But don't think that Daily's very, very good year is going to Stewart's head. ''Are we better than Letterman? No. The man is a genius and an icon for the ages.'' And how about Wayne Brady, the guy who beat Stewart for the best-variety-performer Emmy? ''That name is not to be mentioned!'' Stewart cries. ''I can't disagree. The man sings, dances, and does jokes. I sit at a desk and smirk. If the category was Ease of Facial Expression Following Clip, I could've taken that.''
''You know, my years in j-school...that's journalism school. I wasn't sure if anybody would think that was Jew school.''
Jonathan Stewart Leibowitz (he dropped his surname after comedy-club emcees kept mispronouncing it) grew up in suburban Lawrence, N.J., the son of a physicist father and a special-education-teacher mother who divorced when he was 10. It's no shocker that Stewart cops to being a smart-ass. ''You can imagine the problems I had,'' he says. '''Oh, right, don't be a ridiculous dick to the man much larger than you in sixth grade. He will pummel you.'... I realized maybe I should just shut my f -- -in' mouth and wait for someone in power to do something I don't like and see if I can use it on them.''
After graduating Virginia's College of William & Mary in 1984, he moved back to Jersey and worked odd jobs, including bartending and doing puppet shows about the disabled for schoolkids. At 23, Stewart sold his car and moved to Manhattan, where he waited tables and started his stand-up career. ''It was grueling and hilarious,'' he says. ''I remember walking home at three in the morning going, If it doesn't get any better than this, it's still better than I ever thought it'd be.'' He landed hosting gigs at MTV and the Comedy Channel (which later became Comedy Central). His first brush with late-night glory came in '93, when he was a finalist to replace Letterman on NBC's Late Night but lost out to Conan O'Brien. The comic rebounded by taking his self-titled MTV talk show into syndication in 1994, but got canned after one low-rated season.
What followed was ''as productive a three-year period as I've ever had,'' says Stewart. ''I got a lot of stuff out of my system, like the fact that I'm not a very good actor.'' Case in point: an episode of The Nanny in which Stewart played Fran Drescher's kissing cousin (''an exercise in not being able to say no to people's faces,'' he says). He also penned an acclaimed book of comic essays, Naked Pictures of Famous People, and recurred on The Larry Sanders Show as the heir apparent to Garry Shandling's fictional late-night host.
That scenario almost played out in real life when Stewart signed a development deal with Letterman's Worldwide Pants and started guest-hosting for Tom Snyder on CBS' The Late Late Show. But the job later went to then-Daily Show anchor Craig Kilborn. ''They got the person they wanted and I got the show I wanted.''
Yeah, yeah, yeah, enough about his rise from obscurity. What about the throngs of women who regard the 5'7'', prematurely graying Stewart as a sex god? ''I thought you were going to say, Every woman I told I was doing this story said, 'That man gave me herpes.''' For Stewart, who lives in Manhattan with wife Tracey, the hunk suit has never quite fit. In high school, ''girls seemed nice but my head was the size it is now but my body was half the size, so they weren't quite as interested.'' Today, every now and again ''the receptionist will faint when I come by,'' says Stewart, ''but other than that it's pretty mellow.''
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