Jon Stewart has two things to report about that recent on-air mug smashing: It was real, but it wasn’t as bad as it looked.
To kick off this week’s The Weekly Show podcast, the host riffed on the experience of drawing blood on The Daily Show—for the second time in the show’s history—while also chiding himself for the “humiliating” moment.
“I come to you today broken but not bowed,” he began, “for I had an owwie on my finger.”
For one thing, Stewart confirmed that the coffee mug he shattered Monday night was the real deal. “For those who thought I should have had a breakaway mug: Yeah! Now you tell me!,” he said. “Ceramic is one of my least favorite materials to have embedded in my skin.”
But Stewart’s pain wasn’t just physical. “It really, for a comedian, is humiliating,” he told his listeners. “Buster Keaton would stand in front of a house with a little window cut out. Harold Lloyd would hang off of a clock with no net. I nearly died being vociferous with a coffee mug. It does not speak well of the legends of my business.”
‘Nearly died’ is a bit of an exaggeration. In fact, Stewart admitted the bloodbath viewers saw was somewhat misleading.
“Can I tell you what’s not smart to do when you have a cut? Hold it below your heart for twenty minutes,” he cautioned. “It just makes your whole arm a straw, and it all just flows out. It makes it look way worse.”
“When I picked it back up to look at it,” he recalled, “even, I for a second, was like, ‘What the f—? Was I shot?”
Stewart even presented his wound to the camera on The Weekly Show, but it was blurred out. At the very least, we can confirm the digit is still there for future finger-wagging at Elon Musk’s DOGE.
Watch Stewart’s full finger update below:
