AND NOW YOU'RE OLDER STILL: New York republishes a now twenty-year old profile of then-MTV late night host Jon Stewart, from 1994:
Here in the '90s, when everybody except Chevy Chase has a talk show, Jon Stewart brings three all-important qualities to MTV’s entry in the chat wars: He’s funny. He’s not afraid tackle tough issues with guests like the 7-year-old Olsen twins from Full House. And he has an abundance of body hair. “They have to shave my neck during the hour between taping,” Stewart says. “Is that something I shouldn’t have shared?”
This is the man who should have been Conan. In fact, Stewart made it to the finals of NBC’s Replace Dave Sweepstakes, only to have Lorne Michaels choose O’Brien, who’d spent as much time in front of a television camera as Doris Duke...
The modest success of Stewart hasn’t gone unnoticed at NBC, where execs also considered Stewart as a successor to Bob Costas on Later. Says a Lorne Michaels staffer, “Jon would make a good replacement for somebody — you fill in the name.”
I still remember tuning in one night, seeing Stewart obviously with a flu of some kind, still gamely working his way through the show (including a crowdsurfing bit where it was a dummy being passed around). I wouldn't have predicted the Daily Show, but i think I knew that he was doing *somewhere*.
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