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"A light bulb went off in my head," Chodikoff recalls. "I went to the As the World Turns studio for privacy and called Comedy Central and asked for the names of the executive producers." He sent a letter and a résumé and took his Conan cue card with him to the resulting interview—"as an example of my vast comedy experience," jokes Chodikoff.
"They thought I was psychotic. I think they said to themselves, 'Well, we'll hire him so we can track him. He might be dangerous.' "
When Chodikoff began working at The Daily Show in June 1996, Craig Kilborn was the host, and the show had what was essentially a late-night chat format—hardly the satirical news behemoth it is today. "In the beginning, my parents' friends would ask, 'What's Adam doing now?' And they'd say, 'Oh, you know the cartoon show with the kids that curse a lot? He's not on that show, but he's on the same network. They make fun of the news.' "
It's hard work, making fun of the news. A typical day for Chodikoff begins at 6 a.m. He is the first of his colleagues to arrive, usually by 7:30, at which time he scours the AP wire for an hour and a half for any potential joke fodder. He also tackles the newspapers. Ask him which ones he reads, and he'll give you an answer that sounds oddly similar to the one Sarah Palin gave Katie Couric: "All of 'em."
But, unlike Palin, he can get more specific. "I've got big bales of papers at my desk, tied with rope, like at the newsstand. LA Times, the New York Sun, The Daily News, the New York Post, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New York Times, plus news magazines. Reading and reading and reading," he says. "As much as I can read before 9 a.m., when the writers come in."
What follows is a collaborative effort among writers, producers, and Chodikoff to decide what the topics of the day's show should be. It's a time-sensitive pursuit—all the news in the world ranked and sorted in the scant hours before taping and reduced to its most pertinent components. But that's Chodikoff's specialty: trimming the mundane, the overly technical, and the densely layered down to what is ultimately worthy of a Daily Show zinger. "It's filtering hours of verbiage down to the essential comedy bits," Chodikoff says. "The writers are the funny ones, but I see the potential for jokes. I'm a good joke-potential-finder. I'm on the same wavelength as Jon and the writers, so I see the patterns.
"The other day, I noticed that three different Republican senators used car-wreck analogies to describe the Wall Street bailout. So I have to put all those sound bites together and give them to the writers to work their magic."
Daily Show executive producer David Javerbaum knows Chodikoff's talents as well as anyone; the two have worked together since 1999, when Javerbaum was hired as a staff writer. "He has this amazing memory for sound bites about anything policy-related," Javerbaum notes. "What's remarkable is how many ideas he initiates because he remembered that this guy said this or that a year ago. He's the show's unsung hero."
As the day progresses, Chodikoff's role as office factotum intensifies—from voracious reader to research-compendia provider to dutiful fact checker. When the writers retire to their offices to prepare jokes, Chodikoff is on call with the answer to any question imaginable. What's the GNP of Zambia? Who was the Secretary of the Interior under Eisenhower? Get me a quote of Bush praising former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. "Within minutes, he'll knock on the door with a pile of transcripts," says writer Tim Carvell. "All the specific quotes we need are circled and annotated." He also pitches ideas for field pieces and contributes to the video montages produced by The Daily Show's studio production team. "We tape a lot of stuff," says Chodikoff. "Back in the day, we'd program the VCRs. Now we have twenty TiVos."
By 3 p.m., The Daily Show team has reconvened to pitch ideas for the following day, which means another doggedly researched packet from Chodikoff. At 4:15, rehearsal begins, and he steps over to the studio to make certain all facts are accurate, all graphics are spelled correctly, and all pronunciations are exact. And, as if everything up to this point has been a leisurely amble toward show time, Chodikoff offers a warning: "This is when things can get really hairy. They rewrite a lot of the show when the audience is coming in, between rehearsal and actual tapings, so they'll want new facts." He's happy to oblige, putting "new arrows in [Stewart's] quiver" as he calls it, until the moment the cameras begin rolling.
Chodikoff does not, however, stick around for the tapings most nights. "If it's a guest I really want to see, I'll stay, but I'm usually exhausted by then."
Chodikoff's reasons for demanding factual perfection are simple. "Without credibility, the jokes don't mean anything," he says. "It's like a geometry proof, and the proof is in the videotape. A equals B. B equals C. We just have to prove all the hypocrisy points."
Writer Tim Carvell credits Chodikoff with providing a necessary counterbalance to a roomful of writers whose comedic talents can blind them to potential bias. "Adam keeps our show honest. Because while our show can be wildly unbalanced, we try not to be unfair. So even though our jokes can be—and frequently are—incredibly stupid or silly, they only work if the facts underlying them are accurate. He'll often make convincing arguments against certain jokes if the premises are unsound. There's a specific pained sound he makes, and that's a pretty reliable warning sign that something's wrong with the joke."
Modesty prevents Chodikoff from claiming full credit for the random research discoveries that make The Daily Show the razor-sharp send-up machine of American politics that it has become over the past decade. When pressed, however, he does, with great humility, doff his cap at a segment or two from the past few months. He found the tape of Sarah Palin, only months before the Republican convention, asking someone to tell her what a vice president does. "I think we were the first to get that on the air," he says. "I'm proud of that."
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