Jon Stewart's first talk show kicked off with a Hitler joke so bad he was nearly canceled

Jon Stewart turned the overheated rhetoric about vaccine mandates into a Hitler game show joke on his new Apple TV+ series, The Problem With Jon Stewart. But it wasn't his first Hitler joke, he told his writing staff in a behind-the-scenes clip posted online Thursday. "One of the first things I did in television was I was doing a talk show for Paramount, in 1994 I think, and I was replacing Arsenio," he said. And he and one of his writers came up, late one night, with an idea that he would bring out the writer dressed as Hitler and interview him.

It went about as well as you might imagine, and as soon as they cut to commercial, Stewart recalled, Paramount called the control booth and ordered the show to memory-hole the segment or face cancelation.

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Peter Weber, The Week US

Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.