For several years, the comedian Catie Lazarus has hosted a live talk show, “Employee of the Month,” with an accompanying weekly podcast, in which she interviews notable people—Jill Abramson, Rachel Maddow, Barney Frank, and Wallace Shawn among them—about their jobs. Her tone with guests is both playful and serious: Lazarus is a veteran of U.C.B., standup, and comedy writing, and she was once in a doctoral program in clinical psychology. “On my show, people say things that they don’t normally say,” she told me recently. Lewis Black teared up; the playwright Adam Rapp referred to the Times critic Charles Isherwood as an “asshole”; Gloria Steinem talked about the “f” word and did an elegant little dance.
On Thursday night, at Joe’s Pub, Lazarus interviewed her first three guests of the show’s new season: the musician Martha Wainwright, who played two beautiful songs and talked about Rufus, Loudon, and the gang; the former pickpocket Sherman (O.T.) Powell; and Jon Stewart, a week after he announced that he was leaving “The Daily Show.”
Lazarus, who once played a woman in a mikvah in a “Daily Show” sketch about a prequel to “Hot Tub Time Machine,” took a broad approach to presenting Stewart’s career. “You may remember him from ‘Playing by Heart’ or ‘Death to Smoochy,’ ” she said. The band played “Born in the U.S.A.”—Stewart is from New Jersey—and he came onstage in a faded leather jacket and a gray hoodie the approximate color of his hair. He looked weathered but vital, up for a little after-work jam session. Joe’s Pub went wild with cheering.
“Before you did ‘The Daily Show,’ you had an illustrious career in acting and hosting and modelling,” Lazarus said. On a screen behind them, a Calvin Klein-ad spoof appeared of Stewart, in his underwear and a baseball cap, in a coy pose.
“Now if you saw a picture of me like that, you’d think I was an otter,” Stewart said. “I’ve become slightly more hirsute. That was for the original MTV talk show”— “The Jon Stewart Show”—“which was 1993, right after Marky Mark had done his big ad campaign. And I thought, What’s he got that I haven’t got? Other than a body that does not look amorphous and pear-shaped?” “The Jon Stewart Show” ran for two years, in two incarnations. He wore a leather jacket there, too.
Lazarus asked him about “Death to Smoochy.” “Danny DeVito, who directed it, is one of the most wonderful, inventive guys to be around,” Stewart said. “On the set, it’s Edward Norton, Robin Williams, Catherine Keener—clearly brilliant actors—and me.” They could do things he could not. “So we’re in this big scene, and there’s this huge cast of extras, and I’ve got this ridiculous fucking haircut, and I’m trying to, you know, ‘You get Smoochy, now!’ And I hear, ‘Cut!’ And Danny is tiny. So you don’t see anybody, you just see like bushes moving. And all of a sudden his little head would pop out, and he’d yell at me and then head back into the forest.”
“You always shit on yourself as an actor,” Lazarus said.
“I shit on myself for a lot of things,” Stewart said.
Lazarus played a clip of Stewart and Gillian Anderson in a romantic fireside scene from “Playing by Heart,” from 1998. Anderson looked morose. Stewart yelled at the screen: “The truth is out there—he’s a Jew!” Onscreen, he said, a bit smarmily, “Maybe you’re just afraid of that loss of control,” which made the audience laugh uproariously. To see him being earnest as an actor, in a 1998 romance, felt wrong, embarrassing somehow. The thought crossed my mind that Stewart, as a young actor, had been, like the young George Clooney, on a path to finding his way toward his ultimate form, in middle age: quick-witted and comfortable, exuding the confidence that comes from believing in what you’re doing. When the clip was over, Stewart said, “Acting!,” Master Thespian-style.
Lazarus asked what it was like to direct “actors who you thought were phenomenal. I’m thinking of ‘Rosewater,’ ” she said.
“It gave me a tremendous amount of sympathy for the people who had to direct me,” Stewart said. He said that when you create something and the people you’re working with are able to elevate it “in ways that are surprising or interesting, it’s very gratifying.” I imagined him thinking of his “Daily Show” peers, from Corddry and Colbert to Aasif Mandvi and beyond. “Whenever I was acting, I never felt like I was able to give that to the director or the writer. What I could do in terms of acting was be myself, but ten per cent madder.”
“Did acting influence the process of directing?” Lazarus asked.
“No. What influenced me much more was doing ‘The Daily Show,’ ” he said— collaborating with a team. “You have to learn to read and react very quickly. And that served me well on the set. Tuning yourself to everybody else’s ear.”
“Do you think you’ll do more serious dramas?”
“Yeah, I would like to. I have a lot of ideas. I think partially that’s why I decided to move on from the show. I think I got to a certain point where I thought, Well, you shouldn’t stay somewhere just because you can,” he said. “Whenever you’re doing a hundred and sixty shows a year, you’re not going to be there in full spirit and mind every time. The thing I’ll miss the most is the thoughtful conversation in the morning that turns into a rewrite dance party.” Coping with the day’s news—something tragic, like the Charlie Hebdo attack—“we’re all bereft, we’re having a very thoughtful conversation in the morning, and then finding something by four-thirty or five in that rewrite room that still gives us that stupid childlike jolt of joy. That joy machine. The actual being on TV part has become sort of peripheral to the experience of making it. And I’ll miss the experience of making it much more than the experience of presenting it.”
The audience applauded spontaneously. It was like his retirement speech all over again—the same summing up, the same gratitude and passion for the work, the same chance for the strangers in the room to appreciate him.
“Your employees have constantly complained about how vain you are, how needy, a diva,” Lazarus said. The audience laughed.
“I make them all wear mirrors, and I spend the whole day going, ‘Good idea, Stewart!’ ” he said. “When you can find people that have that type of talent and creativity but also that type of humanity—you know them,” he told Lazarus. “They’re good fuckin’ people. And a pleasure to be around. And in creative environments all the time, you don’t get that. Too many people use creativity and art as an excuse to be an asshole.” This, too, drew some applause, and whistling—Lazarus’s shows are beloved by creative people, some of whom might know a few assholes. Stewart said that he wasn’t a mentor so much as a collaborator—part of a like-minded team—which was preferable to a workplace where everyone was reading “The Art of War.”
A baby cooed.
“And that baby will agree,” he said.
When Lazarus asked about who he’d like to see take over, he said, “What I want to see there is the next iteration of this idea. I feel like the tributaries of my brain combined with the rigidity of the format—I feel like I utilized every permutation that I could possibly use. You can only go so far with four facial expressions and five to seven curse words.”
Stewart and “The Daily Show”—like Ira Glass and “This American Life”—have created a system of entertaining journalism and an experienced group of acolytes who can use the show’s methods to new ends. So far, these include “The Colbert Report,” “The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore,” and “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” which makes effective use of viral campaigns, such as last week’s Jeff the Diseased Lung in a Cowboy Hat (a proposed new logo for Philip Morris). “John Oliver was able to apply our process to a more considered thing,” Stewart said. “It’s exciting to watch it evolve. That’s what I’m looking forward to.”
Lazarus asked him how it felt to leave on his own terms.
“You know, I have found not being fired is preferable to being fired,” he said. “Having experienced the being fired. Often.”
“Even from your brother!” Lazarus said. “Do you want to tell that story?”
“Uh, O.K.” Stewart said. “I was hired to be a stock boy at a Woolworth’s in New Jersey,” he began. The story was a good one—virtuosic, operatic, hilarious—and included a shipment of beanbag chairs and the phrases “beautiful half-gainer” and “parakeet abattoir.” You should listen to him tell it, here.
“I know people are sad to see you retire,” Lazarus said.
“I’m not putting on the black socks and heading down to Boca!” Stewart said.
She gave him some parting gifts: a COBRA form; a bathrobe and bonbons (“What am I, Eva Gabor?” he asked); an events flyer for the 92nd Street Y, including “poetry and some Zumba stuff” (“I see they have Mitzi Gaynor coming in February!” Stewart said. “She’s terrific”), and a notebook. “Because I hope you never stop writing,” Lazarus said. “You are a brilliant, brilliant comedian and a wonderful human being.” The cheering was loud and grateful. The band played its Springsteen fanfare, Stewart disappeared through the little door at the bottom of the Joe’s Pub stage stairs, and Lazarus, continuing with her own job, brought on her next guest.
