While The Daily Show may not have given us quite the volume of great comedians that Saturday Night Live has, it has still given us some absolute titans. Top among them have to be Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert. The two did a lot of great work on the show, and Carrell says he got a great piece of advice from Colbert that helped his early work on the show.
A key component of the Daily Show, especially in the early days, were field segments where comedians would play the role of a TV news reporter getting a special interest story. Carrell was great at these, but he tells Amy Phoeler on the Good Hang podcast that early on, he hated to do them. He explained:
I did not like it, at first. Especially at first, because I was new and I was kind of following the template. And I never felt good about mocking someone who doesn't deserve it.
There’s a fine line between comedy and making fun of people. These early Daily Show segments, as Carell points out, often had people with no idea they were on a comedy show because it wasn’t as well-known at that point. Part of the comedy was drawing attention to potentially wild things people were doing, but Carrell clearly wasn’t comfortable with it.
Help came in the form of The Daily Show’s other Stephen, Colbert, who suggested Carell play a character rather than himself. This allowed him to be the thing people were laughing at, rather than whoever he was interviewing. He continued:
Stephen gave me great advice, which was 'Come up with a character and that will make it much more palatable.' My character was someone who didn't understand, someone who didn't quite get it., but was super-serious about everything he was asking. But the onus was on me. I was the idiot.
Colbert certainly knew of what he spoke. His own character, a right-wing ideologue, worked so well that he ended up getting his own show, The Colbert Report. The show worked so well that many debated Colbert's own politics for a long time, unsure if he was making fun or trying to make a point. Colbert's politics aren't so much in debate these days.
Carrell’s character worked great. He was able to make himself the focus rather than people who maybe didn’t deserve ridicule. And he also helped set himself apart from the crowd of early Daily Show correspondents, becoming one of the first to make deals for movies outside of the show.
The Daily Show has gone through a lot of changes and there have been some great performers on the show in the years since Carrell and Colbert said goodbye, but there’s a lot to be said for those early years that may still be the best the show has ever had.
