It's Jon Stewart's job to make fun of the news, even when there's nothing remotely funny about it.
Such was the case recently when Stewart and the cast of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" came to work and were confronted with the breaking story of the deadliest shooting rampage in modern American history.
So what's a fake anchorman to do?
Find something else to be funny about.
"I will do what I always do when faced with something that is that powerfully damaging to the emotional core," Stewart said at the top of the show. "I will begin to repress it, and swallow it .
.. so let's move on, as if the world was OK.
"
"The main thing is to overcome your own sense of gloom," Stewart said the next day from his Manhattan office.
"Our saving grace is that we're not the news, so we have no obligation to be the news. Our job is comedy, though the foundation of a lot of what we do is not particularly lighthearted.
And it's not that horrible situations cannot make for something satirical or absurd. It's just that in the middle of the immediacy of something like this, you're fighting your own nausea."
Even under those circumstances, Stewart, who has seen the political and cultural influence of "The Daily Show" skyrocket since he took over in 1999, managed to mount a frequently sidesplitting half-hour.
The cable host mocked Richard Gere's kissing antics in India with the help of correspondent Aasif Mandvi. He poked fun at the amorous ways of World Bank chief Paul Wolfowitz, whose efforts to "steer his way into the bay of noncorrupt business practices would run afoul on the coral reef of good nookie." And he welcomed guests including Capt.
Sig Hansen of the Discovery Channel's crab-fishing hit "The Deadliest Catch" and ex-White House chief of staff Andrew Card.
Why do guests like Card come on a show that hurls barbs at the Bush administration every day and whose host supported John Kerry in the 2004 campaign? "I don't know," says Stewart.
"My guess is that he has kids and they watch the show. That's how we get most people who we have no business talking to."
Stewart clearly relishes tangling with those whose views are antithetical to his own.
But when asked whom he prefers talking to, Halle Berry or former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, he answers like a politician.
"I can tell you who smells better," says the comic. "Bolton's mustache is actually not a mustache. It's an air freshener.
So he has a nice pine scent. But seriously, one smells like heaven and one smells like fear. You decide.
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Though the sitting president is Stewart's most frequent comic target, the satirist says he won't miss Bush when he leaves office. "People used to say, 'When Clinton goes, what are you going to do without him?' I have complete faith in the continued absurdity of whatever's going on.
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