Like almost everyone else on the TV beat, I come here today to praise Jon Stewart, not to bury him. And I look back, with particular fondness, on one particular joke he said to me alone…
It was more than a decade ago, at one of Stewart’s infrequent but memorable appearances at the annual Television Critics Association Awards. Stewart’s cheeky and intelligent brand of humor and news analysis caught the eye of TCA members early, and often.
For the 2002-03 season, a dozen years ago now, the TCA presented The Daily Show with Outstanding Achievement in Comedy, and also honored Stewart with Individual Achievement in Comedy – an award he won again for the 2004-05 season.
But also in 2002-03, the TCA awarded The Daily Show the top award in a much more serious category: Outstanding Achievement in News and Information, a category of winners otherwise populated only by very serious news programs, from 60 Minutes and ABC News Nightline to Frontline and documentaries by Ken Burns.
Receiving that award, Stewart jokingly asked the assembled critics if they knew he was a comedy show. We did. That fact hadn’t escaped us. But we also knew just what Stewart and company were doing on The Daily Show – and then as now, they were analyzing and criticizing the news, and especially the news media, in an entertaining yet invaluably clever and incisive fashion.
So Jon Stewart deserved those TCA Awards then, just as he deserves all the praise and fond farewells he’s getting now. (For my own, which pays particular attention to Stewart’s gifts as a master of transition and as an on-air TV critic, see my blog today on the CNN.com website. For an article by Cleveland Plain Dealer TV critic Mark Dawidziak, an article where I'm among those quoted about Stewart's impact and legacy, visit the Plain Dealer website. And Friday, I'll have a day-after review of his final show on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross.)
But at one of those awards shows of yore, I remember, with a smile, one chance encounter with the man who, tonight, exits The Daily Show after an impressive 16-year run. I was exiting the awards-show ballroom, to make a quick phone call, just as Stewart was arriving. After he made his way through the gauntlet of security folks, attendance-checkers and lanyard-givers, he said hello, saw my TCA credentials, and flashed a look of amused disbelief – if you’ve ever seen The Daily Show, you know the one.
“You’d think,” he said totally deadpan, “given the occasion, you’d have to work this hard to get out of here, not in.”
Thanks, Jon. For everything…