The Daily Show (currently The Daily Show with Jon Stewart) is a Peabody and Emmy-winning half-hour American satirical news television program produced by and run on the Comedy Central cable television network.
The show premiered on Monday, July 22, 1996, and was hosted by Craig Kilborn, who acted as an anchorman. In 1998, Kilborn left the show and was replaced by Jon Stewart in early 1999. Providing news-related comedy in the tradition of Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" segment, Channel 4's The Eleven O'Clock Show, and the long-running Canadian series This Hour Has 22 Minutes, The Daily Show reports on the foibles and hypocrisy of the real world with a satirical edge. Since Stewart's entrance, the show has also developed a reputation as one of the sharpest political commentary shows on American television.
History
Craig Kilborn 1996-1998
The Daily Show was created by Lizz Winstead and Madeline Smithberg. Searching for a weeknight staple to replace Politically Incorrect (a Comedy Central program that moved to ABC), Comedy Central premiered The Daily Show in the summer of 1996. A fake news program originally hosted by Craig Kilborn, the show featured a humorous take on contemporary news events. Aimed to parody conventional newscasts, the show featured a comedic monologue of the day's headlines, mockumentary styled on-location reports, in-studio segments, guest commentary, and debates. The show also took advantage of its visual medium, littering episodes with small touches like in-screen images labeled with their own gags, and presenting absurd bits of trivia coming back and going into commercials. Such segments included: "This Day in Hasselhoff History", "Last Weekend's Top-Grossing Films, Converted into Lira", and "Trivial Compromise" in which Winstead's mother, Ginny, would ask and answer various trivia questions. Originally the show was done without a studio audience, and would just prompt the laughs of its own off-camera staff members. A studio audience was incorporated into the show for its second season, and has remained since.
Under Winstead and Kilborn the show had a much more relaxed atmosphere, with not all contributors wearing suits. Kilborn often made personal asides to the audience taking on the character of an "enlightened frat boy". Kilborn would also often dance for the audience, especially on Thursdays as a celebration of the end of the week. In each show Kilborn would conduct very informal celebrity interviews that would end with a segment called "Five Questions" in which Kilborn would ask a sequence of five questions that often had irrelevant answers. The routine was derived from a pick-up line of Kilborn's invention, which Winstead thought would make good material for the show.
Regular correspondents included Brian Unger, Beth Littleford, and A. Whitney Brown. Stephen Colbert joined the cast a year after it premiered and was referred to as "The New Guy" for the remainder of Kilborn's three year tenure. Lizz Winstead herself also acted as a contributor as well as a writer in a weekly spot called "He Said, Winstead" in which she and Kilborn would ad lib a point-counterpoint style argument.
Each show was capped off with a segment called "A Moment of Zen" that often showed random video clips of humorous and sometimes morbid interest such as a snake charmer pulling a snake out of his throat via his nostril. A controversy arose due to one clip in which Asian men and women were shown throwing live baby chicks at alligators as feed. Winstead reacted to complaints by creating a similar video in which she threw fake chicks into a pond from a row boat.
Tensions often flared behind the scenes between Kilborn and female cast, leading Beth Littleford (a once-crew-leading member of the Daily Show) to comment later that Kilborn was as "dumb as a post". In a 1997 Esquire magazine interview, Kilborn made sexually explicit comments about his female coworkers. This led to a two week suspension without pay. Co-creator Winstead quit one month later.
In 1998 Kilborn left The Daily Show in order to replace Tom Snyder on CBS's The Late Late Show. He was able to take the interview segment "Five Questions" with him to the new show, disallowing any new TDS hosts from using it in their interviews. Correspondents Brian Unger and A. Whitney Brown left the show shortly before him. Unger returned for a single show in which he was supposedly killed on assignment by an incoming cruise missile.
Kilborn's last new show was aired on December 17, 1998. Reruns were shown until Jon Stewart's debut 4 weeks later.
A book released by Comedy Central titled The Daily Show: Five Questions (ISBN 0-8362-5325-6) was released in 1998, and highlights many of the best interview moments from Craig Kilborn's stint as host.
John Stewart (1999 - Present)
Jon Stewart took over as host on Monday, January 11, 1999. Stewart had previously hosted two shows on MTV (You Wrote It, You Watch It and an eponymous talk show) and been cast in films and television. His first guest was Spin City's Michael J. Fox, who quipped, "I've been on this show more than you have!"
Unlike Kilborn, whose dialogue and character were written entirely by others, Stewart served not only as host but also as a writer and co-executive producer of the series. His influence is noted for heading a significant, left leaning, shift in the way the show handled news. Stewart had a markedly different style, bringing a sharper political focus to the humor than the show previously exhibited. This satirical edge, combined with the show's 2000 Election coverage, dubbed "Indecision 2000", helped to catapult Stewart and The Daily Show to new levels of popularity and critical respect. With Stewart on board, the show has won nine Emmy Awards and two Peabody Awards, and its ratings more than doubled according to a 2003 Newsweek article. By 2004, the show had emerged into a pop culture hit and one of the most popular programs on cable television.
Stewart took over hosting from Kilborn retaining much of the same staff and on-air talent, allowing many pieces to transition without much trouble, while other features like "God Stuff", with John Bloom presenting an assortment of actual clips from various televangelists, and "Backfire", an in-studio debate between Brian Unger and A. Whitney Brown, evolved into the similar pieces of Stephen Colbert's "This Week in God" and Colbert and Steve Carell's "Even Stevphen". Since the change, a number of new features have been, and continue to be, developed as well. The ending segment "A Moment of Zen" developed from a random selection of humorous videos to often being recaps or extended versions of news clips shown earlier in the show (though sometimes are completely unrelated to any previous segment). The show's theme music, "Dog on Fire" by Bob Mould, was re-recorded by They Might Be Giants.
Current Format
The show's format has remained relatively stable throughout the years. Each episode opens with the introduction, "From Comedy Central's World News Headquarters in New York, this is The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." This used to be followed by the statement "The most important television program ever," but this was eliminated from the introduction following the September 11, 2001 attacks when the show resumed on Thursday, September 20. The show's format generally begins with the host's monologue of news headlines. The Daily Show runs this portion for the first segment, and may include "on location" reports. However, the correspondents are usually just standing in the studio with an obviously greenscreened backdrop. While generally no note is made of this fact, it is occasionally the subject of jokes, such as having a correspondent report from a press base on Mars (this joke was used when the first Mars Exploration Rover landed), or a correspondent report from San Andreas of the videogame Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. A few reports are actually done on location; for example, Jason Jones was actually in Denmark for a March 28, 2006 report, which he proved by shoving the person behind him (an uncredited passerby). Introductions and on-screen graphics always label the same four reporters as "senior" specialists in the subject at hand, sometimes with absurdly specific expertise. A given reporter may be "Senior Palestinian Analyst" one day, "Senior Agricultural Reporter" a few days later, "Senior Papal Vacancy Expert" the next week, and for the 2005 trial of Michael Jackson, "Senior Jackologist" then "Senior Child Molestation Expert". The show formerly split the news into segments known as "Headlines", "Other News", and "This Just In", though these titles were dropped sometime around 2003. Stewart and company have fine-tuned the technique of intercutting commentary with footage, in which the host or correspondent can stop the action at a telling moment, and register skeptical reserve or excruciated dismay, as political clichés, dud imagery, or self-contradictory statements hang in the air.
Following the regular news portion are correspondent pieces and interviews, the order of which varies from episode to episode. Correspondent pieces involve the show's members actually traveling to a different location to make a report or interview people important to the story. Topics vary widely, ranging from the invention of hufu, a tofu-based human flesh substitute, to a piece highlighting the lack of Asian men in pornography. Local media have reported on visits from Daily Show correspondents.
Some segments occur periodically, such as "Mark Your Calendar," "Back in Black" with Lewis Black, "This Week in God", "Trendspotting" with Demetri Martin, "Poll Smoking" with Dave Gorman and "Great Moments in Punditry as Read by Children" (small children reading transcripts of contentious moments from programs like Crossfire and Hannity and Colmes). Since the early days of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a common part of the show has been "Mess O' Potamia," focusing on the troubles in that region.
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