In 1996, Jon Stewart jolted Comedy Central by injecting daily news with humour and biting satire. Now, almost thirty years and a swag of comedy awards later, The Daily Show has seen various hosts and is still going strong. It continues to define late-night comedy television to its dedicated audience. Creative Screenwriting Magazine spoke with long time head writer/ producer Dan Amira about the show’s success and longevity.
It all begins with the creators’ attitude to the show. They don’t specifically chase satire. “We just try to do what we find funny. The news comes in every day. We have a big discussion about it as a group. We find the angles that we think are going to be the funniest for us and for our audience,” explains Amira.
The writers don’t think about the comedic nuances on a philosophical level. “We just go where the funny takes us on a given story.” This approach seems to work best for The Comedy Channel.
We go where the comedy takes us
A key aspect that differentiates The Daily Show from other late night shows is its rotating host setup. “Obviously we have Jon Stewart on Mondays and he is a GOAT. We have this whole other cast of rotating hosts and correspondents that give us so many more opportunities than other shows have. We get different perspectives, different senses of humor. We’re writing for all these different viewpoints and styles. We’re not locked into one host, one viewpoint, one comedic sensibility,” elaborates Amira.
Dan Amira
The Daily Show spends considerable time in the field – especially during election seasons. They visit political party and candidate conventions and frequently interview attendees. Dan Amira describes election campaigns as the show’s bread and butter.
How Hard Can Political Satire Bite?
Political mudslinging can get messy, sometimes beyond what’s reasonably considered to be funny or tasteful. The jokes are generated in a writers’ room and the boundaries to satire are never clearly defined or static. Dan Amira elaborates, “It’s like the Supreme Court Justice who said, ‘I know it’s porn when I see it.’ You just sort of got to feel it. There are no rules. There’s nothing written down.”
The intensity of humor is also dependent on the host. “Some hosts are willing to go a little further. Some are willing to be a little darker with their humor, a little edgier.”
Finding humor may not always be easy in a tragic situation. In those cases, the writers look for an angle to the story that’s not too depressing. Amira cites the example of the mass shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs Parade. “We had a meeting and came up with the idea that you just know they’re going to try and ban parades after this, not the guns that made the parade dangerous. I think somebody did in Kansas City, like a day later say, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have these parades anymore?‘”
Finding the “angles of hypocrisy or dishonesty in any story gives us openings even when the story is kind of bleak.”
Much like navigating comedic satire with a sixth sense, the producers don’t have a fixed template for the format of the show. “We have different departments working on different things at all times and making sure that we have a bucket of pre-taped pieces that we can roll in when they make sense.”
“Our first act is always a headline and a chat, but the second act could be a sketch, it could be a field piece, it could be Jordan Klepper at a rally, or it could be some other correspondent out in the field. It could be a (wo)man on the street piece. We’ve had music recently, we have guests in that act.” Many decisions are based on the news cycle and where the show is production wise. The Daily Show has pre-taped sketches waiting for months for the right time to be aired.
The producers don’t have a segment quota system. The ratio of field verses sketch segments is driven by the ideas.
Producing The Daily Show
Jen Flanz serves as the long-time showrunner of the show with a commitment to presenting a diverse range of guests, underrepresented voices, and a broad array of perspectives as she pushes the envelope of late night show content. The direction of the show is commandeered by a team of about a dozen experienced writers, producers, and department heads. Dan Amira describes the process as “very collaborative” with little input or interference by the network.
The Daily Show has a large writers’ room comprising “multi-purpose, generalist writers.” There are times when Amira might assign specialty tasks to specific writers, but there is generally no joke punch writer working with a monologue writer.
Writers meet for three days each week in the office and spend two days at home to write.
There are about sixteen staff writers and five writer/ producers on The Daily Show. There are over twenty writers in total. “On any given day, there are people on an assignment, but everyone else is also contributing. There’s no day when a writer on our staff is dormant,” remarks Amira.
The Daily Show host lineup. Photo courtesy of Paramount Plus
The writers are sometimes organized into “gangs” where they’ll have a setup for a joke they’ll have to come up with a punchline. Everyone is expected to pitch jokes in a brainstorming session. The proportion of those jokes that make it onto the show is minimal.
“We are sometimes getting fifteen or sixteen writers pitching fifty jokes and we are picking one of those jokes for the show. When I first got to The Daily Show they told me if you get a joke on the show that day, that’s a good day.”
Dan Amira notes the difficulty in stating how long a typical episode takes to produce from idea to final cut given there are multiple segments in each episode, each with their own production requirements. A monologue can be filmed in a matter of hours, whereas a sketch or field piece might take over a month to produce. A guest might have been booked months in advance or a headline that arose during the day might dramatically change the schedule and segments are rewritten very quickly.
How Has The Daily Show Evolved Over Time?
Dan Amira first began working on The Daily Show in 2014 and has witnessed first hand how he and the show have changed. He started during Jon Stewart’s initial run for about eighteen months and then the main host was Trevor Noah for seven years. Like many television shows during the pandemic, production moved out of the studios and into homes.
“We were filming from Trevor’s apartment. We all worked remotely. It was a crazy time.” Following the main lockdown period, the writers returned and Trevor left. There was a period of a year where they had rotating hosts which the show had never done before. There was a new host each week. In the current iteration, Jon Stewart has returned and there is a rotating roster of correspondents. “Since the pandemic, the instability of the show is the norm. We have just rolled with the changes and evolved with it.”
Dan Amira previously worked at New York Magazine before moving to The Daily Show. Many writers on the show come from improv or standup comedy; neither of which Amira has done. Some writers migrate from other departments such as research. “If they come up with really good ideas, we ask them to submit a packet.” Other writers have been invited to submit to the show if they’re really funny on X or other social media platforms.
Writers come from everywhere
Amira grew up on watching Seinfeld which was the bedrock of his comedic sensibilities. The breadth of these sensibilities has widened through years of working with the great comedic minds on The Daily Show.
Jon Stewart vs Trevor Noah
On the differences between Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah, “Jon is in almost an emotional conversation with the news that we’re showing. He’ll show a clip and he’ll react viscerally to it. He’ll ask a question and have the clip answer him and it’s very fluid.”
“In Trevor’s episodes, we would often show a news story and then we would sit in that story for a while, break it down from different angles, analyze it, and tease it apart in a way that was a little less about the emotion of the story and more about bringing it down from different angles.”
He offered more of a global perspective since he’s not from America. He would make Americans care about news from other parts of the world.
Politically, The Daily Show leans toward the left. Dan Amira would love to have more guests on the show that lean to the right to balance things out.
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