It’s nine o’clock on a hot and humid Manhattan Monday
morning. Rachel Axler’s subway ride from Washington Heights
has been sticky and uncomfortable. She barely has time to let the
first wave of air conditioning wash over her before she is called
to the morning meeting. OK, grab a coffee, sit down and be funny—for
a living.
Welcome to Comedy Central’s Emmy Award-winning The Daily
Show located in a nondescript red brick building at the corner
of Eleventh Avenue on Manhattan’s West side—as Axler
describes it “just one horse stable and a small highway from
the Hudson River.” It’s the first meeting of the day
for the ten writers and producers. Their next one is at three.
And yes, brilliant though Jon Stewart is, there is actually a group
of writers who construct this 4-night-a-week gleefest of social
and political comedy. Fueled by caffeine and television deadlines
these modern day jesters debunk pomposity and pretension wherever
they find it—and they do find it, all across the political
and social spectrum.
Rachel Axler, M.F.A. ’04, the lone female among the 10 writers,
has been with the show since May 2005, and she says she knew she
wanted to work on it since she was doing her M.F.A. in playwriting
at UCSD. When she graduated her professor, Adele Shank, told her: “You’re
just out of grad school. You want to be a playwright, go to New
York.”
For Axler, who comes from New York, it was coming home. Axler
started out on that familiar path to success in the arts—temping—but
all the time she harbored the ambition to get on The Daily Show. “I
promised myself that by tooth-or-nail, or hook-or-crook, I was
going to get myself known in some way. I basically googled all
variations of the phrase ‘writer for The Daily Show.’” Finally
she found a class ingeniously called, “Writing for The Daily
Show.”
“It would have looked like bullshit to me,” she says, “except
that it was taught by this guy, J.R. Havlan, who has been a writer
for The Daily Show since its first day.”
“At first I thought Rachel was barely a day over 15 years
old and wondered what on earth she was doing there,” recalls
Havlan. “I soon found out she was by far the funniest, most
consistent writer in the class. In fact, the first assignment she
wrote made me wonder if I had gotten her name wrong and was reading
someone else’s work. Not because I thought she couldn’t
possibly be talented, but because she just plain didn’t look
the part. In hindsight, I’m not sure what the ‘part’ was
supposed to look like, but in my head it wasn’t 5 feet 4
inches tall and cute. Based on the other writers we work with,
she should have been closer to six feet tall and basically unpresentable
to the general population.”
 Havlan was impressed by the writing, very impressed, and a few
weeks later asked her if she would collabroate on some sketches
with him for the Dave Chapelle Show. “One of the things that
threw me at first was how filthy she could be. And I mean filthy,” Havlan
wrote in an email to @UCSD. “She looked like a doll and wrote
like a sailor. No—a drunken sailor. No—an angry, drunken
sailor on leave in Bangkok with $700 in his pocket . . . and a
sense of humor, of course.”
The Chapelle scripts never reached Chapelle, who had just done
his famous vanishing act to South Africa. Then a few weeks later,
Havlan called her at work and told her that The Daily Show was
looking for two new writers.
“I quit my temp job and I wrote for a week,” Axler
recalls. “I had my first Red Bull, and it kept me awake for
two straight days.” Apparently it worked.
Axler, who is diminutive and darkly pretty, has the ability to
swoop in with deft witticisms while you are still pinioned by her
smile. So it’s no surprise that she loves the anarchy of
the morning meetings, when the overnight news is dissected and
reinvented into classic Daily Show headlines. These headlines,
the news stories delivered by Stewart at the top of the show, are
assigned to three or four writers at a time, and each writer works
on them individually.
“That’s the time of day where you’re all alone
with your stress,” Axler says. “You’re writing
as if you were the only writer on this show. You just have to tune
everything else out and write until 12:45, when you hit print.
You’re writing everything from ‘we turn now to Iraq,
where blah-de-blah,’ joke intro, into trying to get through
the entirety of the story, whatever the story is, explaining it,
parsing it, and of course writing jokes off any piece of valid
information you can, because you want to get as many jokes in there
as possible.”
“It can be very stressful and intense when we’re on
a deadline, which is a lot of the time, since we put on a show
every night,” says Sam Means, another Daily Show writer,
who shares an office with Axler.
These four sets of complete headlines, called “packets,” are
then collected and delivered to Stewart and the other producers.
That team then pulls jokes from each of the packets and cobbles
them together into one headline. Often during the course of the
day, several will get rewritten for any number of reasons—timing,
relevance, or because some new story has just broken.
This is when the writers work in teams. Means, who is also a regular
contributor of cartoons to The New Yorker, says Axler thrives in
this collegial process. “Rachel is an extremely talented
writer,” he says, “but she’s always happy to
listen to an idea and help make it better. She’s really in
her element when working with a colleague .... She always has great
ideas, and is good at working together with other writers to put
them down on paper.”
From the program’s whole series on Indecision 2004 (their
skewered version of the election) to taking on Paris Hilton’s
fleeting moment in prison (by “not” reporting it) the
show has been on the critical frontlines as the witty conscience
of the media. Some classic moments have included the Mess O’ Potamia
series on the Iraq war “Finally, Iraq has become the country
we thought it was when we invaded.” On the Scooter Libby
jail sentence: “Scooter Libby gets 30 months in prison, a
$25,000 fine, and a chance to discover Islam.” On the Attorney
General’s Senate testimony: “Alberto Gonzales doesn’t
know what happened, but he assures us that it was handled properly.” And
on President Bush’s sixth State of the Union address: “On
Tuesday, the State of the Union will match up two bitter rivals:
the President and words.”
The summer found Axler and the writing team wrestling with the
lead into the ’08 elections and as she describes it: “all
the magnificent progress the Democratic party has made since taking
over.” But she is also continuing with her playwriting. Her
newest play Smudge is about a young couple whose first child turns
out to be more monster than baby. It has already generated a lot
of interest after readings at the Lark theater in New York and
The Playwrights Foundation in San Francisco. “It’s
about reconciling ideas about what constitutes ‘life’ with
expectations about what it means to be a parent,” says Axler. “And
it’s definitely funny, but I keep having to warn people:
ultimately, it’s not a comedy.”
And perhaps that’s also not a bad description of The Daily
Show. 
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