Jon Stewart: The Playboy Interview (50 Years of the Playboy Interview) Read Online Free PDF

my family what I wanted to do, so to them it was like a bombshell. I walked in and said, “I’m selling my car and moving up to New York to become a stand-up comedian.” They looked at me like I had the three nipples I have.
    Playboy: Do you still love New Jersey?
    Stewart: New Jersey is tremendous. Everyone’s got New Jersey wrong. What we’ve done in New Jersey is create the world’s largest, smelliest scarecrow, and we’ve kept people away from it for years just by saying, “Where’s the point that the most people who aren’t really dedicated to this state will see?” It’s the Turnpike, because the majority of people are going to be hitting the airport or heading from New York down south or up north. If we create an area of what appears to be pure, toxic genetic-mutation soup right along that road, everyone who drives by is going to go, “Holy shit!” But it’s a scarecrow. It exists solely for the purpose of driving others away.
    Playboy: Next segment: What’s the correspondent’s piece?
    Stewart: We would visit the mosquitocatching program I was part of when I was 18. I used to go down to a Jersey Pine Barrens in a state car. We’d bring the little critters back to Trenton for encephalitis testing. We didn’t pull their genitals off. My job was solely to catch them, knock them out with chloroform, sort them male-female, and bring all the females back.
    Playboy: How about “In Other News?”
    Stewart: Stewart discovers alcohol and Tom Waits; Waits decides he doesn’t want to be found.
    Playboy: The celebrity interview?
    Stewart: My father. We’d bring him on. After the interview he still doesn’t believe I have my own show.
    Playboy: Describe that interview.
    Stewart: It’d probably be one question and then three and a half minutes of him explaining the answer to me by writing and graphing it on a napkin. He was a physicist.
    Playboy: What one question have you always wanted to ask your dad?
    Stewart: Ain’t I doin’ good, Pa? Ain’t I? Then he would explain through graphs and charts why I’m not. It’s a very precise equation calculation. It’s calculus, something I don’t really understand. But I would get to keep the napkins, to back it up.
    Playboy: Does your father really think you’re not doing well?
    Stewart: Hey, hey. Don’t think you’re on to something here! No, I think he thinks it’s fine—probably.
    Playboy: How old were you when your parents divorced?
    Stewart: Ten or 11.
    Playboy: You saw him afterward?
    Stewart: Oh yeah. Hey, pizza every Sunday, my friend. Or every other Sunday.
    Playboy: Do you have a good relationship with him?
    Stewart: Uh...what do you mean? He hasn’t broken up with me.
    Playboy: Did he try to explain the mysteries of the universe to you?
    Stewart: Not that I remember. I was just happy, when I turned seventeen, to realize maybe the divorce wasn’t my fault. I saw that one after-school special where the kid thinks it’s their fault, and I watched it with tears: “Yes, that’s true.” Then you realize, Oh, it’s not my fault. In my hazy memory, I was thinking I had done something or gotten into some minor trouble before it happened. You sort of have the sense of, Oh, Christ, what have I done? But that’s because kids are completely egocentric: I fucked up, therefore...
    Playboy: Didn’t your parents say, “Dear, it’s not your fault”?
    Stewart: I’m sure they did. But you’re living in the world of hyperbole at that age. The drama itself was somehow comforting. It was the Seventies; I’m OK—You’re OK had just come out but I don’t think anybody had read it all the way through yet.
    Playboy: OK. Now let’s go to “This Just In.”
    Stewart: Stewart lands a regular job, may never have to buy clothes again. Then we do a moment of Zen.
    Playboy: What’s yours?
    Stewart: Probably footage of me watching one of my cats a few years ago take a shit right next to the litter box because I had been too lazy to actually clean it out. It was