Thursday, January 08, 2009

A Day With Jon Stewart

Yesterday was a pretty interesting day. I finally bought a computer (a Dell Inspiron, more about that in a future post), and later in the day, a friend of mine asked me if I'd be interested in seeing a taping of "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." I thought, "Why not?"

I've seen the show a few times, but I was never really a regular viewer. My friend and I went over to the West Side of Manhattan for the taping and met two friends of his, and we also had seats in the VIP section, which was a nice thing indeed. We sat just about 15 feet to the left of Jon's desk, in the second row. I've been to a few other TV tapings in my life, and like the others, the studio always looks much smaller in person. No exception here.

We were seated about an hour before the taping began, along with about 250 other folks. A writer on the show named Paul Mecurio did a 15-minute warmup, and he was very funny. (My friend told me he did a gig at Professor Thom's during one of their "Boston Comedians"night over a year ago and was terrific.) Turns out he is from Rhode Island, and my friend told me to put on my Red Sox hat to see if he would notice, as he's a big Red Sox fan. My friend said he saw it but didn't say anything to me.

The show was a lot of fun to be a part of. Jon Stewart took questions from the audience before the taping began, and was great with his sharp, witty responses. The audience was in high spirits, and the show was funny. Jon did a wrapup of the press' insane coverage of the Obama girls' first day of school, along with three of his cast members doing a skit about it, and then Assif Manvi came out and did a funny bit on Sanjay Gupta being tapped as Surgeon General.

The show moved rather quickly, and the breaks between tapings was faster than I thought they would be. MSNBC talk show host Rachel Maddow was the in-house guest, and she came off rather personable and funny. The show then concluded as Jon thanked his audience for coming.

I enjoyed the experience very much, especially since it didn't cost me anything! I'll be watching "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" more often now.

4 comments:

Peter N said...

Good luck with the new computer!

BklynSoxFan said...

Thanks Peter. I should have it within two weeks.

Suldog said...

Sounds like you had a great fun time. Good for you.

BklynSoxFan said...

Thank you, Suldog. I love hooting and hollering with 250 other people...