Michael Kosta On Having Jon Stewart As His Monday ‘Opener’ | The Daily Show

let's quickly discuss the return of John Stewart yes it's your first experience working with him and mine as well okay ask you that yeah what's it been like and what are your impressions very positive man I have such a weird life you know I watched him forever and now I'm in doing a piece with him when I first met Jay Leno I actually said to him hey you look how you look because I hadn't really met a lot of celebrities yet and I was like I can't believe he looks just like how he looks I couldn't

really so John Stewart is just he seems like how he is he's he's positive he's funny he's very very smart I've enjoyed his two shows on here very much very well researched very silly I think people forget how he can also just be really silly so he'll hit you over the head with a very intelligent poignant societally um important sentence and then he'll do a Polish joke which is what happened this week which made me laugh by the way Poland started World War II why would a country whose Navy has s

ubmarines with screen doors want to instigate a war quick history lesson years ago for reasons nobody is really sure of a stereotype emerged that Polish people were inept in various ways including obviously submarine manufacturing and even something as simple as the changing of a light bulb I don't know actually how many Polish people you think it takes to change a light bulb but it's certainly less than the conventional wisdom at that time would tell you now we know that Polish people are as sm

art as anyone and certainly did not deserve to be invaded by the Germans who of course accomplished that by marching in backwards so the polls thought they were leaving so it's been great I look forward to getting to work with him and getting to know him better what about you have you worked with yeah it's been great so I haven't worked directly with him on any pieces but that first meeting that he had with the directors and writers you know where he sort of gave us this generals pep talk was li

ke so inspiring I mean I think I I started at the show about nine months after Trevor started hosting so for me it's always been kind of Trevor's show although I did grow up watching it with John Stewart I mean when I was in college it's like every night you're watching John Stewart host The Daily Show so the thing that I thought was so funny is he's so Earnest and positive even in these private meetings and then he'll always kind of drop one little thing that is like uh a joke so it's not so Ea

rnest and so sweet he always wants to put that little Edge on it which is was fun to watch well it's what he and now the Daily Show is you know we will of course talk about really important topics but there's going to be laughs and comedy the way I like to approach it or at least in my idealistic mind of Comedy is that it's meant to challenge and it's meant to speak truth to power which is a very hacky phrase at this point but that is essentially what it's doing and we've been on the air I mean

I've been here for almost eight years we've never been able to do a Polish joke until John was here he finally was brave enough to call out you know yeah the people who are really running the world yeah that was funny and he also did preface it by saying I we nobody really knows why this genre of joke became yeah so anyway back to that cat skills comedy you know just knowing the whole breath of Comedy I wanted to ask too like how was that chat last week you did uh with him about Tucker Carlson a

nd the dictatorships that was so funny an unbelievably embarrassing display of sycophancy from Tucker Carlson yeah well I'm not sure what that means John so I'm GNA assume you loved it as much as I did it made me think that these dictatorships have gotten a bad rap which is why I've traveled here to North Korea and as you can see it's amazing it was nice to get to be just me and him you know I wanted some dad time I want some time with Dad uh so that was really fun and it wasn't perfect like it

uh we we did it for the show and some of the jokes that we all thought were really funny but were kind of righty um too mean jokes didn't didn't do so well on the actual performance so he got cut peace out that's the beauty so the piece ended up being funnier shorter and it worked really well and it's another Testament to you know one of the words John used a lot in that meeting that I love and I always forget about I needed to hear was calibration we're going to calibrate over and over and over

again and that is what the Daily Show does we try we don't get it right we calibrate we get a couple things right we calibrate and so that was a fun chat for me to do with him because I saw there was calibration all the way through from the first draft of the script to the rehearsal to the actual performance we had to calibrate a little bit thank you editors and it ended up being great yeah it was so funny I'm curious to know so you guest hosted the show a few months ago when we were back from

the writer strike it was so great and now you're getting to host the Tuesday to Thursday after John yep John's my opener yeah you could do worse you could do worse um do you feel like you're taking a different approach to hosting the show coming up or has has JN given you any advice or do you feel like maybe a different experience since you're going to be following following John I'm excited to follow John I think it's challenging because uh he is effortlessly I mean it's not effortlessly but it

feels effortlessly good at it and when I'm out there it feels like if I'm good at it it's through effort you know so if he gets to ride the big wave I get to serve right behind him which is pretty cool too so I just don't see any negatives about it uh I get to watch him learn from him I then get my own time at the desk I'm looking forward to not be to being a little more comfortable there because the first time I don't think anybody really realizes it just takes a lot of time and comfort and wh

en I'm watching John on Mondays I'm always like man he just is like so natural up there and I'm like well wait a sec it's been thousands and thousands of hours there you know so can I make a tennis reference I was expecting it you're expecting it nobody ever wins their first Grand Slam final I know what you're thinking Sarah but what about yanx siner at this year's Australian Open okay he's the one exception the reason you don't ever win in your grand slam final is it's it's nerve-wracking you'r

e figuring out that the balls look different there's there trophies standing next to the court it's packed it's a different vibe it's a different feeling so to be at the desk is different it's a VI everyone's staring at you you're not a supplemental player anymore so I'm looking forward to hopefully feeling a little more comfortable there