Last night at Joe's Pub, Jon Stewart spoke for the first time about leaving The Daily Show since making his emotional announcement last week. And he revealed his next gig is already lined up: "I’m going to be a featured blogger on The Huffington Post," he joked.
Stewart was one of the guests on "Employee Of The Month," Catie Lazarus’s long-running talk show. While Stewart said he has "a lot of ideas" about what he wants to do next—and reiterated he wasn't retiring—he was pretty explicit that the reason he was leaving The Daily Show was to spend more time with his children. His words, via the Hollywood Reporter:
"I just needed more flexibility," he said, alluding to his rigorous Daily Show schedule. "I got maybe four or five more years with the kids until they really don't want anything to do with me. And I'm just not there. You can't [work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.] for 16 years and think you're going to be able to tell them to not smoke pot. You can't show up at 9 p.m. and go, 'Don't get high. OK, goodnight, sweetheart.'"
He added that he also didn't want to become stuck in a loop of repeating himself: "I think I got to a certain point where I thought you shouldn't stay somewhere just because you can," he said.
As for what's next for The Daily Show, Stewart is hopeful there will be a new host who can push it into new areas: "What I want to see there is the next iteration of this idea," he said, according to the Times. "I feel like the tributaries of my brain, combined with the rigidity of the format, I feel like I utilized every permutation of that that I could possibly use. You can only go so far with four facial expressions and five to seven curse words."
He also gave praise to John Oliver, saying that he "was able to apply our process to a more considered thing, and it's exciting to watch it evolve and see it mutate and change and fill different gaps and different ideas."
One thing Stewart doesn't need to do: grow a beard (since he already did that during his Rosewater summer hiatus). But his old sparring buddy Stephen Colbert is following in his footsteps, unveiling a white-speckled Colbeard at the 10th Annual Oscar Wilde awards last night. "I have not allowed this to happen to my face since college because I’ve been working professionally pretty constantly since then," Colbert told The Daily Beast. “I have like nine months where nobody has to see me so I said, ‘I wonder what I look like?’"
