Thursday, 14 July 2005 | Rabbits

A friend of Todd's is a writer for The Daily Show, and last week he offered to give us VIP passes to a taping. (As far as I could tell, the difference between the VIPs and non-VIPs was that the VIPs wait in a yellow concrete room with a metal detector doorway [as opposed to outside], and they sit to either side of Jon Stewart, rather than directly in front of him.) We saw Tuesday night's show, which was apparently its second night in the new studio.

We spent the first hour in the holding pen with the other VIPs (which included obviously very important people such as a group of skaters, a large man with a walking stick and a "NORML" t-shirt, a girl with impossibly tan legs, and us) before we were allowed to file into the studio. Todd and I killed time by playing Hangman, a game my friend Sarah and I used to play as kids during the sermon each Sunday. Sarah and I weren't very competitive, and we regularly cheated for each other by drawing gloves and belts and shoelaces on the dangling stick figure, in order to buy more guessing time. Todd assured me that the stick figure he'd drawn would be wearing no such items.

The professional audience warmer (PAW) emerged a half-hour later, and began asking audience members about where they were from. People held up their hands anxiously, proudly annoucing the names of their cities. Santa Cruz, California! Brooklyn, New York! Nashville, Tennessee! One couple from New Jersey contributed an exasperated sigh when PAW asked, "Which exit?" An old man looked confused when PAW joked that the name of his town sounded a lot like the words, "Whore Pile." (I don't remember the actual name of the town, unfortunately.)

Eventually Jon Stewart came out for his pre-show show, in which generously fielded unprepared questions from audience members: dumb things like, "How do you feel about Brad Pitt being in the hospital?" and interesting things like, "What news sources do you read?" Somehow, he managed to be remarkably polite to the inquirers, while consistently producing clever jokes out of thin air. It was like watching someone pull rabbits out of empty hats.