The New Yorker Radio Hour - Jon Stewart: “That’s Not Cancel Culture”

Episode Date: October 19, 2021

“The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” defined an era. For more than sixteen years, Stewart and his many correspondents skewered American politics. At the 2021 New Yorker Festival, Stewart spoke with David Remnick about his new show, “The Problem with Jon Stewart”; the potential return of Donald Trump to the White House; and the controversy around cancel culture in comedy. “What do we do for a living?” Stewart asks, of comedians. “We criticize, we postulate, we opine, we make jokes, and now other people are having their say. And that’s not cancel culture, that’s relentlessness.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Let's start here. This is The Daily Show with John Stewart. From the 2000 election to 9-11 and the Iraq War, right up until Donald Trump rode that escalator in the Republican campaign, the Daily Show with John Stewart often drove political conversation in this country. And Stewart's approach to political entertainment has privileged. proliferated all over from John Oliver to Samantha B to Trevor Noah and more. His new show on Apple TV Plus, The Problem with John Stewart, is out now, and I spoke to John

Stewart the other day at the New Yorker Festival. Now, where you've been? What's your life been like? You cut out in 2015. There were a lot of disappointed people, but things come to an end. Well, it was interesting. It was funny. When I went back to do the show that we're doing now for Apple. And the first day that we were there, you know, you have an audience interaction generally before the show. You'll go out and just say hello and you'll introduce yourself to everybody and kind of take some questions. And one of the questions somebody said to me is, you know, you've missed so much over these last, you know, five or six years. And I had to remind them, you know, I am alive.

Like it's not, I don't actually not, I haven't been on television, but I too had to take precautions during COVID and suffer the stress and frustration and anger of the Trump years. You, you live all that. But you know what they're asking. You were, you were a nightly presence for 15, 16 years and then, and then not. How did your life change? I did a tremendous amount of puttering. I have half a melon and then I jazz size. It is a remarkable No, it's oddly enough, for me personally, the way I experienced life was fuller. I'd spent so much time singularly focused on the Daily Show, which is a very sort of eccentric process and one that is, I don't want to say wrote, because it certainly wasn't wrote, but it was redundant. But what you're describing is boredom in a sense or not?

I think that is in a sense, but it's also boredom based on narrowness of field. I mean, there was a certain adolescent joy to that feeling of like, oh my God, I just got out of, you know, I've been looking through a cardboard tube. You had time to think about the impact of your show. You're surrounded by people and fans all the time telling you about how you, eviscerated or annihilated one thing or another, whether it was Fox News or... I was a destroyer of worlds. Yeah, exactly. I was the Attila the Hun of topical comedy.

But on the, I think it was the next to the last show you had. You kind of came out and you showed a montage of all these things that you'd supposedly destroyed, and there they all were. You said the world is demonstrably worse. But, David, the interesting point. about what you bring up is. And it's a great kind of discussion about perception and

reality because you said something in there that I thought kind of gets to it, which is you're surrounded by people who are saying, you know, who are saying, you annihilated or they're big fans. And I'm not. The truth is, I'm surrounded by staff.

And we're all working to make this product. And the internal barometer that you create with each other has to be strong enough to withstand this outside noise. But you can't think about that. You can only think about in this room with these people. Are we clear enough in our intention? Are we being funny enough? Is it smart? Is it relevant? Is this the best iteration of that idea? Are there other things that we could do to articulate it that's less strident? This is too didactic. Let's pull it down. All those things are

happening internally. So the external noise to the best of your ability has to be blocked down. It's still just tell them. You left the show a year before some, I don't know what the number of months was before Trump. Trump is starting to appear, and you grew up in this area, Trump was a kind of a comic figure on the jokescape of New York. He was a, you know, on the cover of spy magazine regularly. He was, you know, a kind of real estate bozo. Right. Were you taken by surprise as somebody from Jersey from New York who was very familiar with Trump, that he would connect as viscerally as he did with so much of the country. I mean, did that take you as much by surprise as nearly all of journalism?

I thought he disqualified himself at every turn. But for those of us who've been in New York, we probably saw, like, if nothing else, dude's resilient. Like, very few people can bankrupt that many things and still continue on with that kind of success. I think what was more. For me, more difficult was it affected kind of a larger, maybe more naive worldview on my part. And that was that I was raised on the ethos of the emperors new clothes. That's what, you know, when you get into comedy or satire, I think there's a certain part of you that goes back to that old fable.

And you're not prepared for the child saying, the emperor has no clothes and you're not prepared for the crowd to go you're the enemy of the people you're fake news and you run a pedophile ring out of a pizza place you know you're in that moment when when naming the hypocrisy and the contradiction and the absurdity doesn't do anything you really are left with a sense of oh shit now now wait a minute I didn't bring anything else. I'm not sure what to do now. Did you have the temptation or even the vanity to think, you know, if I'd stayed longer,

if I'd been here through 16, 17, 18, that the daily show would have been the effective means of pointing out the emperor has no clothes. No, no, no. You know, there were a ton of really talented people doing the thing that I do and doing it every night and doing it really well. And it doesn't, what I'm saying is the lesson I learned from the daily show, that it's that cultural power isn't power. It has an effect.

It's not nothing. But I think the narcissism of media, and I include myself in that, is that we believe that the halls of pontification are actually the halls of power. and they're not. John, one more Trump question. Sure. In four years, Trump proved himself a colossal liar, an admirer of authoritarian's, and his incompetence during the pandemic was what it was.

And January 6th was supported by him and pretty self-evidently an attempt to illegally reverse a democratic election. And yet he persists. He's quite likely to run in 2024, and I think to underestimate his chances seem incredibly foolish at this point. Are people underestimating his chances? I think people do. I think people think he's too old. He's finished. Everybody's exhausted with him.

How do you feel about it? Oh, I think he's got a very good chance. You know, I remember the people saying, like, this is not normal. Corruption has been, if anything, he's done us a favor. I think he's peeled back the facade that our economy and that our government run on a higher-minded principle. And if we don't address that in a real way, then we are much more vulnerable to authoritarian takeover, which by the way is happening everywhere. And one of the reasons that it's happening is the overwhelming fire hose of stimulation and information, that fires into people's synapses in a way that has never occurred before is disorienting.

And in moments of disorientation, people look to the captain to say, follow me, I have the answer, and I will lead you forward. And you see it around the world. John Stewart, in a conversation from the New Yorker Festival. The New Yorker Radio Hour continues right after this. Well, let's talk about your new show. show. The first episode, which I thought was remarkable, was about a theme that's been very close to your heart for a long time. And the specifics of it was about the use of burn pits where the military disposes waste in an incredibly

toxic way, and it's had terrible effects on the health of all kinds of soldiers. And then it's followed up by an examination of the really woeful lack of health care that comes their way. You have an interview at the end of this, after a panel discussion with veterans, which was very moving, there's an interview with the Secretary of Veteran Affairs, Dennis McDonough, who had been chief of staff under Obama. And he agrees with you that these burn pits are terrible and so on,

but then he wants more proof, which you find an incredibly, let's just say, insufficient answer. You've often said you're not a journalist. How are you not a journalist in this program? I mean, maybe that's what that is. I guess it's based on the idea that having not really studied it, I don't know what does that mean. And my frustration with the media conversation in general is processes like the one that you're talking about.

Because what they're focused on is, what was that? You know, are you a journalist now or are you still a comedian? And a lot of the stuff I read about it was that. It was simply sort of based on like, confused. Like, what is it? And you just want to kind of at some point step back and go like, I don't know, but I thought it was compelling and interesting and relevant.

And so few of the people that talked about the show talked about what actually it was. And in some ways, a lot of it was gatekeeping on whether or not I should still be allowed. you're gatekeeping a shitty restaurant. Like, it's like being a bouncer at a sizzlers. You know what I mean? Like, you're, you're, have you seen TV? I won't hear anything bad about sizzlers. As long as I'm not doing more episodes of kitchen nightmares,

how is this not like, it's such a, I just find the whole conversation so odd. Like, we have a show once a week on HBO that does a satirical look at issues. So what makes you think? And I'm like, how many fucking CSI? Are there? Like, what are you talking about? Let's talk about who's in that room. It's, it's, it's, it's really interesting to me that your showrunner is not a comedy writer at all. She's a journalist from CBS, I think, in ABC. Brind out of car. Yeah. And you have a head writer who's, who is a comedian,

I think. Chelsea Devonter. Yeah. How did you, that's a huge thing, how you assembled the room. Who did you want in there? And how did you go about doing that? With, and with what intent? I wanted people who were really expert in what they did, but who were also open to translating a different intention. And if we threw them all into the room, and Chelsea, in terms of the writing, so there's two sides of it. There's the writing staff, and then there's more the production staff. There's, you know, video and research and all those other areas.

It's built probably similar to a newsroom. You know, the bar of entry, especially for writing, is insane. and oftentimes writing samples for shows are almost like hazing. Like, okay, here's what you're going to do. You're going to write three sample scripts. And then when you're done with the sample scripts, I'd like you to just pick and invent eight new words. And I'd like to be popularized.

You know, it's fucking, like they just come up with these insanely robust, like it's somehow it's got to be an Ironman triathlon. And so Chelsea said, you know, let's create something. that's doable. One page of jokes, because here's the truth of it. We've been doing this a long time. It doesn't take me very long in reading somebody where I go, or.

Or the other. Right. John, the second episode is called Freedom, and it's about division in the country, especially where it comes to the pandemic. And it invokes everyone's favorite person, Adolf Hitler. But I see the problem.

You think the government taking public, safety measures to combat COVID is like Hitler. And we think COVID is like Hitler. And so it looks like we got ourselves a good old-fashioned Hitler off. So once and for all, let's find out. What's more Hitler? No, wait. I believe you were supposed to chant that with me, so we're going to try that again.

Do you think that's how Hitler started? They really like chanting the name Hitler. All right, here's a... Shit's getting dark fast, isn't it? What were you setting out to do in this episode? If you were to boil it down to one thing, it's that their reluctance to go along with sacrifice oftentimes is painted as a virtue. So if wearing a mask is what Hitler did, and sort of the joke is like, well, you know, Hitler did institute certain mandates, but it's not

what he was known for. You know, and we do a bit called, uh, what's more Hitler, COVID or the mask mandate. And it's kind of just feeling like, okay, body count wise. I'm going to say it's COVID. I think that's more Hitler than, you know, mask mandates. And so I think to thrust the the episode is if we have a freedom that no longer is connected to meaning, then anything that happens can be viewed as oppression. A lot of voices now, John, are like Bill Maher, for example, when it comes to the culture wars, he expresses his frustration over and over again. I can't say this. We're limited in saying that. We have to wear a gag and this kind of expression. Comedians are talking all the time about, well, I can't, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I,

I can't do this. I can't say that. No. How do you come down on this? All the people who talk about cancel culture. Here's a nice absurdity. Okay. People that talk about cancel culture never seem to shut the fuck up about it.

Like there's more speech now than ever before. It's not you can't say. It's that when you say it, look, the Internet has democratized criticism. What do we do for a living? We talk shit. We criticize, we postulate, we opine, we make jokes. And now other people are having their say. And that's not cancel culture. That's relentlessness. We live in relentless culture. Look at what's happening with Chappelle right now. So many conservatives now. This is the critique of him about transgender jokes.

Yeah, and leaving all that aside, what's interesting is to watch right-wing, Twitter, and the internet grab him and hold him up now and weaponize what he's going through and what he's doing as a way of further pushing their political. When, you know, we're free speech warriors just like Dave Chappelle. Right. What would happen if Dave took a knee at a football game? Still there?

No. Still no lot. It always struck me throughout all the years of the Daily Show that there was also an innate optimism to your view of things. Where resides your optimism? In the resilience of the human species to move forward. I came of age in the late 60s and early 70s when the best people this country had to offer were all killed. and the Vietnam War raged and the President of the United States was a liar and it exposed certain realities of power structures.

And so I don't look at today as uniquely flawed or uniquely troubling or uniquely, I look at it as all of the time periods that have come to pass. You know, my parents came of age in the Depression in World War II. So the greatest threat to our mental health, I think, is probably loss of perspective and nostalgia. Who knows what incredible inventions and progress and intelligence will spring forth from this shit show. But it will. And it will, and not in a linear fashion, and it may be down the road and it may be, but it's kind of the point I always trying to make, which is we're complicated and dangerous and amazing and lovely and horrible. And all the things that we do to progress,

oftentimes in unseen ways, come back to destroy. But there's always always, But that's not the intention. The intention is generally to better. And I've always believed that. Maybe naively so. But I always believe that. And again, don't confuse that with, and so I think we should just wait.

And how can we not be optimistic with Jeff Bezos in Space, as you've featured on the show? He's a wonderful man. You know what? I always feel like saying to him, when if I was to ever like, and I met him once, but I think what I would say to him now is I would meet him and then I would shake his hand and I would lean in and I say, I want you to know, death will be victorious. It does. I don't care how fast you go into space. I don't care how far you run. Death will find you as he finds all of us. John Stewart, thank you so much. And thank you for everybody for making this festival.

possible and thank you to everybody who put it together. Thank you. And thank you for the free subscription. Is that what I can? Yeah, that's coming your way. John Stewart at the New Yorker Festival. His new show is called The Problem with John Stewart, and it can be found on Apple TV Plus. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tuneiard.

with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. We had assistance this week from WNYC's Amy Pearl. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.