Decision 2020
He is going to fuck this up so hard. Twenty-one years of hosting The Daily Show did not count as experience for running the country, no matter how many political books he’d read and how many sitting heads of state he’d interviewed while doing it. One even-less-than-half-assed campaign didn’t make him any more acquainted with all the little nuances of American politics. All the security briefings squeezed in between November and January couldn’t make him ready for the reality of the situation. Good God, if he didn’t get impeached he was going to have to try and keep the country together for four years.
There was no way. There was just no way!
~*~
From the point of view of running The Daily Show, there was the email that had gone out the previous night about the shooting and talk about new security procedures. They had to call in people to watch the camera feed and make sure there weren’t suspicious lurkers around the alleys.
“Leave the studio in groups, and make sure you have security with you,” Jon advised. “Also, as tech-friendly as I might not be these days, I do know that it’s not impossible to work on segment ideas from home and then send them to me. It’s not as much fun as working on them here, but it can be done. As long as someone’s taking pot shots, we’re going to go for safe.”
Jon, himself, was strongly urged to invest in a bullet-proof vest. And by strongly urged, he meant ‘Stephen had phoned a body armor company and ordered one to be sent to him right away, so it was waiting for him at the office when he got back to lunch’. He wore it when they shot that night’s show, showing off the Kelvar during the intro, and put it over his shirt when they covered the shooting itself in a segment called ‘You Missed’.
Also that night, Keith Olbermann named the shooter his “Worst Person in the World”. Between the two, it was enough to apparently spark some bragging and vows of reprisals, which lead to certain phone calls, which lead to the arrest of a man by the name of Jimmy Hardison. They got nothing but motive out of him; every time he opened his mouth, no matter what question he was asked, a vitriolic spew of barely coherent sentences about how Jon was representative of all that was wrong with this country came out.
“So when he gets out of jail, Fox News will have a new analyst. I can hardly wait!” Jon joked.
And that was the end of it. Mostly.
Somehow or another in all the kerfuffle, he kind of forgot that he was supposed to be distancing himself from the Jester Party. Oh, Fred made the news with no small amount of regularity, but… it was all about Fred, not about the Jester Party. Somehow or another he was able to disassociate the two. Fred Karger ran for Governor because he was a crazy, crazy man who’d broken NOM with audits. Jon Stewart headed the Jester Party because it was funny and not to be taken seriously. And just like that they were two completely different concepts, mixed together only when they made a good joke.
The 2018 Midterm Midtacular came around, and for the most part went the way they expected it to. Stephen got a moment of in-character squee when Cindy Lou McCain won the rights to keep her Senate seat in the special election in Arizona- four another four years, at least. He got to give props to Anthony for winning his seat for the tenth time in a row. He winced when someone’s graphic representation was knocked down in a suitably graphic manner, joked about the differences between the different network’s projections and reality, and whenever one of his correspondents ran in with news he played off of them and Stephen to the audience’s delight.
Then Olivia burst in wearing her Jenny Quantum costume, as a nod to that fact that they’ve been scheduling her segments around filming the miniseries and until late last night they hadn’t been sure she could even make it to the Midtacular.
“Guys! Did you hear?” she said.
Stephen shrieked and dove beneath the desk.
“Aren’t you on the West Coast?” Jon demanded.
“Yeah, I’ll warp back in a second,” she replied, waving off the laws of physics. “But have you heard the news?”
“Hear what?” Stephen, from where he was cowering from ‘proof that the gay agenda has ruined American comics for good’. Naturally, trying to tell the character that Warren Ellis was British had no effect whatsoever.
“Fred Karger took California!” she informed them.
“Freddy Krueger took California!” Stephen shot out from under the desk. “No! This is a nightmare! Literally!” He turned to Jon and grabbed him by the lapels. “I can never sleep again, Jon. Freddy Krueger will get me.”
“Fred Karger, Stephen. He was on my show twice and is definitely not a dream demon,” Jon assured him. Stephen let him go, but stole Jon’s coffee with a suspicious glare.
“We’ll see what the autopsies say.” He scowled, and downed the mug in one go.
“What autopsies?” Jon demanded.
“Why don’t you ask Ms. Gay Agenda over there, she looks like she has uncomfortable news,” Stephen shot back.
Jon turned to Olivia, who did indeed look uncomfortable. “What is it?”
“Fred Karger is crediting you as the instrument of his success,” Olivia told him. “No fucking lie.”
“Uh…” That wasn’t even remotely scripted. “Fred who?”
“Freddy Krueger,” Stephen hissed. “And you’re his metal hand of death.”
Jon gave him a withering look for the camera, and turned back to Olivia. “And while we’re at it, what, where, when, and, uh, why?”
“It was Governor-elect Fred Karger, in Los Angeles, with some note cards and a slight case of hero worship,” Olivia replied.
“Are you sure it wasn’t Professor Plum, in the Library, with the candle stick?” Jon asked.
“Or Clay Pedersen in San Diego with the real results?” Stephen chimed in hopefully.
“Nope,” Olivia replied to them both. “He’s just that into Jon.”
Stephen glowered jealously.
“Don’t worry, Stephen, you’re still my favorite conservative,” Jon soothed, patting him on the back. Okay. They needed to move things along, because if California was being called then Fahim would burst in any moment with Washington’s results.
“So, what’s the deal with California’s Congressmen?”
“Well, none of them are sporting peggycorns as of yet,” Olivia replied. “Though it’s California, it’s only a matter of time before one of them starts pegging.”
Jon preemptively clapped his hand over Stephen’s mouth. “The results?”
“It’s California,” Olivia said with a roll of her eyes. “The Democrats still reign supreme, except for those rural areas that think they’re in Texas. Senator Becerra’s still in” She paused to give the graphic time to knock his Republic counterpart down. “Representative Dalton’s out, but we all expected that.”
“JON!” Fahim burst in as Dalton disappeared in a puff of logic. He was dressed head to toe in bright pink rain gear as the cameras swung in his direction. “Did you hear the news?”
“Yeah,” Jon replied, as Olivia bowed out. “I’m attached to the end of Robert Englund’s arm.”
“Really?” Fahim asked, surprised. He hesitated for a bit, before pushing forwards. “Well, I’m very happy for you. But have you heard about Washington?”
“What’s going on in Washington?” Jon asked.
“It’s dry!” Fahim cried.
~*~
The Midtacular closed with the Democrats ending up with a slim majority in the Senate. Jon would very much like to believe that would make things easier, but was more or less gearing up for more of the same old shit.
He wasn’t disappointed.
Internal politics of the Republican Party being what there were, being put in the minority was taken as a sign that whatever scraps of moderation or bipartisanship they had left were worthless things. Congress fell into gridlock over and over again, until the Democrats, predictably, began to cave here and there. President Jindal was facing uproar from within his party- there were calls for running another Republican candidate come 2020, and Jon watched with a weary sense of déjà vu as Jindal began to transform himself, like late McCain before him, from maverick to mad hatter.
Not that McCain hadn’t been able to shake himself free of that transformation, eventually. But it had taken him seven years between picking Palin as his running mate and calling her an embarrassment to both the nation and the Republican Party. Jon wasn’t sure he could last another seven years. Besides, the general consensus was that he’d done it because he knew he was on his way out, and there was nothing for him to lose. So, he would really have more than seven years to go, unless Jindal was actually more like Romney than McCain and was going to come down with a bad case of terminal illness.
Which he didn’t want to happen anyway, so…
“It’s like the old saying: the squeaky wheel gets the grease, whether it’s collected from the bodies of drowned polar bears or from population control on caribou in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge,” Jon told his audience. “This has nothing to do with the needs of the wheel; it’s just that persistent squeaking is really fucking annoying.”
He managed to distract himself with the organizing of things for his emerald anniversary on the show until 2019. Then , things really began to kick off as far as the Presidential elections were concerned. Christine O’Donnell put in her bid in opposition to Jindal, and as distant as the possibility was that the Republicans would pick her, the media gave her a lot of attention; the Democrats were a clusterfuck, as usual, Chris Croons, Claire McCaskill, and Bob Menendez jockeying for position over other, lesser candidates.
Tracy blocked the news channels at home. What with the internet existing and all, it didn’t really help.
It’s fucking ridiculous.
For the Republicans, he’d like to do a segment called ‘Bobby in Wonderland’, about a curious young man confused by the strange dream-logical of the mad tea party and leaves permanently scarred for life, but he would have to draw on the books, and that would mean that half the references would go over the heads of their demographic, who have seen the Burton sequel, and maybe the Disney cartoon version. For the Democrats, he actually did skewer them for their strange and unfortunate commercial regarding Jindal’s trade policy…WITH CHINA.
The all-caps were very much necessary, to make sure that the words themselves were pronounced like George Takei pronounced “total douchebag”. That was seriously how the commercial went:
‘Jindal has made his stance on the economy clear. He is committed to creating jobs …IN CHINA. He is committed to growing industries… IN CHINA. He has a strong partnership with the working people… OF CHINA. He is clearly the man… FOR CHINA.’ Followed by a long stream of gonging.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new game to play!” Jon announced, before pulling a fortune cookie out of his desk. “Once you could only do this sort of thing in your pants, or in bed, but now you can,” he cracked open the cookie and pulled the fortune out, “Plan for many pleasures ahead… IN CHINA!” There was a smattering of laughter, which had more to do with how much enthusiasm he was pouring into the two words than what the words actually were. “Just make sure that you haven’t had too much to drink first, or else you’ll end up shouting …VAGINA!” More laughter this time, as he kicked his enthusiasm up another notch, “And that’s the sort of crass behavior you can only get away with on late night television.”
There was the sound of a gong from behind them, and Tim, in character as P.K. Winsome, appeared on screen. They ran through the lines they needed to get through before he began to pitch several items that were made in China, ranging from ‘recently recalled’ to ‘why would you even want that in the first place’.
This is going to be a long fucking election cycle. And then they’ll do it all over again for midterms, and the next election, and the next, and the next…
He’d been doing this job too long, Jon realized. Somewhere along the line, he’d stopped expecting things to get better, and contrarily started thinking that maybe he could help them get better. No good could come of this. None.
~*~
That was how he ended up lurking in the dark corners of the Jester Party website. In addition to Fred, they had a few mayors, country legislatures, and a handful of county executives, city managers, and the likes. There were talks of rallies, a forum dedicated to getting the Republicans and Democrats to work together, using the new media effectively without pissing of the old guard, and other serious business. One of the most active threads was called ‘Stewart ’20?’
Apparently, he was the only one who they could take running for President seriously. A few people joking put themselves up- and one person was either being serious or had his tongue surgically attached to his cheek- but the responses were generally mocking. The general theme was that, as much as they might want him to, he would never do it. It would compromise his journalistic integrity.
Except, as many awards as his show might get in the ‘serious news’ category, Jon wasn’t a real journalist.
“Stephen!”
“Hey, Jon, what’s up?”
“Nothing much really, I was just thinking… you know the running gag we’ve had for a while about you running for President again on the Jester ticket?”
“Yeah. Do you want to start working it into tosses again?”
“Yeah,” Jon replied. “And I think maybe you should run for President again.”
“Jon,” Stephen protested. “The last time I ran my publicist nearly killed me. ‘What is this? Is this performance art? Why would you do this?’ And I was only running in South Carolina then, not as the frontline candidate for a third party that got a governor in.”
“Okay!” Jon cut him off. He waited a beat, before adding. “But you have to admit, it was fun.”
“It was very fun,” Stephen agreed. “You should try it some time.”
Jon laughed. Stephen was silent for so long that Jon had to check to make sure his phone hadn’t crapped out. “Seriously?” he asked.
“Why not? You’re the head of the party.”
“It was your idea. And you’re the one who built an elevator into space.”
“And you’re the one who got the Electoral College abolished. And who Rallied to Restore Sanity. And who grilled Jim Cramer. And who got Crossfire cancelled. I’d keep going, but there’s a fine line between stroking your ego and fellating it.”
Jon laughed. “It’s nice to know that my ego is less appealing than a banana.”
“Is your ego an excellent source of potassium?” Stephen demanded. He answered his own question over Jon’s giggling. “I thought not.”
“You think I should run?” Jon asked.
“Half the country thinks you should run. What kind of question is that?” Stephen replied.
“Do you think I should run? Not seriously, I mean, but for the comedy potential of playing Jindal off whoever the Democrats pick.”
“Not playing Christine O’Donnell against-”
“If O’Donnell becomes the Republican candidate, I’m going to get blind stinking drunk and then wake up on the Daily Show roof wearing only my left sock, not run for President.”
“If O’Donnell becomes the Republican candidate I’ll join you,” Stephen promised.
“And then we’ll have a clothing scavenger hunt.”
“And then we can have fun looking at mostly-naked pictures of ourselves on the internet.”
“I think I wrote a book like that once.”
“I think you should run.”
“Really? Because this does seem like more of your-”
“Yes, really. Now stop fishing for compliments and send Viacom a message about it. I’ll talk to you over the break.”
“You’re running with me.”
“I am?”
“Absolutely you are. They’re already printing up the Stewart/Colbert merchandizing, we might as well put it to good use.” He waited a beat before adding. “Besides, this is crazy, and I’ll need you, Sir Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, DFA, to help me pull it off.”
“Do you want to just fire off the message to Viacom and talk about it over dinner?” Stephen offered.
“Is that a yes?”
“That’s a ‘buy me dinner first’. You can’t expect me to just put out like that without a little something first.”
“Fair enough. Chinese?”
“Please. If you want me to be your running mate, there better be Italian involved. At least.”
“Okay. I’ll just run to Domino’s-”
“Jon Stewart!” Stephen sounded scandalized.
“What, it’s pizza.” He managed to choke out between giggles.
“Wash your mouth out with soap. Better yet, stay there, I’ll take you out, and you can pay. Dominos. Dominos! If I tried to pull that on you, Jersey boy-”
Stephen broke, and joined him in laughing at themselves.
“I’ll see you in a minute, Stephen.”
“See you, Jon.”
There was no way. There was just no way!
~*~
From the point of view of running The Daily Show, there was the email that had gone out the previous night about the shooting and talk about new security procedures. They had to call in people to watch the camera feed and make sure there weren’t suspicious lurkers around the alleys.
“Leave the studio in groups, and make sure you have security with you,” Jon advised. “Also, as tech-friendly as I might not be these days, I do know that it’s not impossible to work on segment ideas from home and then send them to me. It’s not as much fun as working on them here, but it can be done. As long as someone’s taking pot shots, we’re going to go for safe.”
Jon, himself, was strongly urged to invest in a bullet-proof vest. And by strongly urged, he meant ‘Stephen had phoned a body armor company and ordered one to be sent to him right away, so it was waiting for him at the office when he got back to lunch’. He wore it when they shot that night’s show, showing off the Kelvar during the intro, and put it over his shirt when they covered the shooting itself in a segment called ‘You Missed’.
Also that night, Keith Olbermann named the shooter his “Worst Person in the World”. Between the two, it was enough to apparently spark some bragging and vows of reprisals, which lead to certain phone calls, which lead to the arrest of a man by the name of Jimmy Hardison. They got nothing but motive out of him; every time he opened his mouth, no matter what question he was asked, a vitriolic spew of barely coherent sentences about how Jon was representative of all that was wrong with this country came out.
“So when he gets out of jail, Fox News will have a new analyst. I can hardly wait!” Jon joked.
And that was the end of it. Mostly.
Somehow or another in all the kerfuffle, he kind of forgot that he was supposed to be distancing himself from the Jester Party. Oh, Fred made the news with no small amount of regularity, but… it was all about Fred, not about the Jester Party. Somehow or another he was able to disassociate the two. Fred Karger ran for Governor because he was a crazy, crazy man who’d broken NOM with audits. Jon Stewart headed the Jester Party because it was funny and not to be taken seriously. And just like that they were two completely different concepts, mixed together only when they made a good joke.
The 2018 Midterm Midtacular came around, and for the most part went the way they expected it to. Stephen got a moment of in-character squee when Cindy Lou McCain won the rights to keep her Senate seat in the special election in Arizona- four another four years, at least. He got to give props to Anthony for winning his seat for the tenth time in a row. He winced when someone’s graphic representation was knocked down in a suitably graphic manner, joked about the differences between the different network’s projections and reality, and whenever one of his correspondents ran in with news he played off of them and Stephen to the audience’s delight.
Then Olivia burst in wearing her Jenny Quantum costume, as a nod to that fact that they’ve been scheduling her segments around filming the miniseries and until late last night they hadn’t been sure she could even make it to the Midtacular.
“Guys! Did you hear?” she said.
Stephen shrieked and dove beneath the desk.
“Aren’t you on the West Coast?” Jon demanded.
“Yeah, I’ll warp back in a second,” she replied, waving off the laws of physics. “But have you heard the news?”
“Hear what?” Stephen, from where he was cowering from ‘proof that the gay agenda has ruined American comics for good’. Naturally, trying to tell the character that Warren Ellis was British had no effect whatsoever.
“Fred Karger took California!” she informed them.
“Freddy Krueger took California!” Stephen shot out from under the desk. “No! This is a nightmare! Literally!” He turned to Jon and grabbed him by the lapels. “I can never sleep again, Jon. Freddy Krueger will get me.”
“Fred Karger, Stephen. He was on my show twice and is definitely not a dream demon,” Jon assured him. Stephen let him go, but stole Jon’s coffee with a suspicious glare.
“We’ll see what the autopsies say.” He scowled, and downed the mug in one go.
“What autopsies?” Jon demanded.
“Why don’t you ask Ms. Gay Agenda over there, she looks like she has uncomfortable news,” Stephen shot back.
Jon turned to Olivia, who did indeed look uncomfortable. “What is it?”
“Fred Karger is crediting you as the instrument of his success,” Olivia told him. “No fucking lie.”
“Uh…” That wasn’t even remotely scripted. “Fred who?”
“Freddy Krueger,” Stephen hissed. “And you’re his metal hand of death.”
Jon gave him a withering look for the camera, and turned back to Olivia. “And while we’re at it, what, where, when, and, uh, why?”
“It was Governor-elect Fred Karger, in Los Angeles, with some note cards and a slight case of hero worship,” Olivia replied.
“Are you sure it wasn’t Professor Plum, in the Library, with the candle stick?” Jon asked.
“Or Clay Pedersen in San Diego with the real results?” Stephen chimed in hopefully.
“Nope,” Olivia replied to them both. “He’s just that into Jon.”
Stephen glowered jealously.
“Don’t worry, Stephen, you’re still my favorite conservative,” Jon soothed, patting him on the back. Okay. They needed to move things along, because if California was being called then Fahim would burst in any moment with Washington’s results.
“So, what’s the deal with California’s Congressmen?”
“Well, none of them are sporting peggycorns as of yet,” Olivia replied. “Though it’s California, it’s only a matter of time before one of them starts pegging.”
Jon preemptively clapped his hand over Stephen’s mouth. “The results?”
“It’s California,” Olivia said with a roll of her eyes. “The Democrats still reign supreme, except for those rural areas that think they’re in Texas. Senator Becerra’s still in” She paused to give the graphic time to knock his Republic counterpart down. “Representative Dalton’s out, but we all expected that.”
“JON!” Fahim burst in as Dalton disappeared in a puff of logic. He was dressed head to toe in bright pink rain gear as the cameras swung in his direction. “Did you hear the news?”
“Yeah,” Jon replied, as Olivia bowed out. “I’m attached to the end of Robert Englund’s arm.”
“Really?” Fahim asked, surprised. He hesitated for a bit, before pushing forwards. “Well, I’m very happy for you. But have you heard about Washington?”
“What’s going on in Washington?” Jon asked.
“It’s dry!” Fahim cried.
~*~
The Midtacular closed with the Democrats ending up with a slim majority in the Senate. Jon would very much like to believe that would make things easier, but was more or less gearing up for more of the same old shit.
He wasn’t disappointed.
Internal politics of the Republican Party being what there were, being put in the minority was taken as a sign that whatever scraps of moderation or bipartisanship they had left were worthless things. Congress fell into gridlock over and over again, until the Democrats, predictably, began to cave here and there. President Jindal was facing uproar from within his party- there were calls for running another Republican candidate come 2020, and Jon watched with a weary sense of déjà vu as Jindal began to transform himself, like late McCain before him, from maverick to mad hatter.
Not that McCain hadn’t been able to shake himself free of that transformation, eventually. But it had taken him seven years between picking Palin as his running mate and calling her an embarrassment to both the nation and the Republican Party. Jon wasn’t sure he could last another seven years. Besides, the general consensus was that he’d done it because he knew he was on his way out, and there was nothing for him to lose. So, he would really have more than seven years to go, unless Jindal was actually more like Romney than McCain and was going to come down with a bad case of terminal illness.
Which he didn’t want to happen anyway, so…
“It’s like the old saying: the squeaky wheel gets the grease, whether it’s collected from the bodies of drowned polar bears or from population control on caribou in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge,” Jon told his audience. “This has nothing to do with the needs of the wheel; it’s just that persistent squeaking is really fucking annoying.”
He managed to distract himself with the organizing of things for his emerald anniversary on the show until 2019. Then , things really began to kick off as far as the Presidential elections were concerned. Christine O’Donnell put in her bid in opposition to Jindal, and as distant as the possibility was that the Republicans would pick her, the media gave her a lot of attention; the Democrats were a clusterfuck, as usual, Chris Croons, Claire McCaskill, and Bob Menendez jockeying for position over other, lesser candidates.
Tracy blocked the news channels at home. What with the internet existing and all, it didn’t really help.
It’s fucking ridiculous.
For the Republicans, he’d like to do a segment called ‘Bobby in Wonderland’, about a curious young man confused by the strange dream-logical of the mad tea party and leaves permanently scarred for life, but he would have to draw on the books, and that would mean that half the references would go over the heads of their demographic, who have seen the Burton sequel, and maybe the Disney cartoon version. For the Democrats, he actually did skewer them for their strange and unfortunate commercial regarding Jindal’s trade policy…WITH CHINA.
The all-caps were very much necessary, to make sure that the words themselves were pronounced like George Takei pronounced “total douchebag”. That was seriously how the commercial went:
‘Jindal has made his stance on the economy clear. He is committed to creating jobs …IN CHINA. He is committed to growing industries… IN CHINA. He has a strong partnership with the working people… OF CHINA. He is clearly the man… FOR CHINA.’ Followed by a long stream of gonging.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new game to play!” Jon announced, before pulling a fortune cookie out of his desk. “Once you could only do this sort of thing in your pants, or in bed, but now you can,” he cracked open the cookie and pulled the fortune out, “Plan for many pleasures ahead… IN CHINA!” There was a smattering of laughter, which had more to do with how much enthusiasm he was pouring into the two words than what the words actually were. “Just make sure that you haven’t had too much to drink first, or else you’ll end up shouting …VAGINA!” More laughter this time, as he kicked his enthusiasm up another notch, “And that’s the sort of crass behavior you can only get away with on late night television.”
There was the sound of a gong from behind them, and Tim, in character as P.K. Winsome, appeared on screen. They ran through the lines they needed to get through before he began to pitch several items that were made in China, ranging from ‘recently recalled’ to ‘why would you even want that in the first place’.
This is going to be a long fucking election cycle. And then they’ll do it all over again for midterms, and the next election, and the next, and the next…
He’d been doing this job too long, Jon realized. Somewhere along the line, he’d stopped expecting things to get better, and contrarily started thinking that maybe he could help them get better. No good could come of this. None.
~*~
That was how he ended up lurking in the dark corners of the Jester Party website. In addition to Fred, they had a few mayors, country legislatures, and a handful of county executives, city managers, and the likes. There were talks of rallies, a forum dedicated to getting the Republicans and Democrats to work together, using the new media effectively without pissing of the old guard, and other serious business. One of the most active threads was called ‘Stewart ’20?’
Apparently, he was the only one who they could take running for President seriously. A few people joking put themselves up- and one person was either being serious or had his tongue surgically attached to his cheek- but the responses were generally mocking. The general theme was that, as much as they might want him to, he would never do it. It would compromise his journalistic integrity.
Except, as many awards as his show might get in the ‘serious news’ category, Jon wasn’t a real journalist.
“Stephen!”
“Hey, Jon, what’s up?”
“Nothing much really, I was just thinking… you know the running gag we’ve had for a while about you running for President again on the Jester ticket?”
“Yeah. Do you want to start working it into tosses again?”
“Yeah,” Jon replied. “And I think maybe you should run for President again.”
“Jon,” Stephen protested. “The last time I ran my publicist nearly killed me. ‘What is this? Is this performance art? Why would you do this?’ And I was only running in South Carolina then, not as the frontline candidate for a third party that got a governor in.”
“Okay!” Jon cut him off. He waited a beat, before adding. “But you have to admit, it was fun.”
“It was very fun,” Stephen agreed. “You should try it some time.”
Jon laughed. Stephen was silent for so long that Jon had to check to make sure his phone hadn’t crapped out. “Seriously?” he asked.
“Why not? You’re the head of the party.”
“It was your idea. And you’re the one who built an elevator into space.”
“And you’re the one who got the Electoral College abolished. And who Rallied to Restore Sanity. And who grilled Jim Cramer. And who got Crossfire cancelled. I’d keep going, but there’s a fine line between stroking your ego and fellating it.”
Jon laughed. “It’s nice to know that my ego is less appealing than a banana.”
“Is your ego an excellent source of potassium?” Stephen demanded. He answered his own question over Jon’s giggling. “I thought not.”
“You think I should run?” Jon asked.
“Half the country thinks you should run. What kind of question is that?” Stephen replied.
“Do you think I should run? Not seriously, I mean, but for the comedy potential of playing Jindal off whoever the Democrats pick.”
“Not playing Christine O’Donnell against-”
“If O’Donnell becomes the Republican candidate, I’m going to get blind stinking drunk and then wake up on the Daily Show roof wearing only my left sock, not run for President.”
“If O’Donnell becomes the Republican candidate I’ll join you,” Stephen promised.
“And then we’ll have a clothing scavenger hunt.”
“And then we can have fun looking at mostly-naked pictures of ourselves on the internet.”
“I think I wrote a book like that once.”
“I think you should run.”
“Really? Because this does seem like more of your-”
“Yes, really. Now stop fishing for compliments and send Viacom a message about it. I’ll talk to you over the break.”
“You’re running with me.”
“I am?”
“Absolutely you are. They’re already printing up the Stewart/Colbert merchandizing, we might as well put it to good use.” He waited a beat before adding. “Besides, this is crazy, and I’ll need you, Sir Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, DFA, to help me pull it off.”
“Do you want to just fire off the message to Viacom and talk about it over dinner?” Stephen offered.
“Is that a yes?”
“That’s a ‘buy me dinner first’. You can’t expect me to just put out like that without a little something first.”
“Fair enough. Chinese?”
“Please. If you want me to be your running mate, there better be Italian involved. At least.”
“Okay. I’ll just run to Domino’s-”
“Jon Stewart!” Stephen sounded scandalized.
“What, it’s pizza.” He managed to choke out between giggles.
“Wash your mouth out with soap. Better yet, stay there, I’ll take you out, and you can pay. Dominos. Dominos! If I tried to pull that on you, Jersey boy-”
Stephen broke, and joined him in laughing at themselves.
“I’ll see you in a minute, Stephen.”
“See you, Jon.”