Jon Stewart Says Amazon and Apple Are Dangerous for Comedy Writers

Thanks to his not-so-successful run on Apple TV+, Jon Stewart knows firsthand how creating comedy for a tech company is decidedly different from what he’s experienced in the past. Maybe that’s not all bad — a lot of traditional show business makes no logical sense — but the shift definitely has implications for comedy writers.

“We’ve created this incredibly eccentric business where you need an agent and a manager and a lawyer, and they’re gonna take about 60 percent of what you make, but without them, there’s nothing you can do,” Jon Stewart said on the Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend podcast. “And you join the studio, and the studio will give you a deal and you’ll sit in your room. It’s the most inefficient way.”

Say what you want about big tech, but it’s efficient. “Silicon Valley walked in (to entertainment), in the way that Elon Musk walked into Twitter and went, ‘How many people work here? 10,000? Make it two.’”

The legacy way of creating comedy makes no sense to Amazon and Apple, he told O’Brien. “They go, ‘Writers’ room? Wait, you’ve got 14 writers, and they’re with you from start to finish on the production?’ ‘Well, it’s important for the writers to be invested and also we’re showing them how they’re on the page because it’s different about the page to the screen. They’ve got to understand how that works and understand how we interact with the props.’”

Amazon and Apple hear those arguments and respond with something like, “They can have three weeks, and it’s gotta be on Zoom. And you can have four of them.”

Big Tech is changing entertainment from an analog business to a digital business, Stewart argues, and the result is a virtual earthquake. “I can’t function like that,” he admitted. “My writers! Like, what?”

O’Brien is seeing the changes as well. “I’m friends with so, so many comedy writers,” he said. “Many comedy writers of my vintage or younger have trouble getting work now. It’s changing radically.”

The large tech companies “don’t believe in institutional knowledge that allows people to grow and get better and create more,” Stewart claimed. Instead, they endorse an auteur system that’s responsible for “ruthlessly efficient content factories where what matters is the real estate and not the individual creative.”

Stewart has complained in the past about how his sensibilities didn’t mesh with those of his former Apple overlords. In his initial Daily Show tenure, Stewart’s job was to be provocative and make headlines. That wasn’t necessarily what Apple was looking for. “I could not help them in the way that maybe I had been able to help Comedy Central,” Stewart told Matthew Belloni. “But I think in their determination, I could hurt them.”

The aims of comedy and the aims of tech often “do not align,’” Stewart said. “And that’s when I knew we were in trouble.”