Angry Optimist
The Life and Times of Jon Stewart
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Bestseller
Since his arrival at The Daily Show in 1999, Jon Stewart has become one of the major players in comedy as well as one of the most significant liberal voices in the media. In Angry Optimist, biographer Lisa Rogak charts his unlikely rise to stardom. She follows him from his early days growing up in New Jersey, through his years as a struggling standup comic in New York, and on to the short-lived but acclaimed The Jon Stewart Show. And she charts his humbling string of near-misses—passed over as a replacement for shows hosted by Conan O'Brien, Tom Snyder, and even the fictional Larry Sanders—before landing on a half-hour comedy show that at the time was still finding its footing amidst roiling internal drama.
Once there, Stewart transformed The Daily Show into one of the most influential news programs on television today. Drawing on interviews with current and former colleagues, Rogak reveals how things work—and sometimes don't work—behind the scenes at The Daily Show, led by Jon Stewart, a comedian who has come to wield incredible power in American politics.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this pseudo-biography of Jon Stewart (n Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz), Rogak (Hillary Clinton in Her Own Words) packages a canned chronology of a figure's life and career. Starting from the very beginning, she tracks Stewart's childhood a short, Jewish kid in the WASPy neighborhood of Lawrenceville, N.J.; his adolescence as a class clown and talented soccer player; his first attempts at stand-up at the Bitter End and other New York haunts; his early stints on TV; his landing on The Daily Show in 1999; all 15 years of his tenure there up to the present; and all the various projects he has taken on in the meantime (including three books, several movies, award shows, and much more). While the thought-provoking questions surrounding Stewart's tenuous, and often contradictory, relationship to his work as both a fake-news-show host and an influential political pundit hang in the air, Rogak does little to shed new light on the topic. Instead, she borrows from other journalists to create an uninspired collection of repurposed quotes, which are interspersed with her own repetitive prose.
