Jon Stewart Reveals Chaos of First Show & How Howard Stern Mocked Him (VIDEO)
Jon Stewart returned to his well-worn chair to host his weekly segment of The Daily Show Monday night, and in addition to weighing in on the latest political hot topics, he also took a quick trip down memory lane, guided by one of his audience members in his “After the Cut” question and answer series.
The audience member in question informed Stewart that she had been a faithful viewer of his since his early ’90s MTV show, The Jon Stewart Show, and she wondered what he might’ve done differently in retrospect.
“You watched that show?!” he asked the guest incredulously.
The Jon Stewart Show was a half-hour talk show hosted by the eventual Emmy-winning emcee, but at the time he was not exactly a household name. The show only came to fruition after Arsenio Hall stepped away from The Arsenio Hall Show, and it ran for just two seasons from 1993 to 1995.
So the chance to revisit his first stint as a talk show host seemed to tickle Stewart to no end as he revisited just what a mess The Jon Stewart Show was.
“My first guest was Howard Stern… and he came on, and he said, ‘You suck, this set looks ridiculous, you’ll be canceled in six weeks.’ And I just sat there like, ‘Don’t say that,'” Stewart recalled. “It was such a different kind of show. I think the two guests on that first show were… It was Howard Stern, a boy that ate cheese into the shape of states who was referred to in all the production documents as ‘Cheese Boy.’ The crazy part is Cheese Boy is probably, like, 50 now. Cheese Boy is an ophthalmologist.”
Stewart continued, “We had so much fun, but it was such a different ethos.… I was hired to replace Arsenio, which makes total sense. And so you can imagine how that went. And then that got canceled. And I remember the last two weeks of that show were just chaos. Like, it’s good that they took us off the air ’cause someone was gonna die.”
Not one to skip out on the specifics, Stewart then went on to describe some of the dangerously unprofessional things that happened during his tenure as host of the show.
“Marilyn Manson was on the show, he lit a fire during his performance, an actor smashed a mug and cut his hand wide open, and the final one was, there was an act called ‘The Birdman of Vegas,’ and the Birdman of Vegas had a condor act,” he remembered. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been around condors. They’re gigantic… His assistant is there and the condor will fly from his arm to the other, and it’s a giant bird with a wingspan of 12 feet, and it flies over. But the bird apparently wasn’t going to do that that day. Instead, what it did is it flew into the audience. And so a giant condor just started pecking s***… and then the audience starts chanting, ‘Sue them, sue them!’ And I’m just like, ‘I..'” And we were, like, canceled… We were already canceled. And I was just like, ‘I will let the birds kill everyone. I don’t give a s***.'”
Returning to the original question at hand, Stewart concluded, “So if you say, like, ‘Would you have done anything differently?’ I’d be like, ‘I guess I would’ve made sure the condors were leashed.'”
The Daily Show, Weeknights, 11:30/10:30c, Comedy Central
