Jon Stewart Stops by ‘Strike Force Five’ Podcast, Reveals How He Fills Void Left by ‘Daily Show’
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The Strike Force Five live podcast taping in Vegas this weekend may have been canceled, but that didn’t stop the striking late night hosts from releasing a new, taped episode of their podcast early Friday.
In the latest episode, the seventh in a series, the group of Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers and John Oliver was joined by surprise guest Jon Stewart, who looked back on his pre-Daily Show time on late night and reveals how he found structure following his exit from the Comedy Central series.
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Though this new episode was likely taped after a headline-making Rolling Stone exposé that claimed Fallon’s erratic behavior makes working on his Tonight Show a miserable experience, the hosts did not bring up that investigation or Fallon’s apology in a Zoom call with his staff. They hadn’t spoken of it in the three previous episodes released since the exposé came out.
Instead, Fallon shared that he had a bad cough and, to great teasing from the other hosts, he took the advice of one of his friends and put onions in his socks in an attempt to cure his illness.
As for Stewart, he joked at the top of the show that he was “Not a fan” of the show, though he “tried to get through the first [episode].” Colbert revealed the host is listed as “doofus” in his phone and, though they are best friends, only see each other in person once a year.
During his guest appearance, the hosts asked Stewart about his early days as host of The Daily Show. Stewart said he recommends new hosts “inherit a staff that has no idea who you are.”
“And the first meeting I ever had with them was a week beforehand and they said to me: This is no MTV bullshit,” he said in reference to his short-lived MTV late night show, going on to joke about having bands on the show.
Stewart also recalled that shortly before he started, one of the correspondents, who Colbert noted was trying to get people to leave, left the show and told the press he was leaving because, as Stewart paraphrased, “I want to get out of here while I can still be proud of what we did.”
Stewart said he took up playing the drums after leaving The Daily Show, saying it was partly to give his life the structure he no longer had without a daily late night show to work on.
“As you guys are learning now, the circadian rhythm of your life becomes the production schedule of your talk show,” Stewart said to the hosts, none of whom have taped new episodes since May because of the ongoing writers strike. “It’s that structured. You know, none of us got into this business to be proper businessmen who get up at 8 [o’clock] and take the subway and go to the thing, but that’s what having a talk show is.”
He continued, “And so I knew if I didn’t replace that structured day with something I have the type of brain that would slowly … it turns from like, ‘That was a great run,’ to, ‘You failed everyone who ever loved you,’ like pretty fast. It goes South and dark really fast.”
The other hosts agreed as Stewart said music he felt would fill that void.
“When you lose that structure, you’re untethered from the thing that prevents the bad mind from doing its corrupt best,” he explained. “So I knew I had to fill it with some other things, and I picked music, something I’d always wanted to do.”
Though Stewart initially tried guitar, he quickly realized it would take a lot of practice for him to get good, but, “I can bang on shit. And so I started that.
“And [drumming] turns out to be much more complex and challenging and all those things than I thought it was,” he said. “But you could interact with music almost immediately … just sit in there and it’s such a lovely feeling. And at that age, to have your body doing things that, you know, clicking in a pattern that just wasn’t there before, it’s like the opposite of death.”
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