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Photo: R. Jerome Ferraro |
Tuesday morning
on a bright spring day, and the news is pretty grim.
An appearance by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
has been interrupted by protestors. The U.S. military
is showing off video of a captured terrorist in Iraq.
And sitting in a loft on Manhattan’s West Side,
a group of twenty- and thirtysomethings watch it all
on TV and smirk.
“But didn’t he always say he knew where
the weapons of mass destruction were?” someone
asks, as Rumsfeld denies just that. “Maybe he’ll
get an endorsement deal,” another one cracks,
spying name-brand athletic shoes under the terrorist’s
robes.
That’s not funny, that’s sick?
No, actually, it’s work.
This is just after 9 a.m. at The Daily Show with Jon
Stewart, and by 12:30 the 10 writers in this room have
to turn in a program’s worth of topical jokes
and sardonic observations. And right now all they have
is some attitude and a few wisecracks.
Each day’s Daily Show “basically starts
as a roomful of very talented comedy writers just watching
TV and ruthlessly making fun of people,” says
Kevin Bleyer, ’93. “And then we go off and
write, and then that evening we see it on the air. I
really love the immediate gratification of that. Jonathan
Swift had to wait for his pamphlets to come back from
the publisher. But we’re doing our ‘A Modest
Proposal’ four nights a week.”
Bleyer, who’ll turn 35 on November 18, grew
up in Washington state, where he parlayed his all-American-kid
looks into a small part in the 1985 movie Twice
in a Lifetime. “I spent the whole summer
having Gene Hackman carry me around on his shoulders,”
he remembers. “So that gave me a taste of the
business, but not enough that I felt the need to be
a performer.”
Bleyer sang in the Fleet Street a cappella group and
“did a lot of drama” at Stanford, but didn’t
see show business as a career. Although he graduated
as a communications major, he started in engineering,
studying computer code. “Finally, I realized I
didn’t want to be staring at a computer screen
all day,” he says. “Of course, now what
do I do for a living? I stare at a computer screen all
day.”
After he switched gears, he landed an internship at
New York’s Public Theater with former professor
Anna Deavere Smith. Then he worked with David Brancaccio,
MA ’88, who was setting up the London bureau for
American Public Media’s Marketplace.
“Like almost anyone I’d want to work with,
he’s funny and smart and very fast on his feet,”
Brancaccio says. “He has very sharp critical thinking
skills and a comedy instinct which a lot of journalists
don’t—just as there are a lot of comedians
who don’t know from news events.”
Bleyer did some reports for Marketplace,
then for All Things Considered on National
Public Radio. (“I remember the first time I heard
‘And now, correspondent Kevin Bleyer . . . ’
” he says. “That was a blast.”) From
there, he moved on to a staff job at Bill Maher’s
Politically Incorrect, then up to the head
writer’s job on Dennis Miller. In September
2005, he joined the Daily Show, whose staff
won the 2006 Emmy Award for best writing for a variety,
music or comedy program.
“I think I’m working on the gold standard
of political comedy shows right now,” Bleyer says.
“And part of me is worried I have nowhere to go
but down.”
In the middle of the day, the writers are huddled
over their computers, trying to turn the morning’s
news clips into a half hour of political comedy, including
short satiric reports, scripted chats with tongue-in-cheek
“correspondents” and an end-of-show interview
with a newsmaker who’s game for late-night-TV
treatment.
The staffers work through their take-out lunches, frantically
deleting bad jokes, furiously Googling for ideas. Bleyer
appreciates the deadline pressure. “I would find
a dozen excuses not to write if I didn’t have
this sword of Damocles hanging over my head.”
Offices are shared, and furnished in Early Dorm Room—funny
clippings and old posters, high-school yearbooks and
vintage issues of Spy. “Basically you
write something, you hand it off, it gets rewritten,
and it gets made better,” Bleyer says. “This
is not a place to have a large ego . . . The person
you’re sharing your office with is just as talented
as you are, and so are the eight other people down the
hall.”
“Kevin’s really like that,” says
staff writer Rachel Axler. “He came here from
a show where he’d been head writer, and to then
be just part of a team had to take a certain mental
shift. But he fit in pretty damn quickly. The first
week he was here, he figured out that one of the Bush
soundbites we were using had the same number of syllables
as a haiku, and he wrote all these jokes in haiku. .
. . He’s just terrific with words. Also, he does
an excellent Aaron Neville imitation.”
Bleyer can imitate Jon Stewart, too. He has to. The
pauses, the little catchphrases like “not so much”—these
are things that all the writers have to hear as they’re
writing for him. Just as they have to keep in mind the
show’s political tilt, which seesaws between anger
at the Republicans and disgust with the Democrats.
“Personally, I find a lot of positions on both
sides of the spectrum equally outlandish,” Bleyer
says. “I don’t think we should be hamstrung
by the opinions of the religious right but neither do
I believe we should live in a society where everything
is bought and paid for by the government. Especially
now that I’m getting some money.”
The evenhandedness of the show’s ridicule bothers
some critics, who fear it fosters civic apathy—especially
among college-age viewers who may get their main dosage
of current events from the Daily Show. One
study worried that the show encourages cynicism in its
audience.
“But we don’t trade in cynicism,”
Bleyer protests. “We trade in exposing hypocrisy.
We care about the issues. And I think the people who
are tuning in care, too. They’re already informed.
If they weren’t, they wouldn’t get half
the jokes.”
A little after 4 in the afternoon, the line for the
200-odd seats in the studio is around the block. Inside,
Stewart runs through the final rehearsal. A joke in
which a fake Osama bin Laden gets hit in the crotch
at a piñata-bashing party breaks Stewart up.
One writer gets praise for dubbing in a funny voice.
The gag about the terrorist’s endorsement deal—doesn’t
that need more of a punchline?
Writers throw out ideas, rapid-fire. Within an hour,
the gag is patched, the rest of the show has been rehearsed,
and the audience has filed in. Then the theme music
starts and the crowd screams—no one louder than
Bleyer, standing in the wings.
An hour later, he’s grabbing a hamburger and
a pint at a nearby restaurant, where all the boys wear
button-downs and BlackBerries, and all the girls have
little black dresses and interesting underpaid jobs.
No one recognizes him.
“Some people have asked me, well, why aren’t
you hosting a show,” Bleyer says. “Maybe
because I know what it takes.”
“I first met him on the Dennis Miller show and
he was so personable and enormously gracious that I
wished he was doing the interview,” says Yeardly
Smith, the actress who gives cartoon voice to Lisa Simpson.
“He’s one of the hardest-working people
on the planet. When he told me he was writing a book
about relationship disasters, I wondered—did I
somehow miss the memo that now there were 28 hours in
a day?”
I Love You, Nice to Meet You (St. Martin’s
Press) is a he-said/she-said approach to dating advice.
Bleyer wrote it with Lori Gottlieb, ’89, a Los
Angeles writer and his friend from an earlier, short-lived
TV show, Significant Others. But now that it’s
in stores, he wonders a bit about its I’m-through-with-love
sarcasm.
“I wrote most of it three years ago, after the
Dennis Miller show had been cancelled and I’d
just broken up with a girl,” Bleyer confesses.
“Now I’ve got a job I love and I’m
in another relationship; I don’t even recognize
this bitter guy anymore. But the hope is that other
people will, and that if you’re going through
a breakup, it’ll feel true.”
A book. Late-night TV shows, radio programs and a
movie. And that doesn’t even begin to count blogging
for the website The Huffington Post, or the magazine
pieces he used to do.
“I don’t know, papier-mâché?”
he asks. “I have no idea what’s next. But
Howard Stern says he’s the King of All Media.
Maybe if I hang in there I can be the Diminutive Court
Jester.” |
