Jon Stewart: You Know, That Guy on the Tube : Television: The syndicated host went from an arch-hip show on MTV to what he calls 'sort of a dream life.'

By ROBERT STRAUSS

Nov. 30, 1994 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

NEW YORK — Perhaps sometimes you need a little Jersey in you to have the stamina to be a TV talk-show host.

“One of my first jobs was testing for encephalitis in the New Jersey Pine Barrens,” said Jon Stewart, host of the syndicated “Jon Stewart Show.” “I was 17, and I had a state car, and I would drive down to the Pine Barrens and think I had the greatest gig in the world.

“What we’d do is, we’d go out at night and set up these traps to car batteries. Then we’d come back in the morning and we would trap--literally suck--insects into a cup. Every flying creature in the Pine Barrens would be there,” said Stewart, now insect-free in his cubbyhole of an office in the Chelsea section of Manhattan after an early evening taping.

“We would take them to a lab and knock them out with chloroform--not kill them--and then sort them out by male and female mosquitoes. This would take a while and they would start to wake up,” he said, his eyes now starting to bug out in true stand-up comic form. “By the end of the summer, I had like bubonic plague. I had all sorts of chiggers and bites. It was insane.”

This is not unlike a talk-show gig, where you have to weed out the interesting guests from the inane before the audience gets chloroform-sleepy. Then you have to put up with all the chiggers and bites from the media, telling you that you’re not Johnny or Dave or even Arsenio. And then you have to go back into a Pine Barrens of a studio the next day, convincing yourself all along you have the greatest gig in the world.

“It really is sort of a dream life,” Stewart, dizzy from a day that has already lasted 12 hours, still insists.

Stewart, 31, is the latest entrant in the late-night TV wars. When Arsenio Hall called it quits after five years last spring, Paramount went looking for a new late-night host. About the same time, the studio was merging with Viacom, which owns MTV. MTV had a young guy named Stewart hosting an arch-hip show on the cable network. Paramount jumped at it, asked him to broaden the show a little bit from the MTV-inspired run of guests and started Stewart’s one-hour series on Sept. 12.

The program has met with meager ratings and mixed reviews, which sometimes doesn’t sit well with Stewart.

“I think it’s hard to block that stuff out, because it does affect you,” he said. “It’s funny, because when I was a kid, you never thought the paper could be used against you. If you are a kid, any time you’re in the paper it’s like honor roll or you got a double in the game. So to open the paper and see, ‘Stewart on His Way Out,’ you think ‘Bastards!’ But then you open People magazine and they give us a great review and you say, ‘Exactly! Now this is a man who knows!’ ”

Stewart’s road to his current “greatest gig in the world” was neither one of great hardship nor a ladder of overwhelming successes but rather the jagged path of hills and troughs most of us encounter. Brought up in Lawrence Township, N.J., a suburb of Trenton, as Jonathan Stewart Leibowitz (he dropped the last name when he became a stand-up comic in the 1980s), he grew up feeling like a black sheep compared to his older brother.

“I remember being a young kid and seeing him have the Latin Cup from Lawrenceville Prep School, and I just thought, ‘Wow! I’m never going to be good enough in Latin to get a cup.’ I just sort of thought I’d better take another route to get attention because, you know what, he’s got me trumped on the smarts thing,” Stewart said. “I took my identity from wising off: smart-ass versus smart.”

After college at William & Mary in Virginia, where he played soccer and made a lot of schoolmates laugh, Stewart came home and tried to figure out what to do with his life. Mostly, he bartended in Trenton.

“One place was called the Bottom Half. It was literally underneath a liquor store. The other was called City Gardens, which at that time was considered an alternative rock club. A lot of bands like the Ramones and Butthole Surfers, bands like that, came through, and that was great,” he said.

“But I realized that if I didn’t watch it, I’d be 40 and this would be me,” Stewart said with a grimace. “Instead of playing softball, I’d be the guy organizing the team.”

So he took an apartment in New York and tried his lot as a stand-up comic.

“I never had any talent or affinity for any other artistic thing,” Stewart said. “I went through a period of time where I said, ‘I’m going to be a cartoonist. I’m going to be a novelist. I’m going to be a trumpet player.’ A few weeks into each, it became apparent that it was not my calling. When I was on stage, the clouds didn’t part and someone didn’t call from above, ‘Yes, you are a comedian,’ but it was something I felt comfortable with.”

Stewart’s humor could be called “early slacker.” His stuff is observational, much like Jerry Seinfeld’s, but with a more cynical, hipper edge. (“I believe in God,” he’s said. “I just don’t think he’s still looking out for us. I mean, he created the world 5 billion years ago. Don’t you think by now he’s moved on to another project? Maybe we’re just something he threw together for his third-grade science fair.”)

By the early 1990s, Stewart was doing the comedy-club-and-college circuit. Soon enough, he and low-budget cable TV found each other. He hosted “Short Attention Span Theater” and “Stand Up and Deliver” on the now-defunct Comedy TV and Ha! channels and then went over to “You Wrote It, You Watch It” on MTV. Last fall, he got his short-lived talk-show slot on MTV, a half-hour program that seemed almost over by the time the first guest sat on the couch.

The current Paramount show hardly reinvents the wheel. Instead of a swivel chair and couch, the host and guests sit on overstuffed red chairs. Instead of a desk, there is an air-hockey table between the host and guests. There is no house band, but almost every show has a live rock act, with recorded rock going in and out of commercials. But, generally, it is Stewart doing a monologue, interviewing a few stars or offbeat folks, going along with a written comedy sketch and introducing the band. Then it’s off to plan for the next show.

“As far as comparing ourselves with other shows, I’d have to say the main difference is Jon Stewart. A show like this builds around a personality, a New York, sort of hip kind of guy,” said Madeline Smithberg, 35, one of the show’s three executive producers. “We try to have a casual atmosphere, but we hope in our interviews we get something different, because we hope the people feel more at ease both with Jon and with the setting.”

Stewart said he has not quite taken advantage of being a TV personality yet--although it isn’t entirely his fault.

“Paramount owned Madison Square Garden and the Knicks, but two months after I signed, they sold it (to ITT) and merged with Blockbuster (via Viacom),” he said. “So I went from Knicks tickets on the floor to 10% off on video rentals. I was so close.”

* “The Jon Stewart Show” airs weeknights at 12:30 a.m. on KCOP-TV Channel 13.