« I like narcotics | Main | Heaven in a jar »

March 9, 2006

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart LIVE

So, yesterday, we went up to NYC and saw a live taping of the Daily Show. It was pretty cool. I was surpised by a few things:

1) The studio is much smaller-looking in person. The way they use the cameras, it looks much bigger on TV than it really is. Rob Courdry did a segment and he was literally standing 4 feet from Jon while they were doing their "remote" interview.

2) They don't shoot extra material and then cut the show together. It's pretty much shot as a live-like show. On the monitors during the taping, you could see them change the camera angles during the interview as they were shooting it. Those little graphics that show up over Jon's shoulder as he's reading the stories are literally on the screen behind him, over his shoulder. It's not a special effect superimposed graphic. I was surpised, since it looks so crisp on TV, but the screens seemed more fuzzy to me, maybe because of where we were sitting in relation to the lights. I guess that's the magic of TV. During the commercial breaks, they play music in the studio, Jon makes notes or looks over his paper, and talks to one of the crew - probably a producer or something like that.

I'm going to wait a little while before I plan another trip to do this. When you consider that it's a 3 hour train ride each way, and then you have to line up early to get seats, since tickets aren't a guarantee, it's a lot of effort for only short entertainment. But it was fun. If you ever make the trip yourself, I recommend getting there really early - they hand out the audience passes at 5, and recommend you get there an hour early at least. We arrived at 3:30 and were 170 and 171 out of 216 possible seats in the audience.

I did enjoy our audience warm-up guy. If you happen to be in NY next week, Paul Mecurio is doing a show at Caroline's. He's a staff writer at the Daily Show and he was the one to joke around with us and psyche up everyone to cheer before Jon came out. If I could easily get back up to NY for a 7:30 show on a Thursday, I would totally go to his show at Caroline's.

The rest of our trip was fun, too. We got a late start, since my medicine makes me really sleepy, so I slept late. We ended up catching a noon train from Philly, so we got to NY and decided to have lunch, then head directly over to the studio. I SMSed Google Local to find the closest pizza place to the studio - it was a total hole-in-the-wall kind of place, but the pizza was really, really good. After the show, we caught up with a few KA people- Seth Goren, Chris Spina, and Brad Moore- for dinner at a vegetarian restaurant. It was nice to see them and we had a good time. They were surpised to see us, since we arranged it with Seth, and he told the others that we were mystery guests. After dinner, we said really long goodbyes, then caught the train back to Philly. We had a long layover in Trenton, but Terry and I had fun talking.

It's been a long time since I've gone to NYC. This was the first time I ever had to figure out my own subway trips - it felt very empowering. In the past, I've left that to other people, or just waked longish distances to avoid the potential for ending up in the complete wrong direction. But it worked out okay. I was pleased. Hopefully, I'll get to do it again soon. We realized during the day that there were a lot of people in NY that we didn't get to run into for a while, so we'd like to try again, maybe after the semester ends and life feels a little less crazy.

Posted by Janice Lee at March 9, 2006 4:41 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.numtopia.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/216

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference The Daily Show with Jon Stewart LIVE:

» Daily Show - Random Thought from Aarrgghh!!
Janice said pretty much all there was to say about our experience at the Daily Show taping, so I'll just say this: I respect and admire Jon Stewart, but I have non-sexual man-crush on Stephen Colbert.... [Read More]

Tracked on March 10, 2006 12:40 AM

Comments

Hi - My wife got us tickets as a birthday present on April 17. Can you post some information (or reply back) about when the taping was over? (My company might want me to fly out that night on a business trip.) Thanks for the write-up - now we're even more excited to go!

Posted by: Josh at March 21, 2006 2:25 PM

I would say it was over a little after 7pm, maybe 7:30 at the latest, but I'm pretty sure I looked at my watch on the way to the subway after taking some pictures outside and it was around 7:10. I normally wouldn't remember something like that, but I recall wanting to take more pain medication for my hip, because of the walking. I also remember thinking that it was physically possible (though highly improbable) to see The Daily Show and the Colbert Report on the same day, if you had someone wait in like at the Colbert studio for you and the Daily show got out just early enough for the 7pm-ish seating. Have a great time!

Posted by: Janice Lee at March 21, 2006 2:52 PM

Post a comment





Remember Me?

(you may use HTML tags for style)