David Steinberg had an inkling that Jon Stewart was about to step down from “The Daily Show” when he interviewed him for “Inside Comedy” months before he announced it.
“My first question was, ‘How long do you think you’ll stay in television?’” Steinberg remembers.
Stewart immediately deflected. “He said, ‘Is this what this is? So they hire Steinberg to drop the hammer on me?’”
During the interview, which debuts Tuesday, May 5, at 11 p.m., Stewart cracks jokes about his early days at The Bitter End (“There’d be four Doors cover bands and then you”) and entertains the possibility that God is the biggest jokester of them all.
“The greatest example of that is the scrotum,” Stewart says. “If he doesn’t have a sense of humor, why would you hang something so sensitive outside the body?”
Says Steinberg, “It was all very funny and very off-the-hook.”
The comic also talks to Stephen Colbert, who contributes a clip of his own SCTV skit: he and Steve Carell play “Waiters Who are Nauseated by Food.” Colbert also reveals he probably would have soon stopped doing his Comedy Central show even if he hadn’t been offered the chance to replace David Letterman.
“Inside Comedy” is now in its fourth season on Showtime. The show has given Steinberg a chance to catch up with many of his contemporaries at SCTV (Catherine O’Hara), get cozy with some superstars (Bette Midler) and, in the case of Stewart and Colbert, the opportunity to meet a new generation of funny men and women. In addition to Stewart and Colbert, Steinberg will talk to Dane Cook, Wanda Sykes, Dan Aykroyd, Carol Leifer and Cheech and Chong.
“Those guys are adorable. They’re like brothers,” says Steinberg, now 72. “They’ve loved each other for all these years.”
Over lunch at Michael’s in midtown, Steinberg, who appeared 130 times on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson,” reveals that he follows the rules he learned at SCTV, which he joined in 1964, in doing interviews.
“It was fly-by-the-seat of your pants, don’t over-prepare and don’t prepare at all,” he says.
But there was one time when he should have thought of something to talk about beforehand. Back when the “Tonight Show” was 90 minutes long, he was subbing for Carson and stranded at the desk with none other than Elaine Stritch. Who was tipsy.
“As the host, you’re half-listening and you’re half-looking at the [production] log and all that,” Steinberg says. “The producer said, ‘Don’t worry about Elaine. I was with her all day. Just ask her about her marriage and she’ll go for a half-hour.’
“I’m so relieved. So when she comes on, I ask her about her marriage. She says, ‘My marriage? I talked to the producer about it all afternoon. I don’t want to talk about that.’ It was the scariest half-hour of television I ever did.”