Jon Stewart says the best episodes of The Daily Show are made from the smallest moments.
Take Donald Trump eating pizza with a fork (clip here), for instance. Stewart can make that into “eight minutes of overblown, sanctimonious rant.”
The worst episodes, he told Rolling Stone executive editor Eric Bates, are when the show tries to distill three days of legislative action into 12 minutes. It might be informative, but it’s not very funny.
As for the infamous cable news mash-ups The Daily Show is known for, thank the program’s “mole people.” “They’re allergic to light,” Stewart joked. “They live in the darkness, but they do the good work.”
Stewart is often a critic of the 24-hour news cycle, comparing the quality of cable news to elevator music. But it does prove useful for The Daily Show.
“We have a cycle to work off of,” he said. “There’s a news cycle to work off of. You don’t necessarily have to adhere to it, but you at least get to work off it. … You’re tied to that news cycle, so in some way it’s constricting, but it’s freeing because you don’t have to come in everyday and go, ‘what joke will I make about J-Lo’s derriere today?'”
“You’re interested in it in and of itself, so that has its own sort of momentum,” he added.
And of course, like anyone, Stewart said there are days he’s not quite up for it. “Some days, you just don’t fuckin’ feel like it,” he said. “You don’t feel like sitting in that room and gathering up the energy to make it show-worthy, and you’d rather be at home watching Spongebob with your children. Which actually just described my weekend. So, really, I guess I have the best of all worlds.”
Watch the interview:
