Angry Optimist: The Life and Times of Jon Stewart - Hardcover

Rogak, Lisa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1250014441 ISBN 13: 9781250014443

Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books, 2014

Synopsis

A New York Times Bestseller Since his arrival at The Daily Show in 1999, Jon Stewart has become one of the major players in comedy as well as one of the most significant liberal voices in the media. In Angry Optimist, biographer Lisa Rogak charts his unlikely rise to stardom. She follows him from his early days growing up in New Jersey, through his years as a struggling standup comic in New York, and on to the short-lived but acclaimed The Jon Stewart Show. And she charts his humbling string of near-misses―passed over as a replacement for shows hosted by Conan O'Brien, Tom Snyder, and even the fictional Larry Sanders―before landing on a half-hour comedy show that at the time was still finding its footing amidst roiling internal drama.

Once there, Stewart transformed The Daily Show into one of the most influential news programs on television today. Drawing on interviews with current and former colleagues, Rogak reveals how things work―and sometimes don't work―behind the scenes at The Daily Show, led by Jon Stewart, a comedian who has come to wield incredible power in American politics.

About this title

About the Author:

LISA ROGAK is the author of more than forty books, including the biographies And Nothing but the Truthiness: The Rise (and Further Rise) of Stephen Colbert and the Edgar- and Anthony-nominated Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King. She is the editor of the New York Times bestselling book Barack Obama: In His Own Words.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

CHAPTER 1

 

WHEN JONATHAN STUART LEIBOWITZ was born on November 28, 1962, in New York City to Donald and Marian Leibowitz toward the end of the huge postwar baby boom, he began a typical middle-class American childhood that was unremarkable for the time, and apparently very much strived for by the majority of people in the United States.

He joined Larry, a brother who was two years older, and the Leibowitz family had little to set it apart from the other families living in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, just down the road from Princeton, in all ways but one. As one of only a handful of Jewish families who lived in the area around the famed Ivy League school—notorious as a well-heeled Protestant college that was rumored to deliberately limit the quota of Jewish students admitted well into the 1970s—the Leibowitzes were determined to live an everyday—and secular—American life in the peaceful heyday of the early 1960s. As Stewart later put it, he never lived anything but a typical American childhood: “I grew up in the good old days before kids had these damn computers and actually played outside.”

He watched popular TV shows like Emergency! and The Hudson Brothers Show, he ate Quisp cereal and collected box tops to redeem for cheap plastic toys, and developed the first crush of his life on Eve Plumb, who played Jan Brady on The Brady Bunch.

“My life was typical,” he said. “I played Little League baseball. I never wanted for food. I always had shoes. I had [my own] room. There were no great tragedies. There were the typical ups and downs, but I wouldn’t say it was at all sad. We were Jewish and living in the suburbs so there was a slightly neurotic bent to it, but I can’t point to anything where a boy overcame a tragedy to become a comedian. As my grandmother used to say, ‘I can’t complain.’”

Despite his apparently normal childhood, young Jon did stand out in one way: he was short. Noticeably so. His classmates towered above him, and so he made an easy target. And it didn’t take him long before he realized the best way to deflect his tormentors was with a witty comment or pointed retort.

“I was very little, so being funny helped me have big friends,” he said.

“I realized it was a way of getting attention pretty early on,” Jon added. “There was a sense that this feels good, to say something that made everybody laugh. It was a rhythm that made sense to me.”

Though the Leibowitzes belonged to a local synagogue and Jon attended a yeshiva kindergarten before moving on to first grade at the local public school, neither parent was particularly interested in immersing themselves wholeheartedly in the Jewish faith. Possibly this was because of a lack of opportunities to do so in and around Princeton, but also because they hoped to distance themselves from their family history and blend into the community more easily. Donald’s grandfather was ultra-Orthodox; he ran a shoe store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and never failed to wear his religion on his sleeve. “When we visited his store, he would … make me recite prayers,” said Donald. His son—Donald’s father—had already begun the move away from a life of extreme religion by becoming a cabdriver in New York. At the time, running a store in an orthodox Jewish neighborhood pretty much ensured that few Gentiles would cross the threshold into the store; on the other hand, a cabdriver gave up control over the types of people he’d interact with over the course of a day.

Marian’s family, by contrast, took a more secular route. According to genealogist Megan Smolenyak, Marian’s father, Nathan Laskin, was born in Inner Mongolia in 1906 and grew up in Tientsin, China, home to a tiny but thriving community of Jewish entrepreneurs and salesmen, many of whom built thriving businesses as furriers. Most of the settlers had defected from the Russian army after the Russo-Japanese War ended in 1905. According to Marian, Jon took after Nathan, her father, who had a wicked sense of humor and actually subsidized his salary as a fur salesman by moonlighting as a stand-up comic in China in the early part of the twentieth century and later immigrated to Seattle to help expand the business.

Nathan helped run the Manchurian Fur Trading Company before he decided to pull up roots and try his luck at business in the United States. After first landing in Seattle, he eventually moved with his wife, Fannie, and small daughter, Marian, to Cooper Street in Manhattan, where he continued working in the family fur business. In 1940 he pulled in the princely sum of seventeen hundred dollars for the entire year.

After Donald and Marian married in the late 1950s, they settled into life in Manhattan where Marian worked as a schoolteacher and Donald worked at RCA Labs in Princeton, New Jersey.

Shortly after their first son, Larry, was born in 1960, Don and Marian decided to move from New York City to New Jersey to reduce the commuting time to Don’s job at RCA Labs. They moved into a house in Lawrenceville, the next town over, about forty miles from Philadelphia. As was typical of the era of the man in the gray flannel suit, mothers held down the fort at home while fathers spent long hours at the office, arriving home often too late to spend time with their children. And Donald was no exception.

The area around Princeton had long leaned toward white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, and though the Princeton Jewish Center existed, that was about it when it came to Jewish culture in the area. Not only was young Jonathan teased about his height—or lack thereof—but for his name and heritage as well. “Leibotits” and “Leiboshits” were two of the more commonly hurled epithets. “I didn’t grow up in Warsaw, but it’s not like it wasn’t duly noted by my peers that’s who I was,” he said, adding, “there were some minor slurs.” One day in seventh grade he was beaten up by a group of kids while he was waiting for the bus, although he realized that he was at least partly to blame. “I was holding my books and a trellis I had made in shop and thinking, ‘How much more of a pussy can I be?’”

Jon took up the trumpet in elementary school and quickly showed that he had a talent for it. He joined a band made up of kids that played big band music with a repertoire that included songs like Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” and Duke Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train.” The band of nine- and ten-year-old musicians performed at school and community functions, and also regularly played at a home for juvenile delinquents that is today known as the New Jersey Training School.

In 1971, Jon made his first television appearance ever when the band was invited to play on a children’s show known as Captain Noah and His Magical Ark, a mainstay children’s program on the Philadelphia TV station WPVI that was a must-see for kids in the area. Captain Noah was founded by a Lutheran minister who hosted the show along with his wife. Though the show and characters were beloved by parents and children all over eastern Pennsylvania, Jon got his first glimpse of the gulf between what appeared on your TV screen and what happened behind the scenes.

“Captain Noah didn’t know anything about kids,” said Stewart. “He wasn’t a happy guy. You’d see him slide down the slide and say hi to the kids, but there was more to it than that. Essentially, Captain Noah was a mean man who craved a smoke. Those are my memories of breaking into showbiz.”

Though in later years Jon would say he had a normal childhood and only learned to develop a keen albeit thinly veiled barbed sense of humor because of his height-challenged stature, the truth is that while those may have been contributing factors, the thing that eventually set him on the path of becoming a comedic star was the direct result of a major tragedy of young Jon’s life. After all, it’s the rare—possibly nonexistent—amateur or professional comedian who doesn’t experience a childhood tragedy—or several—in one form or another.

Jon Stewart was no exception.

To be sure, Donald Leibowitz wasn’t overly warm toward his sons or his wife, but that was the norm in an age where fathers worked all day while mothers stayed home and kept house and raised the children. With hardly a kind or encouraging word toward his younger son, Donald had another reason to keep his thoughts and affections to himself: he was having an affair with his secretary. Though it was unclear how long it had been going on when he broke the news to his wife, the Leibowitz family would never be the same.

Back in 1973, when Donald revealed his infidelity and then subsequently moved out, divorce was still a rare-enough occurrence in the United States. Still, after Jon’s father admitted to the affair, his parents separated and then divorced.

Ten-year-old Jon was devastated. Marian returned to work as a public school teacher while she and her children learned to manage with less. For instance, when Jon’s older brother, Larry, had had his bar mitzvah two years earlier, when the family was still intact, they could afford to spring for a posh celebration and threw an elaborate party at a hotel in nearby Somerville. Jon’s bar mitzvah, by contrast, occurred after his father had moved out, when finances were tight. As a result, his coming-of-age ceremony was held at the Princeton Jewish Center, where they also attended High Holidays.

Marian and her sons adjusted the best they could. “She was an anomaly in that era,” Jon said. “She had a quiet confidence because she had to fend for herself.”

After the divorce was final, Marian, Larry, and Jon got on with their lives. They spent a lot of time with her family, and one of Jon’s favorite things to do was to go to the Jersey shore.

“I always loved going there,” Stewart said. “When my grandparents were still alive, we would go to Asbury Park. When I was in my teens, we would go to Seaside Heights, or if we thought we could get into a bar illegally, we would go to Wildwood. If it was a family thing, we would go to Long Beach Island.”

But despite the supportive extended family, Jon was often angry, though he tried his best to keep it under control. He was not only mad at his father but at a number of things that were going on in the early to mid 1970s. The area around Lawrenceville in central Jersey was overwhelmingly Republican and conservative at the time, when the rest of the state was engulfed in the protest against the Vietnam War and President Richard Nixon. He grew up during Watergate and Vietnam, and was “infused with a healthy skepticism toward official reports,” he said.

He also cut off all contact with his father, refusing to have anything to do with him. Jon’s rage was only fueled by his prodigious reading habit, particularly science fiction novels by Kurt Vonnegut and Aldous Huxley.

To avoid getting beaten up, he also worked on developing his sense of humor, in school and out, though he recognized that he had a lot of work to do. “No one has wit at eleven, you’re just obnoxious,” he said.

By watching and listening to others before coming out with a humorous response, Jon was not only building his own unique style of comedy, he was also in the process of realizing that his own poor view of himself was of his own making. “Those feelings of inadequacy were placed there by me,” he admitted. “In my own head, I was a weirdo.”

But young Jon was a quick learner. In studying various people in order to formulate the funniest reply possible, he soon realized his strengths as well as his weaknesses. For one, it was hard not to feel like he was inadequate when compared to his brother, Larry, who excelled in academics while Jon was an average student who specialized in wisecracks. “I remember being a young kid and seeing him have the Latin Cup from Lawrenceville Prep School, and I just thought, ‘Wow! I’m never going to be good enough in Latin to get a cup,’” said Jon. “So I thought I’d better take another route to get attention because, you know what, he’s got me trumped on the smarts thing. I took my identity from wising off: smart-ass versus smart.”

But he didn’t attend Lawrenceville Prep like his brother; instead he entered his freshman year at Lawrence High School in Lawrenceville—other famous alumni at the public school would include Tom Cruise and Michael Eisner—trying not to get beaten up or bullied while learning how his own worldview could make people laugh. Though not all of his teachers would encourage his tendency to crack a joke or be class clown, others encouraged him. According to Larry Nichol, who taught Stewart English in his senior year, “He’d always be saying something on the way out the door as the bell was ringing.”

Selma Litowitz, another English teacher, also encouraged her young student. “Jon has said that she was the first who recognized that his humor was something that he could make a living at,” said Debra Frank, Litowitz’s daughter. Incidentally they lived on the same street. “His joke was that, for many years, he thought that Jews had to live alphabetically.”

He always liked sports, and he managed to find one where his small stature wouldn’t put him at a disadvantage: he joined the varsity soccer team. The players practiced in all kinds of weather at the fields of nearby Mercer County Community College. “It would be twenty degrees out and the ground would be frozen solid, and we would be out there running around like idiots,” he said, adding that working-class Lawrenceville was more of a soccer town due to the high percentage of immigrant families in town, mostly Italian and Polish. In upper-class Princeton, kids gravitated more toward football.

“I began my sports career as a way out of the suburbs,” he admitted. “The best way to describe my ability was to say that after the game the other kids would say to me, ‘Way to try!’” Stewart and a friend from up the street spent hours practicing their moves every night, sometimes until midnight. “I spent hours just kicking a ball against a wall, doing anything that would help me get better,” he said. “It’s always been a part of my personality to be very dogged when I’m unsuccessful.”

*   *   *

Though he loved soccer, and was pretty good at it—he actually made the all-state team as an honorable mention—Jon was happiest when pursuing a number of different interests rather than focusing on just one. His tendency toward being a Renaissance man, interested in pursuing everything at least for a short time, blossomed during high school. In addition to playing soccer and being in the school band, he also pursued his desire to work at an incredible variety of jobs, no matter how menial or dangerous. After all, unlike his brother, Larry, who knew he wanted to make his fortune in the financial world, Jon had no idea what he wanted to do and figured he’d try as many jobs as possible in order to check things off his list.

As it turned out, this approach would provide great fodder for a budding comedian. And regardless of the type of work, he could always count on having a new audience where he could pass the time trying to get a laugh out of his coworkers. He took his first job at the age of fourteen in what would become a long string of minimum-wage positions at the Quaker Bridge Mall just outside Trenton; in just over a year, he’d be fired from six different stores at the mall, in some cases because he wanted to make the other employees laugh.

First up: his brother Larry hired him at a department store as a stock boy. Jon gathered up his coworkers and decided to get a laugh the old-fashioned way: with a pratfall into a beanbag chair. Instead of hitting his target, he landed on a display case of aquariums filled with live fish ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1250014441
• ISBN 13: 9781250014443
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288