With an appointment that turned out to be bizarrely timely, we went to talk to J.R. Havlan, one of the writers for Comedy Central’s award-winning TV “news” program, the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, on a day that happened to be the morning after the shooting in Colorado that took place during a showing of the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises. What Havlan and the rest of the Daily Show team do, four days a week, is to articulate what we might want to yell back at the TV had we witnessed the networks’ coverage of events (and had a genius touch for comedy); they work nightly to save us from having to listen to or read what’s out there by acting as our eyes and ears. But Havlan is in no doubt about the nature of the job: “We’re a comedy show,” he says firmly. “We’re not the news.”
     The shooting was on a Friday; by the following Monday, the blurb for the show read, “In the wake of the shootings in Aurora, Colorado, opinions differ on whether it’s the right time to debate the efficacy of America’s gun-control laws.” Stewart’s question “Are we ever going to get a handle on how to prevent these kind of tragedies?” which began the segment, was followed by a Fox News commentator’s reaction—“I think now isn’t the time to, obviously, have a big conversation about guns”—immediately cutting back to an incredulous, in fact apparently almost speechless, Stewart. “When we do things on stories that are inherently tragic like this, more often than not our take will have something to do with the coverage of the story being grotesque, over the top,” says Havlan. “To be honest, most of what we deal with is not funny. But you’ve got to keep in mind, you’re not talking to Dan Rather. We don’t have to cover anything.”

Not the nightly news
According to the show’s well-known format, Jon Stewart does monologues and interviews seated behind an impossibly glossy desk; for all the claims that they’re not presenting the news, the desk fronts a set that resembles a rather vulgar TV newsroom, complete with an illuminated world map and massed vertical strips of bulbs like those around makeup mirrors. From time to time the Stewart segments are punctuated with “reports” from the show’s “correspondents,” such as John Oliver, Samantha Bee and Wyatt Cenac, with occasional guest-type spots by comedians like Lewis Black.
     Havlan has been with the Daily Show since it started, 16 years ago, with Craig Kilborn in the spot taken over a couple of years later by Stewart. In addition to 12 writers, a head writer, two executive producers and Stewart himself, there are, as Havlan puts it, “a whole bunch of associate producers downstairs” who have a lot to do with the content of the show as well. “They’re the ones who do a lot of culling through footage and finding funny things,” he explains. “And, maybe because they watch more TV than we do, or they watch it in a different way, they’re the ones who are able to make certain connections. If something comes up in a meeting, they can say, Oh, yeah, I saw this little bit, and then we’re off and running.”

A ray of light from the East
It’s immediately obvious that Havlan is able to quickly cut to the humour inherent in any moment and seize it, though when I ask him about being funny, he fends it off. “It’s not like some ray of light from the East fell on my head as a baby and my parents knew I would be funny, or something,” he demurs, but I can’t help feeling perhaps it was just like that. He does admit he experienced the power of being able to make other kids laugh instead of beating him up early on in the playground. “I don’t really have formal training,” he says; in fact “my formal training would have stopped at basically the alphabet and knock-knock jokes.” After college he started doing stand-up; after a long hiatus (which included marriage and the births of two children as well as the TV show), he went back to it about a year and a half ago. The routines he does now come more from his own personal experience. “It’s also the basic sort of Jerry Seinfeld, have-you-ever-noticed-this kind of stuff,” he says. “Now it’s kind of a combination of that plus personal things. I have a very long six-minute bit about trying to get my two-year-old into nursery school. It just kind of kept building and building. And that in itself becomes not just about being in my experiences, but also of being able to throw in social commentary within that, and that’s what brings it around for everybody to be able to relate to.” Writing, he says, began for him as an avenue for getting out of stand-up—a field probably even more cutthroat than acting—but as it turns out, the writing he does now isn’t really based on anything he could have learned in a class or trained for: “The type of stuff I do is very specialized. You could be a great novelist, or a great sitcom writer, or a great monologue joke writer—but you could come on our show and not know where to begin, and vice versa.”

Making the sausage
Havlan’s writing day is, appropriately, very scripted: there are two meetings, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Everyone involved with the show, including the associate producers, usually attends the morning meeting, where they discuss issues and what stories they’ll cover. “It’s not just what we’re going to cover,” Havlan explains. “It has a lot to do with how we can figure out how to cover it—what kind of angle to take, what framework to put it in in order to make it funny and unique.” That unique angle is part of how they “pretend we’re doing something that we’re not doing but that we’re actually doing”; it also requires a smart, knowing audience that’s at least partly in on the jokes. How to present it, Havlan says, involves figuring out “what ridiculous characters are we going to create for our correspondents, or what sort of misguided jaunt we are going to have Jon go off on. He’s very involved in that whole process, of course.” The associate producers also bring footage to the meeting. “You can say, oh, I saw a thing we should look at now on Rachel Maddow last night, it has to do with this, and it was at 8:47 p.m. They can bring that up on the computer, and wham, it’s right there.” This is also where the story order is worked out; decisions are made about whether a story will be on that night’s show or the next, or whether it might be dropped entirely until they have a clearer idea of what they can get out of it. Writers are assigned to each story: “Sometimes by choice, sometimes just by default.”
    With, say, six stories and two writers assigned to each, Havlan says how it pans out is the luck of the draw. “I can rank those stories in the order I would care to work on them—because I’m a little more excited about one thing, or a little more worked up about another thing, or a little more knowledgeable about this thing—and so there’s a number one and a number six. And sometimes I get number one, and I sometimes I get stuck with number six. And sometimes I get number one and I choke it, and sometimes I get number six and I hit it out of the park. So it’s just a matter of ‘this is what I do.’ If you knit, you’ve been knitting for 16 years, you’re good at knitting. You don’t really need to think so much about what that sleeve looks like, because you’re good at knitting now.”
     And then they go off and write. They have an hour, maybe an hour and a half, Havlan says, “so it’s a pretty tight shift. Sometimes we work in a team, but it depends on the different parts of the show we’re writing for.” Otherwise each writer works alone. For Stewart’s bits when he’s sitting at the desk—the parts that don’t have anything to do with correspondents—two writers usually work separately. This stuff, Havlan says, is a “little looser”; they’re trying “to throw in different ideas, while not being so strict with linear writing.”
     This is the stage where, he explains, they’re just getting a bunch of jokes and ideas together. After that, everything goes to Stewart and the executive producers to look at; it usually comes back to the writers a few times for a rewrite, sometimes with “the powers,” sometimes not. “We hand it in again, it gets kind of put together again by the head writer or sometimes by the executive producers, and then there’s rehearsal,” says Havlan. “But just before rehearsals at three o’clock we have another afternoon meeting. Basically, it’s the writers, a few of the associate producers, and the head writer and executive producer, and we discuss what we’re going to do the next day.” There’s one more rewrite after the rehearsal, “in part to change things, in part just to tweak them a little bit. And in part because the show is three or four minutes over and things have to be cut.” Then the show tapes in front of a live audience.

Collaboration and evolution
The whole process is collaborative. “We are not individually funnier, necessarily,” Havlan says, “although that could be the case.” There’s a benefit in the coming together of all those slightly different senses of humor. “Oftentimes what’ll happen in that morning meeting is that somebody thinks of something that is not quite there, and somebody adds to it, and it gets there. That’s the show in a nutshell, too—in that we start with something that might not be what we end up with, but what we end up with might not have happened if we hadn’t started with that one other thing. In the end, even though you may have laughed at that first joke, you can look at whatever it became and say, yeah, that’s a better thing to do right there.”
     Even individual lines in a sketch can get worked on by a group. “There’s a system within writing the show where we’ll have a setup to something we want to discuss, but the punch line that was submitted by one of the writers might not be quite what the producers or Stewart were looking for,” Havlan says. “They say, ‘Okay, we want a joke here, there’s nothing’s coming off the top of our heads.’ So the people downstairs will throw the setup upstairs to the writers’ wing to see what they get.” This means that whoever happens to be available sits down to try to think up three or four different punch lines to submit. “In that atmosphere, we’re all trying to be funny,” Havlan adds. “But over half the things are usually not funny enough to enough people in the room.”

Staying in character
The writers know who’s going to be speaking the lines they write—a Jon Stewart–delivered joke is different from a Lewis Black–delivered joke. “You don’t necessarily write for John Oliver or Wyatt Cenac so much as you would write for whichever sort of pain-in-the-ass character they’re playing that day,” says Havlan. “Are they being a needy, lost person who’s completely ill-informed, or an overbearing prick who believes he knows everything?”
     On screen Stewart comes across as unscripted and simply himself, but Havlan is clear that he is playing the part of Jon Stewart, fake newsman. “Jon is relatively consistent as far as what he does,” he says, “and there’s more of him in that than there is of the correspondents in what they do. The correspondents fill a role of doing inane, crazy stuff that would kind of take away from Jon’s fake gravitas.” He points out that when Stewart is on camera with a correspondent, he frequently plays the role of straight man—or at least the voice of reason. “We try to make it so that he also has input in a conversation. That’s important.” On the show Stewart reads from a teleprompter, though he’s so skilled he makes it as though he’s not reading at all. “There’s not really a tremendous amount of time to go over it. It’s really kind of astonishing, because it is an underrated skill and he’s extremely good at it,” says Havlan, who has huge admiration for Stewart’s skill of appearing to have no skill. “He was good in the first place, when he started at the show, and he’s just got better and better.”

Part of the process
While the live audience provides immediate feedback on each show, there aren’t enough of them to give a genuinely representative reaction. On Fridays, when there’s no show airing, the team meets to discuss what happened during the week—“this was great and this was maybe not so great, and here’s why I think it could be better,” Havlan says. “Maybe we kind of missed the train on such-and-such a thing and we should potentially have done it this way. But we don’t get crazy about it, because that would make us crazy.”
      When I ask if Havlan’s had flops, he says no, pretty bluntly. Basically, the point of the system is to make sure that doesn’t happen; the writing process itself ensures that sub-standard material doesn’t make it through to the show. “That’s not going to happen,” says Havlan. “And me writing something that misses the mark, that’s different from not being funny. You know, I’ll miss the mark, plenty of times, because we’re messing around, and we don’t have a lot of time, and our thinking in certain parts of the process is not linear, but more just like, duh. So you’ll write a funny joke, but it might have nothing direct enough to do with the story—so it doesn’t make it into the story. That’s missing the mark, but still with a funny joke.” It’s just part of the process. “That’s one of the reasons we have so many people. It’s not frowned upon; we’re not yelled at; we’re not chained to a radiator if we get it wrong once in a while.”

Keeping them honest
One popular misconception about the show is that being funny was easier in the Bush era than it has been in Obama times. “That is a dark misunderstanding of what we do,” says Havlan. “We cover the coverage of the events almost as much as we cover the events themselves, maybe more. Often the media’s antics trump the original content, and since conservatives and liberals alike are constantly doing silly and nefarious things, we never really have to make a concerted effort to appear ‘balanced.’” While Havlan admits it’s not much of a secret that the general political “beliefs” around the office are liberal-leaning, he insists that that’s not what really drives what they do. “What we are, first and foremost, is honest,” he says, almost earnestly. “And if you think about the level of dishonesty from every side—and every person who has to go out there and paint some picture of them being good and another side being bad—you can see the importance of that. You can see the lack of real honesty. It just doesn’t happen much. And when it doesn’t happen, we try to point it out, and when it does happen, we try to point that out, too.”—LUCY SISMAN