Short of The Tonight Show’s opening monologue, there may be no more enduring late-night ritual than The Daily Show’s “Moment of Zen.”
Since the Comedy Central series’ very first episode on June 22, 1996, viewers have been sent off with the same deadpan benediction: “Here it is, your Moment of Zen.”
The segment is credited to Daily Show co-creator Madeleine Smithberg, the program’s first executive producer. But Smithberg won’t accept full glory for it. As she tells LateNighter, the bit’s true inspiration was her disagreeable cat, Lillian.
“She was an ugly cat,” Smithberg recalls of Lillian, a half-Persian with “a face that looked like somebody just pushed it in.”
“She was nasty,” she says. “She didn’t like me. And I didn’t like her.”
Lillian was not just unpleasant. She was also, according to Smithberg, spectacularly lazy—the kind of cat who could make you wonder whether she was asleep or decorative.
But once a week, Lillian roused from her stupor when she heard Charles Kuralt’s voice coming from Smithberg’s television.
On the CBS News show Sunday Morning, Kuralt would end each broadcast by introducing some serene bit of nature footage—“the western osprey mating in the wetlands of northern Idaho,” Smithberg says, slipping into his folksy baritone.
“And then it would be nothing but two and a half minutes of birds in the nest.”
Lillian was transfixed.
“She would go right near the TV, and her tail would be twitching,” Smithberg says. “She would be mesmerized for the entire two and a half minutes.”
That image—her cranky, inert cat suddenly hypnotized by a peaceful nature segment—stuck with Smithberg as she and the staff were building The Daily Show.
“Let’s end our show with the most disturbing videotape we can possibly find and call it ‘the Moment of Zen,’” Smithberg remembers suggesting.
How disturbing? Smithberg’s favorite early “Moment” involved news footage about Lay’s Wow Chips, the fat-free potato chips made with Olestra. The additive came with a memorably unfortunate side effect, introducing the phrase “anal leakage” into the American snack-food conversation.
“We were laughing so hard,” Smithberg says, “because we were like, what crunch could be worth that?”
That night’s “Moment of Zen” featured footage of potato chips frying in vats of Olestra.
“That, to me, was the classic,” Smithberg says.
Nearly three decades later, the “Moment of Zen” is still there, still doing more or less what Smithberg intended: giving The Daily Show one last strange exhale before the credits.
Like Andy Rooney at the end of 60 Minutes, Smithberg says, some closing rituals are hard to replace.
“The people at The Daily Show were smart in keeping it there because it works,” she says. “It’s a really great way to let out a little air before the end of the show. ‘Before we leave you, we’re going to give you something where you can take a breath and be uncomfortable.’”
Neither Lillian nor Smithberg ever received a note from Charles Kuralt. Nor, Smithberg adds, do either of them see any Daily Show residuals for inspiring the concept.
“But we created something, Lillian and I, that has really endured,” Smithberg says. “I can imagine my gravestone: ‘Here lies Madeleine Smithberg. Her cat invented the Moment of Zen.’”
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