Jon Stewart’s Job History

Vulture has published NY Mag’s 1994 profile of Jon Stewart, who was then a talk show host on MTV (“The Jon Stewart Show”!), and single, and if their scan of the article is any indication, very, very pretty. It opens with a very 90’s stockbrokers in a pizza joint scene (omg) and then segues into a brief career history. Stewart was 32 at the time but declares himself to be 29 “until they move [him] to VH1.” Heh.

He graduated from the College of William and Mary in 1984 with a degree in psychology and without a clue as to what to do with the rest of his life. “My college career was waking up late, memorizing someone else’s notes, doing bong hits, and going to soccer practice,” Stewart says. “A fine institution of higher learning, and I spent half of it bent over a little plastic tube going, ‘Turn up the jam!’”

Hapless attempts at real jobs practically drove Stewart into comedy. He worked as the agar chef in a cancer-research lab, then separated live male and female mosquitoes as part of a New Jersey state project on encephalitis. That job left Stewart looking like a five-foot-seven-inch chigger bite. But show business, at first, seemed nearly as bleak. Stewart performed for kids as part of a puppet show about the disabled. “I was a cerebral-palsy puppet, a blind puppet, a deaf puppet, a hyperactive puppet — and a puppet who couldn’t commit to a relationship. How sad.”

I don’t even know if any of that is real. Did they fact check the puppet thing? But this seems real:

When Stewart moved to New York to become a comedian, his mom promised she’d keep his room at home ready.

Stars! They’re just like us.

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