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Having midwifed such professional irritants as Kennedy, Puck, and Jesse Camp, MTV is not renowned as a launching pad for notable, lasting talents. We do, however, owe MTV a debt of gratitude for incubating Jon Stewart. Living in Canada -- where MTV is only a strange and vaguely understood rumour -- I remember awaiting the syndication of Stewart's MTV talk show in 1994 with great anticipation; he was, after all, the newly-crowned clown prince of America's foremost trend-setting, taste-making cable channel, and now he was making the jump to the big stage.
And The Jon Stewart Show was, as I recall, pretty funny -- not groundbreaking, but not without promise. Stewart himself seemed likable, despite his unnerving penchant for audibly expressing his desire to molest his female guests. At the age of thirty-one, he was young for a talk show host, and when you watched him careening around the set in his jeans and sneakers with the energy of a hyperactive teenager who's just downed a box of instant Jell-O powder, Stewart just seemed young, period. During his interviews, he looked like he was waiting for a chance to cut in and ask whether he might go outside and play. Alas, a few months into its life, the show was canned, assumedly because syndicated-TV-watching America never warmed to Stewart's cock-eyed humour and mildly adolescent antics.
I felt no great sense of loss at the time; I knew, after all, that it wouldn't be long before the syndicated late-night talk show reins were taken up by an entertainment titan such as, say, Sinbad. But I found Stewart's later guest spots on Larry Sanders oddly melancholy; there was something off-putting about watching Stewart play himself, in the role of the number one contender to Sanders's crown, because the unspoken "joke" seemed to be that Stewart himself had already blown his real-life title shot. Sure, Stewart got thrown a bone once in awhile, when CBS would let him host The Late, Late Show, but hearing the phrase, "We won't be needing you this week; Tom Snyder's back from holiday" can't do wonders for anyone's ego.
So there seems to be some sweet justice in the fact that Stewart has landed behind the desk of Comedy Central's The Daily Show -- now thirty-seven (!), now with a little gray at the temples (!!), now much more at ease and way more fun to watch than his predecessor, Craig Kilborn, whose one-note, "Frat Boy, Smirking" routine is now in evidence on his own floundering, eponymous late night show. What may have appeared at first to the naysayers (okay -- to me) like some kind of consolatory, booby-prize gig -- the sloppy seconds of Kilborn, a guy who used to host SportsCenter, for crying out loud -- has turned out to fit Stewart perfectly, and he, in turn, has grown nicely into his own screen presence -- punctuating his performances with wry, self-deprecating asides; deftly piloting the funniest half-hour on television; and generally exhibiting none of the desparate, puppy-dog mania that marred his tenure during his previous hosting gig.
There was, however, a specific moment when I realized that Jon Stewart deserves -- nay, demands -- to be bumped up to first class on the next flight of Fame Air. I caught him around New Year's on this ill-conceived MTV show, which was counting down the worst videos of all time. Stewart was one of an all-star comedy clique -- along with Janeane Garofalo, Denis Leary and SNL's Chris Kattan -- who sat on couches eating popcorn and tossing out impromptu wisecracks about the videos being aired, like live-action Beavis and Buttheads. Kattan acted like a bored eight year-old at his parents' cocktail party; he kept putting on funny hats and essentially screaming, "Pay attention to me!" Leary looked like he had a plane to catch. Janeane Garofalo giggled. And then there was Stewart, the one-time boy wonder, now turned elder statesman, coolly sitting back while the others peddled their schticks, and only interjecting every so often to drop the funniest lines of the bunch. These days, Jon Stewart doesn't seem to care so much about being the centre of attention, even though, these days, he clearly deserves to be.
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