Ed Helms and Daily Show writers on Fox News and satire.

In our third Slate Plus bonus episode from Slow Burn Season 10, host Josh Levin talks with three former staffers from The Daily Show—correspondent Ed Helms, head writer and executive producer Ben Karlin, and writer Chris Regan.

Slate Plus members can listen to an audio version of this conversation. Hear more from Daily Show staffers about how they took on Fox News in Episode 4, “Beacon of Truth.” By joining Slate Plus, not only will you unlock exclusive Slow Burn episodes, but you’ll also access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Visit slate.com/slowburnplus to get access wherever you listen.

Transcript:

NARRATION: Hello and welcome to this Slate Plus bonus episode for Slow Burn Season 10: The Rise of Fox News. I’m Josh Levin. The episode you probably just heard was about how a bunch of critics started going after Fox in the early 2000s, including the people behind The Daily Show. Now, we’re going to dive deeper into that world, with conversations with three Daily Show alums. We’re starting with Ed Helms, who starred in The Office and the Hangover movies. But before that, he was a Daily Show correspondent from 2002 to mid 2006. 

Josh Levin: Before you started working there, what did the Daily Show mean to you as a viewer and a comedian?

Ed Helms: I moved to New York City after college. I got a job as an assistant editor, on the film side, and then I just dove into the stand up comedy world, and I had my sights on Saturday Night Live.

That was sort of my be all end all comedy goal. But very quickly I fell in love with The Daily Show as a comedy voice. When I really got into watching it, Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell and Mo Rocca and others were sort of the core correspondent crew.

And of course, John was anchoring. It just was operating at such a high level comedically. And I also felt like it was kind of saying meaningful things. And I don’t mean that in a, hoity toity like, Oh, it was changing the world. I just mean, it was very, very sharp satire.

And particularly those correspondent pieces were sort of calling out media behavior in a way that I just thought was so sharp and funny. As an up and coming comedy performer, I just would look at the landscape and be like, okay, where, where can I fit in?

And I was looking at those correspondent roles and thinking, like, I think I could do that. And that was very, very exciting. And I chased it.

Levin: What is the story of your first Daily Show segment? Do you remember the mole story?

Helms:  The mole story was my second segment. But remains one of my all time favorites.

Levin: Do you want to just tell that story?

Helms: I will. Katie Couric had just gotten a colonoscopy on camera, right. For the Today Show. And, uh,  obviously it was a very legitimately courageous move to go on camera while getting a colonoscopy and a very meaningful public message.

I don’t want to take anything away from that. I think she was doing something, actually quite, dignified and meaningful, but it also just on its face was very, very funny. And so we started trying to think of a way to satirize a correspondent going into a medical procedure and kind of overdramatizing it.

I’d always had this mole on the side of my nostril that kind of bugged me. It was no big deal, but it just was like the most irrelevant medical procedure we could possibly think of and not only that there’s a little bit of vanity mixed into it, which makes it even better for the satire.

And the one thing I remember about shooting that segment, we write these questions in advance that we’re going to ask the subjects. And we’re trying to think of the funniest questions possible.

And one that was just so juvenile and like so dumb but based on the Katie Couric piece was, I’m going to ask this doctor with a straight face, will the tubes in my anus be uncomfortable? I could not get it out without laughing. And this doctor was very confused, he was one of the few people at the time who was not familiar with the Daily Show and didn’t know we were being silly. But I kept kind of like, choking on these laughs. Finally, I got it out and his response was so perfect.

He just was like, no, no, there, there won’t be any tubes in your anus. Anyway, there’s nothing I love more than like very like juvenile base humor in the service of elevated satire. That to me is like the most fun combination of things. It’s what Monty Python always did so brilliantly and it’s always been a kind of aspirational goal for me.

Levin: When it came to critiquing or satirizing the media in particular, what was the Daily Show’s point of view?

Helms: I interpreted the Daily Show ethos and in turn my job as a correspondent and writer there to really try to call out hypocrisy wherever we saw it.

That seemed like the most sort of basic job and then to try to put a funny spin on it. What Jon Stewart has that is so special and rare is this like finely tuned intellectual honesty meter, right? So he can clock when the media or when pundits or when politicians are behaving with intellectual honesty or not. And I think it’s those stumbles or faults in the media or in the political sphere of when people are acting either very cynically or overtly hypocritically.

Those are the moments that John can sort of see with incredible clarity and then just put the most hilarious top spin on.

[MUSIC]

Levin: I know you were totally thrilled to be at the conventions in 2004. I’ve read you talking about that before, but can you just talk about how exciting that was for you?

Helms: The conventions feel like the kind of beating heart of the presidential races. So the Republican convention was in Madison Square Garden right in the heart of New York City just a few blocks from our studio, thankfully, which made things a little easier.

And  we all showed up together and we’re showing our credentials. Uh, but you also had to provide your driver’s license or you know your photo ID. And Rob Corddry had forgotten his driver’s license. And it was like, Oh God, this is catastrophic.

Not just, For poor Rob, but like for the show, we’re going to be down a whole bunch of segments or whatever. And then Rob looks up and he goes, well, does that count as photo ID? And he points to a giant Daily Show billboard that had been mounted right next to Madison Square Garden. And it had all of our faces and all of our names right under our faces.

And the security guy was like, yeah. Okay, that works. Go ahead. And he let us in.

Levin: Amazing.

Helms: So we would go in every day with very little and just run around the convention space, trying to get stories or jokes or segments, whatever we could.

George Bush’s vice president Dick Cheney voted in support of segregation when he was a senator in Wyoming. Does that give you pause as an African American Republican?

Well, I think it’s important for people of color.

I’m totally kidding.

We would have these meetings first thing in the morning where it’s like, okay, Ed, you’re going to try to find Senator Byrd and ask him about his, the constitution he keeps in his breast pocket or whatever.

Colbert, you’re going to find this or that. And then, and you’re just running, literally running around these convention spaces and maybe you would see somebody and be like, Oh, there’s James Carville. I, I, I got a joke for him. And you just like stop him in the hall and, and try to catch him saying something silly or startle him, catch him off guard.

Levin: What do you remember about going on Fox and Friends during the convention?

Helms: Comedy Central had booked us on Fox Friends literally to promote The Daily Show, not to like get a bit or like do a segment.

It was just part of a much broader publicity push about The Daily Show’s coverage. So I think Rob and I went in just kind of being like, this’ll be just another publicity appearance and we’ll just sort of chat. It’s a morning show, so we’ll just chat and be goofy with the hosts. We’re backstage and there are all these powerful people, you know, mingling backstage and it’s sort of exciting to be back there.

And I remember Ralph Reed sees Rob and I, and his face drops into a scowl. And he turns to the guy next to him and he goes, I guess they’ll let anybody in here.

And I’m thinking Ralph Reed, what was he head of?

Levin: Christian coalition

Helms:  Christian, The Christian coalition right. Like that’s not a very Christian demeanor. So there was a little bit of a sense like, Oh, maybe we’re not as welcome here as I thought.

I just thought we were, and again, I’m very naive, but I just honestly thought like, yes, we make fun of Fox news, but they can take it we’re all professionals here. But then we get onto the set,it’s a morning show so it’s all very light feeling.

And they’re like testing the mics and stuff and, and everything feels okay. And then they ask us some goofy question about how many donut shops are in Boston ‘cause there’s some, there’s only like 500 donut shops in or something, and it’s like, oh, what a funny thing to talk about. And we make a couple of jokes and then Rob and I lose audio in both of our earpieces. So, we can no longer hear the questions that they’re asking. The anchors of the show are in New York City. So we’re just watching a monitor of them but we can no longer hear them.

So Rob and I turned to each other and we’re kind of like, uh, sorry, we can’t hear you. We, we can’t hear you. And we keep saying that. And then we could see, I can’t remember if it was one of the anchors or someone in the studio next to us that just got so mad. And they were like, they’re messing with you.

They’re messing with us. They’re messing. And I will admit, like, that’s a plausible interpretation of the moment, seeing a couple of Daily Show correspondents, like pretending like they couldn’t hear might be what’s happening, but it wasn’t. We genuinely couldn’t hear. And the producer got so mad and they cut the segment short and Rob and I just walked out of there like, okay, sorry. You know, that was weird.

Levin: How familiar were you with Fox News when you started at the Daily Show?

Helms: I was pretty familiar with Fox News. I considered myself quite a news junkie, and I really respect and admire journalism. And so my love language is to then satirize it and make fun of it and call out the foibles that I see in it.

Levin: One thing that’s really kind of fascinating to look back on. I don’t know if you realized it at the time was that Fox and the Daily Show were really growing together. They both launched in 1996 and both weren’t kind of in their complete and final form in the beginning, but both sort of hit peaks around the 2000 election, 9/11, the Iraq war, and they were kind of growing together.

And it just felt to me, like as a viewer then and sort of as a reporter now. That there was this kind of conversation going on between them, or maybe it was a one way conversation where the Daily Show was talking about Fox, but there is this just sort of parallel rise that I find really interesting.

Helms: Yeah, I never thought about that, but, the thing that always struck me about Fox News from, from the outset, or really probably around 99, 2000, when I really started to pay more attention, I don’t remember when they adopted the fair and balanced motto. It was so deliberately and overtly not fair and balanced like as a, uh, as an institution, it was, uh, stridently conservative. And that’s fine. Be what you are, but then also own what you are. And you know one of the things that the rise of Fox news did.

Also was, I think it, it made clear some of the liberal biases that existed in other news outlets that most people just sort of completely overlooked or took for granted. But, I think that it becomes a false comparison very quickly because the liberal biases were just not as powerful as what Fox was putting out from a conservative side.

It just was so overt and strident, that the claim of being fair and balanced almost felt offensive to me.

Levin: Whether it’s about the Daily Show writ large or just you, like when you would critique or satirize Fox on the show, was it because you disagreed with its politics or was it about the cynicism or hypocrisy rather than they’re conservative so I just want to go out and, and satirize or mock or disagree with that.

Helms: Yeah, it is an important distinction to make. I really think that the Daily Show was just trying to say ‘what the fuck?’ to institutions or public figures who were being shitty or disingenuous and that was the ethos it wasn’t about like taking down conservative people at all.

And I think John really said it eloquently. We’re not in a situation where it’s conservatives versus liberals, the real problem here is it’s extremists versus moderates.

And I thought that was such a beautiful distillation of what felt like a kind of a growing divide in the country.

[MUSIC]

NARRATION: For more on how The Daily Show thought about Fox, we’re going to turn to Ben Karlin, who was head writer and then executive producer of The Daily Show from 1999 to 2007. I asked him what he saw when he watched Fox’s primetime hosts like Bill O’Reilly. 

Levin: If you could just talk a little bit about just why did it seem like Fox and O’Reilly needed their own satire?

Ben Karlin: Well, it definitely seems like the media environment really transformed during this period in the early 2000s, and the kind of cult of personality around these figures that had kind of one foot in the news world and one foot in the personality world, um, and then trafficked very happily and like the blurring of those things, like, I don’t have to be as journalistically responsible because I’m not on this show as like a news person.

I’m on this show as a personality, but I’m going to have some of the kind of pieces and feel of a new show. So to, uh, casual viewer it’s gonna feel like news. However, I don’t have to hold myself to this kind of responsibility. It felt like a real cynical and disingenuous thing that they were doing as a way of, like, basically piping propaganda.

Um, and it seemed like these personalities were certainly more than willing to do it. I mean, Sean Hannity is the most guilty of this, of anyone I can think of. And it’s like, how many times does that guy say, Oh, I’m just a personality. I’m not a news guy. But when you watch his show, he has the look and feel of a guy you see on the news, you know?

And it’s like, that’s a distinction that you have to be more responsible in making.

Levin: Do you feel like there’s an argument to be made that you guys benefited Fox in any way by bringing them attention? I mean, people from Fox seemed to enjoy what you were doing so.

Karlin: I think that that’s totally valid. I think that there’s definitely an us versus them vibe in our culture, and that’s been drawn along, like, a lot of political and social lines

Levin: The big New Yorker piece describes you getting a call from someone at Fox News. You say, wanna hear something amazing and sad? I just heard from someone at Fox News that whenever we make fun of them, they all gather and watch. They love it, but we hate them.

Karlin: Yeah, I do remember that. Yeah. It was always weird. We would run into people at Fox news at like, you know, conventions and, and when they’d find out we were from the Daily Show, sometimes they’d be like, God, I wish we could do what you do. And I always found that so weird because it’s like, you’re like a journalist, like you’re supposed to be able to like speak whatever truth there is.

Like, what do you mean? Like what’s, what’s preventing you from being honest about what you think and feel like it always struck us as very strange that people were like, felt hemmed in by, by their jobs as journalists and reporters. And you know, it’s just like, well, if you’re reporting on stuff that you think is ridiculous or not true or not fair, maybe you should advocate to not do that.

Levin: Somebody we talked to said that the distinction for them was that the jokes about Fox were Are you fucking kidding me? And the ones about CNN were more like a nudge, like, you guys should do better.

Karlin: Yeah, I think I guess it felt like there’s this baldness, uh, to Fox that was, we could never quite be sure that they were totally aware of how fucking crazy what they were doing was and just didn’t care or that they had somehow like really really believed it and there was just this like other world like that that existed next to ours of these competing realities. So we were always kind of straddling that with with Fox a little bit with CNN It just kind of felt like this sad like try hard You know, like, we have to do better because we’re losing energy, you know, it didn’t feel like they were aware of everything they were doing.

They just weren’t that good at it.

Levin: Did you feel like you had to balance how much you were hitting Fox versus CNN and MSNBC?

Karlin: Not really just because we didn’t have the same obligation that to like, to be fair and balanced as like, an actual news organization would. But the biggest concern was that it would just get boring because you’re just doing the same thing over and over again. There’s a show called Mystery Science Theater 3000, which would watch old movies and kind of do a running commentary about these like really cheesy B movies.

And it’s basically like the original, like funny people yelling things at the screen kind of device. And we were very concerned about our show sometimes becoming that for Fox news where we’re just kind of just rolling their tape and making fun of them. I mean, it was a lot of easy fodder for us, and it was very tempting to do that, but we would seize on any opportunity to make fun of anybody as long as it was there was an angle basically and as CNN, you know kind of tried really hard and kept on going through these kind of identity crises and and you know MSNBC was on the scene and they were like the little brother that was you know, trying to get some attention, but couldn’t like, we tried to find ways in, um, on that.

And then there was still the network news and, and other places. Um, it just felt that Fox because it stood against all these other, you know, kind of traditional institutions, it felt oftentimes like one stop shopping

[MUSIC]

NARRATION: Finally, we’re going to hear from a Daily Show writer, Chris Regan. He was with the show from 1999 to 2006.

Chris Regan: I always felt my job was, as a comedy writer, to deal with this news story and plug some comedy into it. And just sort of, tell the story and hang some jokes on that tree. And sort of let the comedy speak for itself, but I think after a while it became very much that every little headline package we did was going to tell a story and have a point of view.

The show clearly had a left leaning point of view. And I think a lot of comedy has a left leaning point of view. Comedy is usually anti authoritarian and I think right leaning people have a tendency to favor authoritarianism a little more. So comedy in general, I think it’s going to go after stuff like that.

Whenever you see someone doing comedy, that’s, we’re really going to go at it from both sides. Doesn’t really work.

Levin: Fair and balanced comedy?

Regan: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t, I don’t think that really works for anybody.

Levin: Did it seem to you like the people on Fox were like having a good time and that like they were enjoying themselves?

Regan: Yeah. I mean, there always seemed to be a big wink. And, you know, there seemed to be a bit of a sense of humor about it in some respects. And I think the initial Fox was sort of jovially looking down on the rest of us, you know, like here’s what the children won’t tell you folks and blah blah blah and you know slick willie, etc, etc this sort of mean cultural war stuff didn’t you know emerge until a little later, you know, it seemed like it presented a counterpoint for people.

I don’t think they were allowing you to decide, you know, I think, I think they were playing to a crowd of people who had decided

Levin: Well, were you guys allowing people to decide though?

Regan: Oh, probably not, but we’re a comedy show. You see, we can hide behind that.

Levin: I mean, they were giving their audience what they wanted.

And you were I’m not trying to create like a false equivalence, but the mission wasn’t to like change people’s minds was it?

Regan: On the Daily Show? No. Um, we were always protected by the fact that we are not a news show. We’re a comedy show. Like we would fall back on that.

Levin: Do you feel like that was a dodge kind of?

Regan: I think to some degree. Yeah. I mean, for being absolutely honest, but Fox couldn’t dodge that. Fox presented themselves as a news network with whatever they call entertainment journalism, like whatever the E or opinion journalism, whatever their evening block of stuff is.

But at least then, you know, the nine to five stuff was supposedly, you know, it was, news reporting.

Levin: Real journalists.

Regan: Yeah. And we weren’t ever reporting. We were making fun of.

Levin: To the extent you were, it was a dodge. What were you dodging?

Regan: I guess to some degree of being accused as just, you know, liberal propaganda of only presenting one side.

That whole thing? Why aren’t you making fun of the Democrats? They’re doing A, B, C, and D. And I think, I think we did give it to some Democrats, but I think there was a point where Republicans were just doing things that were so weird and outside of what we consider normal at the time that, you know, it was just funner and easier to go after them.

[MUSIC]

Levin: I think a thing that gets forgotten is that one thing that the Daily Show did, which Twitter does now or social media more broadly is actually just identify the crazy shit that was being said. Like, there was no other way probably if you had missed it to even know that it ever happened.

And so I don’t know if it’s too high minded to be like, it’s providing a service, but like, I think the Daily Show is probably the first and only time a lot of people saw some of these clips.

Regan: Yeah. And we had a secret weapon at the show. He’s still there. Actually, a man named Adam Chodakoff, who was our main researcher and Adam had this amazing recall for when politicians said stupid things and he could conjure up almost to the exact day when a politician said something and he was this wonderful, amazing tool, where he could really just call up footage of people and, you know, we could hammer the points home of, of people saying really ridiculous things on C SPAN at, you know, various times when people weren’t watching it.

Levin: To generalize, is that unusual for a researcher to be the secret weapon for comedians?

Regan: Research is very important. And it was very important to Adam because towards the end of my tenure there.

When you’d put something in a joke, Adam would come in and say, where’d you get that? And if you ever said, I found it on the internet, he would just go, just sort of walk out. He made sure that everything we put on the air would stand up to any sort of tests that a journalist would want to pass with their material.

Levin: Why, why was that important?

Regan: Because, um, you know, if we were to have any sort of credibility, you know, we certainly couldn’t go deep on something that, that wasn’t true.

Levin: You had to kind of become like them to critique them in a way, or like do what journalists did.

Regan: Yeah. Because, you know, as we became more and more of this, you know, young people get their news from the Daily Show business.

I think there was sort of an obligation to present it as news a bit more and not, you know, just go down any sort of path of maybe sort of rumor innuendo. Like Adam really held our feet to the fire for stuff like that.

[MUSIC]

NARRATION: This bonus episode was produced by Rosie Belson and Joel Meyer with help from Sophie Summergrad and Lizzie Jacobs. I’m Josh Levin. Thanks very much for listening and for subscribing to Slate Plus, which makes this series possible. We’ll be back next week with more Slow Burn.