In Origin Story, LateNighter digs into the people, ideas, and happy accidents behind some of late night’s most memorable bits.
When Stephen Colbert left The Daily Show in 2005 to launch The Colbert Report, he already had a cult following as a clueless, over-eager correspondent and the strongest lead-in Comedy Central could offer: Jon Stewart.
What he did not have was any guarantee viewers would stick around.
With Stewart at the helm, The Daily Show had become Comedy Central’s flagship program. Two presidential election cycles had helped turn it into appointment viewing, and the show was coming off three consecutive Emmy wins for Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Series.
But The Colbert Report would have to hold its audience against late-night’s network heavyweights—Jay Leno, David Letterman, and Nightline. Could Comedy Central keep viewers from flipping the channel once Stewart had delivered the night’s Moment of Zen?
Stewart “wanted to help Stephen get some traction with his show,” remembers David Javerbaum, head writer of The Daily Show when Colbert ventured out on his own. “Of course, he wound up getting more than enough traction, but at the beginning, Jon wanted to keep the viewers tuned in.”
The solution was “the toss,” a short segment at the end of The Daily Show in which Stewart would engage Colbert in cross-show banter for a seamless transition between the two half-hours. The goal, according to Javerbaum: “Get people a peek at Stephen being funny, right before our show ended.”
The Daily Show-to-Colbert Report toss also parodied the then-ubiquitous handoffs between cable-news hosts—the very ecosystem both shows were built to mock.
The toss was Javerbaum’s favorite segment to write each day, in part because Stewart and Colbert rarely bothered to read the script before recording in front of live audiences. The two stars never rehearsed the exchange. As on a live cable news show, they just shouted whatever was on the prompter, lending the segment a loose, relaxed absurdity.
The tosses “were considered such an incidental thing,” Javerbaum says of the lack of second-guessing. “So I got to express a little bit of my unabashed sense of humor.”
As Colbert’s Late Show came to an end in May, Stewart paid tribute to his old friend by replaying Javerbaum’s personal favorite toss: a playful exchange built around a children’s alphabet game.
Colbert: A little alphabet game?
Stewart: But you promised we were through with this.
Colbert: Continue.
Stewart: Don’t drag me into this, Stephen.
Colbert: Excellent.
And so on through the alphabet, until they reached the end of a toss that made “zero sense.” It was a bit of inspired goofiness that provided a break from the show’s heavier segments.
“That’s not something Jon would ever write,” Javerbaum says, “or Stephen would ever write.”
But Javerbaum would. In fact, he scripted every one of them, though the tosses were often the last thing put on paper.
“I didn’t give them much thought,” he says. “I just kind of went on instinct.”
Unlike the rest of The Daily Show, which relied on topical humor, the toss could reference just about anything, from Muppet Show homages to half-hearted Earth Day celebrations.
While Stewart was usually the straight man during the bits, Javerbaum says it was “really satisfying” when he could turn the tables and make The Daily Show host the silly one.
Unfortunately, when Comedy Central gutted its online archives, most of those tosses became impossible for today’s viewers to find, though Javerbaum notes that they would actually hold up better than many of the older shows’ topical jokes.
It was an in-between piece of television by design. That may be why Javerbaum remembers it so fondly: for a few seconds each night, the connective tissue became the joke.
“It’s a part of the show that probably few people talk about,” says Javerbaum. “But it was just super fun because there was no pressure on it at all.”
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