This Was Jon Stewart’s Favorite Moment with George Carlin
“Jon, who’s your comedic influence and why?”
That was the question posed to Jon Stewart during a Daily Show audience Q&A, and Stewart had a definitive answer. “You know, growing up, it was National Lampoon. It was Monty Python. It was Steve Martin. But really, the guy I locked in on was Carlin.”
In 1997, while Stewart was still in his leather jacket days, he sat down with his comedy hero George Carlin for HBO’s 40 Years of Comedy. They talked about Carlin’s comedy heroes, including Danny Kaye and Bob Hope. Stewart asked Carlin how aspiring to be Bob Hope was working out.
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“Well, I knew I wanted to stand up and be silly and have people say, ‘Isn’t he cute? Isn’t he cute and clever?’ And that’s all it was, a reward, a psychic reward,” Carlin replied. “You know, when you’re a kid and you find out that you can get the attention of adults and approval and a little bit of respect, and you just hunger for it, you keep going back for it.”
Carlin was no longer a kid when Stewart interviewed him for HBO, and he was feeling his age. “Longevity is a wonderful thing,” he explained. “Sometimes you get applause just for not being dead when you say, ‘I’m going to be 60.’ They applaud that. ‘Wonderful, not dead, 60.’”
Which brings us to Stewart’s favorite memory of Carlin, a moment that happened in 1997 away from the HBO stage. “I interviewed him out in Aspen, they did a comedy festival in Aspen,” Stewart remembered. “Aspen is 10,000 feet above where people would live. And when you go there, you do feel like it’s one of those horror movies where you can’t breathe, but everybody else seems fine.”
In 1997, Stewart was only 35 years old, a former college soccer player who started on the varsity for three years. If the Daily Show host was having trouble catching his breath at high altitude, imagine the effect on the 60-year-old comedian. “Carlin, at that point — I don’t know if you know his health history — but he had had, like, five heart attacks.”
That made for a harrowing walk up to the Aspen Opera House, which inexplicably didn’t have an elevator. “And we’re just walking up, step after step, into the thinner and thinner air so that he can do a comedy show,” Stewart said. “He’s in his 60s. He’s had five heart attacks. And I just remember on, like, the fourth plateau, before we were going to summit, he just stops and he turns to me.”
With a pained expression, Stewart does his best imitation of Carlin in full exasperation mode: “What the fuck are we doing here, man?”
That was the moment, said a blissful Stewart, describing the memory by blowing chef’s kisses into the comedy heavens.
