Wyatt Cenac, a former writer and correspondent on “The Daily Show,” said Jon Stewart told him to “f**k off” when Cenac confronted him about the way he was imitating Herman Cain’s voice.
Cenac, a black man, recounted the story on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast released Thursday. The incident occurred in 2011, as Stewart was imitating Herman Cain’s voice, who was a 2012 presidential hopeful at the time.
“‘Fuck off. I’m done with you,'” Cenac said Stewart yelled at him, on the podcast. “And he just started screaming that to me. And he screamed it a few times. ‘Fuck off! I’m done with you.’ And he stormed out. And I didn’t know if I had been fired.”
He said that he remembered thinking the comments came from a “a naïve, ignorant place.”
Cenac watched Stewart’s bit remotely, but told Stewart that the sketch bothered him when he returned, according to the report.
“(Stewart) got incredibly defensive. I remember he was like, What are you trying to say? There’s a tone in your voice. I was like, “There’s no tone. It bothered me. It sounded like Kingfish,” Cenac recounted.
Cenac was the only black writer on “The Daily Show” staff at the time, according to the Vulture report.
“Something like this, I represent my community, I represent my people, and I try to represent them the best that I can. I gotta be honest if something seems questionable, because if not, then I don’t want to be in a position where I am being untrue not just to myself but to my culture, because that’s exploitative,” he said.
