Jon Stewart Reveals the ‘What the F***’ Moment That Drove Him to Comedy
Stewart told Pete Davidson what inspired him to get out of New Jersey and move to New York.
Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images
Jon Stewart’s comedy ambitions were spurred by the creativity of punk bands he saw while working one of his post-college jobs in New Jersey.
The comedian recalled feeling unsatisfied in his home state after having graduated from college in Virginia. Up until then, comedy seemed distant.
“I wasn’t really raised with the idea that this was ever a possibility. I was only raised with the feeling that something was wrong,” Stewart, 63, told Davidson on the latter’s Netflix show.
“I remember getting out of school, and I was working at this bar in Jersey called The Bottom Half. It was a tavern underneath a liquor store on Route 1…” he recalled.
Jon Stewart on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” in October 1993.
NBC/NBCUniversal via Getty Images
Stewart said he also worked as a bartender at a punk club in Trenton called City Gardens in the mid-1980s. There, he said, he saw established bands who were on their way from New York to gigs in Philadelphia.
“Some of the bills were like Dead Kennedys and Butthole Surfers… Suicidal Tendencies—all these great punk bands. Black Flag—Henry Rollins’ band, when it became that—Bad Brains, the Ramones," he recalled.
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What he absorbed there clashed with the vibe of where he was raised.
“The town I grew up in, it was more like, ‘So you’re out of school, you live here, and now you join the softball team, and you go down to Bottom Half every Friday night, and it’s payday.’”
Being around those bands and that level of creativity gave him the realization that he should leave, he said.
“I got to the point where I was like, ‘Yeah, man, what the f--- am I doing here? I want this—not musical, but I want something."
Stewart with “The Daily Show” writers at the 55th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards in 2003. The Comedy Central show won the Emmy for Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Series.
Chris Weeks/FilmMagic
After selling some possessions, Stewart put what was left in a U-haul and drove to New York, where he first lived in a “six-week sublet” with “no plan.”
Stewart said he “locked in” and got odd jobs. He also started seeing stand-up sets at the Comedy Cellar in Manhattan, which had started up earlier that decade.
“I saw a night of comedy, and was like, ‘That’s how my brain works. That’s what I want.’”
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