Unleavened

Long before he took over a late-night cable program and turned it into a political juggernaut, Jon Stewart was a working comic whose MTV talk show had just been canceled. Unleavened captures him in that 1996 limbo, three years before he joined The Daily Show, working the stage in an oversized suit. The political instincts that would define his later career are already visible as he takes aim at the 1996 election cycle, the Republican party’s fixation on gay rights, and the logistics of bombing Saddam Hussein. He also spends time deconstructing antisemitic tropes, building a joke about stereotypes that culminates in an image of thirty men pulling a falafel wagon.

Aired as his first hour for HBO, the broadcast is a straightforward document of a professional between gigs. Stewart himself seemed aware of how dated the material would eventually become. When he signed a new deal with the network two decades later, he noted he was mostly looking forward to using up the last of the Saddam Hussein jokes he had left over from this set.