbrokers
settling in at the next table. It's just before Christmas, and the
gentlemen eyeballing Stewart are jaunty, whimsical, downright festive,
though their silk neckties remain, at I I P.m., firmly knotted. The
lads are clearly stoked by the Yuletide magic in the air - or maybe
just cheap office-party eggnog.
"Hey! Are you that f---ing guy? With the f---ing show?" bellows broker
No. 1. "You're on LTV, right?"
"I think you mean MTV," Stewart says dryly. "I'm Jon."
"You do look like him, you prick. What's the show called?"
"The Jon Stewart show."
This rouses broker No. 2. "Your commercials suck. And if it is your
show, which I don't believe, how do I get into Duff's pants?"
"You?" Stewart says. "You'd have no problem, you're so smooth."
No. 3, wearing a bow tie, pipes up. "So where do you live?"
"In a suite in the Dakota. I told John not to go out that day, but he
went."
This sails right over their drunken heads. The abuse spews for another
ten minutes; eventually the Wall Street worthies ask a really
offensive question. "Hey," yells No. 1, "what are you doing with your
short-term money?"
Stewart shakes his head as we escape to the sidewalk. "I was kind of
hoping you'd get to see a really pretty girl come up and say, ~I love
your show; would you like to date?' Guys like that, you don't have any
one thing you can say to them that would totally sum up the damnation
you feel in your heart. There's not one sentence."
He pauses for a half-second. "That's why I've written this song. . .
."
Here in the nineties, when every body except Chevy Chase has a talk
show, Jon Stewart brings three all-important qualities to MTV's entry
in the chat wars: He's funny. He's not afraid to tackle the tough
issues with guests like the 7-year-old Olsen twins from Full House.
And he has an abundance of body hair. "They have to shave my neck
during the hour between tapings," Stewart says. "Is that something I
shouldn't have shared?"
This is the man who should have been Conan. In fact, Stewart made it
to the finals of NBC'S Replace Dave Sweepstakes, only to have Lorne
Michaels choose O'Brien, a comedy writer who'd spent about as much
time in front of a television camera as Doris Duke.
"And what do we have for the losers?" Stewart intones in his most
unctuous game-show-host voice. "A week at Giggles Comedy Club in
Rochester! " Stewart's consolation prize turned out to be more
valuable: MTV launched The Jon Stewart Show.
All the standard talk-show elements are present in Stewart's speedy
half-hour, but they're slightly skewed: Announcer Howard Feller looks
heavily sedated (he played an inmate in Awakenings). The musical
guests (the Breeders; 4 Non Blondes; Gin Blossoms) are loud and
quirky. Then there's the host, a boyish, smartly sarcastic comic who's
a regular guy - quick-witted, but not overpowering like Robin
Williams; ironic, but not smug like Dennis Miller.
Stewart is also doing his best to be perky. "Jon's shown more of his
nice-guy side so far," says his pal Denis Leary. "As the show
continues, it will get uglier; eventually it will just be this raging
little Jewish man screaming into the camera."
Even with a cheesy set and an odd schedule - weeknights at ten, except
Thursdays - stewart is beginning to draw the hip, younger audience
that cludes Late Night With Conan O'Brien. MTV will make the challenge
more overt in February, when it moves Stewart to 12:30 A.M., directly
opposite Conan.
By then, Stewart will have paid his cable bill and had his service
reconnected. There's one talk-show competitor he's had his eye on for
years. "Robin Byrd," he says. "The other night I'd been dialing for an
hour and I finally got through. I said, ~I just want to tell you
ladies, I fought in Vietnam, and you are the kind of people that make
America worth dying for.'"
Stewart says he's 29 - "and I'll keep saying it until they move me to
VH-1" - but there are a few gray hairs scattered just above his ears.
He was raised Jonathan Stewart Leibowitz in Lawrence, New Jersey, a
suburb of Trenton; his parents, a teacher and a physicist, divorced
when he was 9. Asked if he was a hip kid, Stewart cackles and
confesses that his first big crush was on The Brady Bunch's Eve Plumb.
"There were never any hot Jewish girls on TV," Stewart says. "Although
there was that Gilligan's Island Chanukah episode. ~We're trapped on
the island, but look, a menorah washes up!'"
He graduated from the College of William and Mary in 1984 with a
degree in psychology and without a clue as to what to do with the rest
of his life. "My college career was waking up late, memorizing someone
else's notes, doing bong hits, and going to soccer practice," Stewart
says. "A fine institution of learning, and I spent half of it bent
over a little plastic tube going, ~Turn up the jam!'"
Hapless attempts at real jobs practically drove Stewart into comedy.
He worked as the agar chef in a cancer-research lab, then separated
live male and female mosquitoes as part of a New Jersey state project
on encephalitis. That job left Stewart looking like a
five-foot-seven-inch chigger bite. But show business, at first, seemed
nearly as bleak. Stewart performed for kids as part of a puppet show
about the disabled. "I was a cerebral-palsy puppet, a blind puppet, a
deaf puppet, a hyperactive puppet - and a puppet who couldn't commit
to a relationship. How sad."
He'd always been a wise guy, though. Heredity helped. "My grandfather
had a talk show back in Russia," Stewart says. "Getting Through the
Pogrom With Nathan Laskin."
When Stewart moved to New York to become a comedian, his mom promised
she'd keep his room at home ready.
Anna-marie Goddard looks a little skeptical. Playboy's
fortieth-anniversary Playmate has balanced her 36-24-35 frame on the
ugly green vinyl car seat that serves as The Jon Stewart Show's
interview couch, and now the host is blind folding her.
"You're from Holland," Stewart says. "Let's see if you can tell the
difference between Edam and Gouda." He places a hunk of cheese in
Goddard's giggling mouth. She chews thoughtfully. What happened next,
Stewart says later, is the kind of transcendent moment that makes a
man proud to call himself a talk-show host.
"When she spit the cheese out in my hand, that's when I thought" - he
puts on a pompous, stentorian voice - "~Hey, we're making television
here!'"
Stewart has selected the Cedar Tavern for tonight's interrogation.
It's within sprinting distance of his apartment, should the locals
turn hostile again. He puffs on a Camel Light, the smoke curling up in
front of his handsome face, one that combines the best of Rob Morrow
and Richard Lewis.
Budweiser in hand, Stewart considers his critics.
An interesting if still minor comedian. "That's great! I didn't know
you talked to my father!"
Attractive only, to MTV viewers too brain-dead to switch channels.
"Ah, ha, ha! I imagine that's an older - person who just doesn't like
MTV." Told it's from the Hollywood Reporter, Stewart grins. "Yes!
That's the guy who loved Chevy's show!"
A sharp social commentator in the honored tradition of Lenny Bruce.
"That's got more to do with my affinity for strippers and heroin than
it does with anything else."
In fact, Stewart bought Bruce's records when he was learning to be a
stand-up. His stage debut was in 1987, five painful minutes at an
open-mike night at the Bitter End. One of the first changes he made
was his name. "I know it seems like one of those self-hating-Jew
things to do, but I just didn't like my full name. Then I started
performing under the name Destiny, and everyone expected me to take my
top off. So I used my middle name. And Woody Allen called and said he
approved."
Up the comedy ladder he went, from an appearance at the New Jersey
Division of Mental Health Christmas party to a regular slot at
Stand-Up NY to Caesars Palace. In conversation, Stewart can fire off
one-liners as if rim shots were following him around. His stand-up act
is considerably more subtle, and, thankfully, a whole lot more acerbic
than his MTV show.
One Friday night at Stand-Up NY, Stewart prowls the stage wearing an
Agnes b. leather jacket and a hooded Nike sweatshirt. He moves from
the Pope ("the guy's a hat choice away from being grand wizard of the
Ku Klux Klan. . . round hat - good; pointy hat - bad") to Yom Kippur.
"Jewish day of atonement. You don't eat for one day, all your sin for
the year is wiped clean. Tremendous deal," Stewart says. "What do the
Catholics have? Forty days of Lent. Forty days! Even in sin you're
paying retail."
Despite his success on the club circuit, Stewart didn't feel he'd
arrived until he appeared on Letterman last March. "When I walked
onstage, I blanked," Stewart says. "The audience is dark, and there's
just a little red light. At that moment you realize, It'll be really
quiet here if I don't talk." Stewart's comedy reflexes kicked in, and
the rest is hysterical.
Besides doing stand-up, Stewart's also spent a year hosting Comedy
Central's Short Attention Span Theater, and thirteen weeks trying to
rise above the fart jokes on MTV's You Wrote It, You Watch It.
In October, he returned with the cheerfully low-rent Jon Stewart Show.
"Othertalk shows, their bits are like, ~All right, we're going to fly
Costas in on a helicopter; then he's going to parachute down and
present me with the Soupy Sales figurine,'" Stewart says. "We're like,
Can we afford that picture of Hasselhoff?'"
Stewart presides from behind a Nok-Hockey table instead of a desk. In
the first nine weeks, he hasn't come up with anything as inspired as
Letterman's legendary Alka-Seltzer suit, but he's showing a talent for
tbe loopy device. On one show, the aed Margarita Sames hunched over a
blender, mixing the frozen tequila beverage she claims to have
invented 45 years ago. Then there was Blind Date Night, when the
producers fixed up Stewart with Leonora, a gangly bionde so
opinionated that she should have her own show. "It was not the start
ol' something big between us," says Stewart, who is single.
But Tisha Campbell slow-danced with him, and William Shatner caressed
him gently. "Captain Kirk," Stewart deadpanned on the air, "you're
boldly going where no man has gone before."
"You want to take Jon home with you," says Tawny Kitaen, a recent
guest. "Like a puppy. You want to make sure he's okay."
Now, that's a compliment that makes every man cringe, but Tawny's
right - Stewart's got a vulnerable quality. When the show's first
guest, Howard Stern, launched a hilarious assault on MTV ("They ruin
people's careers") and Stewart ("I don't know who Gene is"), Stewart
played tight along: "I am scared to death," lie said, and the quiver
in his voice sounded real.
Stewart is sometimes too nice to his guests. His show's other big
weakness is that it can seem like an MTV infomercial, stuffed with
fellow MTV talking heads like Kurt Loder and Cindy Crawford. "I
agree," Stewart says. "In the beginning, it was really important to
get a lot of people on the air that the MTV audience recognized."
The show's appeal has broadened since then, to the point where MTV
says its ratings are second only to those of Beavis and Butt-head.
"I've met Butt-head," Stewart says. "Beavis has an attitude. You can't
talk to him. He's got an entourage."
The modest success of Stewart hasn't gone unnoticed at NBC, where
execs also considered Stewart as a successor to Bob Costas on Later.
Says a Lorne Michaels staffer, "Jon would make a good replacement for
somebody-you fill in the name."
Stewart's keeping everything in perspective spective. "I used to watch
NITV in college," he says. "You're with your roommate, watching Duran
Duran's ~Hungry Like the Wolf,'and you're high and you're eating an
egg sandwich, and you're like, ~Martha Quinn is cool!' Somewhere I bet
there's a 19-year-old kid, high, eating an egg sandwich, saying to his
roommate, ~Hey, where's Martha Quinn'? And who's this hairy guy?'"