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.”
STEPHEN WHITTY is movie critic at the Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J.
Correction: Kevin Bleyer should have been identified as a writer for Dennis Miller, not as that show’s head writer.
