The man recently celebrated by two of the current stars of The Daily Show for delivering one of the show’s all-time classic bits of deadpan comic “reporting”—a segment for the ages called “Disney Man”—is now reporting on real news developments in Atlanta for the CBS station there.
And here’s the thing: Brian Unger doesn’t see the work as all that different. “I think I saw from the very beginning this incremental collision between comedy and news.”
Unger was one of the pioneers, an original correspondent for The Daily Show when it premiered 30 years ago. He was the author of not only that matchless report on a man so obsessed with visiting Disney parks that he quickly wore out the patience of five wives, but also the inaugural correspondent report, a profile of the cat-costume-wearing owner of the late, great “Princess Kitty.”
That one, according to Madeleine Smithberg, the co-creator of The Daily Show, set the mold for the show’s field pieces and established on night one exactly what the show was—and would be for the next three decades.
Brian Unger’s career may be one of a kind. He went from working as a hard-news producer for CBS, covering stories like the O.J. Simpson trial, to a three-year stint at TDS, followed by comedy/news-ish gigs everywhere from NPR and CNBC to playing a fan-favorite on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. (OK, the last one was all comedy.) And now he’s back to straight-shooting professional journalism.
He made the journey never quite sure which foot would land in which camp, or when. But it’s been quite a ride.
Unger considered his 1990s work at CBS News his “dream job,” one he had every reason to believe would define his career. But the Simpson trial soured him on it and burned him out, he said. “It stripped me of my innocence about newsgathering. When I saw the absurdity of how we were chasing every witness.”
How absurd was it? “My cameraman and I got into a fistfight with a BBC crew trying to get a witness.”
Still, when he was approached by Smithberg, who had once hired him as an intern for her production job at David Letterman’s Late Night, and Lizz Winstead, whom he’d met at a Manhattan bar and was “sort of dating,” about a new daily faux-news show they were creating, Unger knew he was facing a career-shaping decision.
“I sat on a picnic table in a park in LA for a week,” Unger said. “I knew if I did this and went to work for Comedy Central I would never work in news again.”
Yes, he concedes now, he was wrong. “It just took 30 years.”
But the move turned out to be energizing and exhilarating. “When I started at TDS, the first year was a catharsis for me in really working out a lot of my anger about media, how it didn’t turn out the way I thought it would be.”
Still, that news experience was crucial to his instantly assured comic take as a faux “correspondent.”
“I had zero ambiguity on how I wanted to do it from the very first piece. All of the things I learned as a news person helped in executing those stories. I was really more invested in satirizing the conventions of electronic journalism.”
On “Princess Kitty,” he wanted to execute a 60 Minutes-type piece. The cat, killed by a BB gun, was being memorialized by her owner, who visited school kids and had created an annual “Princess Kitty Day.”
“I was going to treat that as the most important day on the calendar. I just dove head-first into that realm. I will never forget during the interview looking down at my sound man and he was sweating and dying from trying not to laugh. He had to get up and leave the room. He just left the audio mixer running on its own.”
In another memorable piece, Unger profiled a man who had invested his life savings in creating a “bear suit” so he could hibernate with grizzlies. He went broke, and the bank repossessed the suit.
“I thought why not do the interview with the guy in the bank with the suit in the background?”
While doing the interview, Unger had an idea. He asked the man whether he got “conjugal visits” with the suit. The answer: Yes, I do.
“Well at least you have that,” Unger said.
With that priceless moment on tape, Unger was wrapping up when the bear-man’s pal burst in and asked whether he realized Unger had just asked if he was “f*cking the suit.”
“And the guy pulls out a butcher knife from his belt,” Unger said. “The only thing I could think of saying was, ‘Is that what conjugal means? I had no idea.’”
The conjugal line stayed in.
“Disney Man” called for even more journalistic discipline, Unger said. “I remember saying to the producer: I’m going to ask him specifically about every single wife and I’m going to do it in the most serious journalistic way I remember every correspondent at CBS News doing it.”
The result still kills 30 years later. “The serotonin rush in those moments was like you just found yourself in the greatest comedy quicksand of all time. You just stayed there and you were going to make the most of it. In comedy, the desire is always to kind of up the joke. Going on TDS as a newsperson I had the opposite modus operandi, which was: lay back and let them do the work. Just ask the question and see where it goes.”
The memorable pieces also included “Touched by an Angel,” which covered a lovely lady breaking the law by cohabitating with an animal from the wild, which in her case was a domesticated squirrel named (by her) Angel Danielle Nicole Clifton. She stressed that separating the two would be like taking a child from her mother and managed to twice (because she emoted too much on take one) imitate Angel’s anguished squeaks at the prospect of a future without her mother—and the chance to be dressed as a Santa squirrel in holiday season.
Unger’s genuine news skills came out in pieces like one where he pushed some sidewalk Santas to acknowledge some shady details of their work, like perhaps an unsanitary lap.
If the transition from news to comedy was all but seamless, the path back the other way has been decidedly less so, Unger said, even though he had seen the two genres overlap in many ways. Network news anchors became regular guests on late-night shows, usually delivering comic anecdotes.
He pointed to NBC anchor Brian Williams, who hosted Saturday Night Live and at one point actively sought to give up the anchor job for a shot hosting The Tonight Show.
But Unger’s post-TDS efforts to edge back into the news arena ran into his reputation for funny stuff.
“Growing up I did not see that much distinction between Johnny Carson and Walter Cronkite. I watched them both and had equal appreciation for them.”
But when he pitched himself to then-CBS News president Andrew Heyward, he noticed a “suspicious eye” looking back at him.
“I could see him thinking, can I hire a Daily Show correspondent to work for us? He didn’t say it out loud. And I was like: Johnny Carson informed America just as much as Walter Cronkite did, just differently. I can do both things. I never heard from Andrew again.”
Which brings up an obvious question: With a résumé of unforgettable comic reports at The Daily Show, why even try to play it straight again?
“I don’t think I’ve ever said this out loud before,” Unger said. “When Craig Kilborn left as anchor, the management sent me a message asking if I was ready to take the chair. I left that exchange thinking, well, I’m the guy, I’m the in-house candidate.”
It made total sense, Unger thought. He had filled in as a substitute anchor. He was the logical successor.
A short time later, people were running through the halls at the studio shouting the news that Jon Stewart had been hired.
“I was overly ambitious and wanted the job badly,” Unger said. “And I just typed up a resignation letter. I quit. I was so wounded. I helped birth this thing and I helped nurture it, and I was up all night giving it the bottle that had the nutrients. I just felt like this was a done deal.”
It wasn’t. Stewart arrived, and the show rose to unexpected heights.
“It’s such a hard lesson to learn,” Unger said. “Because all you do is imagine if you’d stayed. I would have been shoulder to shoulder with Stephen Colbert. Steve Carell was just coming in. That was my first big lesson in media/entertainment, which is: Don’t quit. No matter what happens, don’t quit, stay in there.”
Other opportunities did arrive, and Unger is proud of the work that followed. He’s also proud of the show—the franchise—he helped launch.
“When there was that research study that said more young people get news from TDS than any other source, I thought to myself: Look at our baby now. We started out like a Community College student and we became a Rhodes scholar under Jon. I’m quietly proud of that achievement.”
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