Tonight is Jon Stewart's last episode as host of The Daily Show. I will never forget where I was on August 6, 2015.
As a part of my healing, and as a way to say goodbye, I have been binge-watching the past 16 years of The Daily Show for over a month now. 1999 and 2000 were silly years. 2001 through 2007 were very dark years (see previous post). But re-living the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 was euphoric! I was shedding tears of joy as I watched the episodes from the days after the 2008 election. I had forgotten how magical those days were. We really did believe that everything was going to be alright.
But I realized that I'm never going to feel that kind of euphoria about an election ever again. The exquisite joy of that night (and the following months) was a direct result of the feelings of fear and hopelessness from the previous eight years of the Bush Administration. You can't have the joy of an Obama election without the devastation of a Bush presidency. You can't have the rainbow without the rain.
However, the euphoria of the 2008 election was dampened by the economic collapse of 2008 and 2009. I was just starting graduate school, and it seemed like the world was collapsing around me. And Jon Stewart spoke for all of us when he interviewed CNBC host Jim Cramer about the role that people like him (and other economic reporters) played in the economic collapse. Please do watch all three parts of the extended Jim Cramer interview HERE.
2009 was also the year that The Daily Show sent Jason Jones to report on the presidential elections in Iran. Yes, Jason Jones was literally in Iran and not in front of a green screen pretending to be in Iran. Jones interviewed Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari (watch the full segment HERE). Bahari was imprisoned shortly after the interview. He was tortured and interrogated for 118 days. Bahari wrote a book about his experience in captivity called Then They Came For Me. Stewart and Bahari then wrote a screenplay based on the book, and Stewart directed the movie, later titled Rosewater (watch the movie trailer HERE). It's currently streaming on Netflix, if you haven't had the chance to see it yet. It's magnificent.
2010 was year of the devastating earthquake in Haiti, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the South African World Cup, and the year that I moved to London. Yup, I moved to London *ONE MONTH* before Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert came to Washington, DC for their "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear." I was heart-broken that Stewart and Colbert were coming to my town just after I had moved to another country! To this day, it still pains me that I missed this event.
In 2011, Senator Gabby Giffords was wounded in an Arizona shooting that killed six victims. An earthquake in northern Japan triggered a tsunami, leading to the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl. Kate and William got married (I was there!). The Arab Spring brought uprisings to Egypt, Libya, and Syria. The Occupy Wall Street protests led to similar "occupy" movements around the world. And Osama bin Laden was killed in a firefight in Pakistan. In 2012, Malala Yousafzai was shot by the Taliban, Barack Obama was re-elected president, Hurricane Sandy ravaged the East Coast, mass shootings in Colorado and Connecticut shocked the country, and the Summer Olympics came to London (I was there!). And there was Jon Stewart, through all of it.
All of our lives were touched and shaped by these events. Just writing this blog post and listing all of these horrific events in sequential order is breaking my heart. The world is a horrible, horrible place! But that's why I needed Jon Stewart and the The Daily Show. I needed someone to help me laugh so that I wouldn't just give-up and cry. That's what Jon Stewart did for me.
Can I share with you my absolute favorite moment from all 16 years of Jon Stewart's time on The Daily Show? It's this: Michael J. Fox interview from April 2009.
Michael J. Fox was on The Daily Show to promote his new memoir, Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist. Fox was confessing that it took him many years to come to terms with his Parkinson's disease diagnosis. At first, he didn't tell anyone about it. He drank too much, he went a little crazy. He said, "But once you can fix something in space and say, this is this, and this isn't going to change, then it opens up all these new possibilities around you." And I absolutely needed to hear that message at that moment. Because, in 2009, I had been diagnosed with depression and anxiety. I thought I was going crazy. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep. And I kept hoping that it would just eventually go away. But after watching this interview with Fox, I finally "fixed it in space" and accepted that I had a problem and that I needed help. So I summoned all the courage that I could muster, and I found a therapist and a psychiatrist, and I got the help that I so desperately needed. And it saved my life.
So I owe a lot to The Daily Show. I'm not exaggerating when I say that Jon Stewart got me through some of the hardest times of my life.
And somewhere, deep down, I'm kind of afraid to move on with the next 16 years of my life without him. I don't know what I'm going to watch first thing in the morning while I'm getting dressed. I don't know who else is going to make me laugh at 7:00 AM so that I can face everything that life will inevitably throw at me.
But I think I can do it. I think I'm a big girl now. I'm not the 18 year-old that I was when Jon Stewart started at The Daily Show. I'm 34 years old. I think it'll be alright.
Thank you, Jon. Thank you.
Your biggest fan,
Leila
