Day Five: NEW YORK! 124 mi

OMG WE WENT TO A DAILY SHOW TAPING AND AL GORE WAS THE GUEST! IT WAS FREAKIN AWESOME!
Also, saw Times Square, survived driving in the city, and verified that I am NOT an urban dweller at heart. Gah. I could never live in a City. Bah.
Will add more to this when I am rested.
ETA: OK, am now rested and am hanging out whilte Twon and our host rock out on GH2, so I’m gonna update in more detail about how the taping worked.

Here’s how it works.

1. Acquire tickets from this page on ComedyCentral.com.
   We managed to get tix by hitting reload all the time and waiting for someone to cancel. (If you get tix and then don’t show, you get blacklisted, so people do actually cancel and then their tix become available).
2. Show up at the Daily Show studio on 11th Ave. in New York some time before 3pm to get in line
   We reached the city around noon, so we parked and went wandering around for a couple hours, then got in line around 2pm. We were the second group in line.
3. Get a little card with a number on it showing that you’re actually going to get in.
4. Listen to the speil about what is and is not allowed inside.
5. Go through a metal detector and have your bags searched.
   Twon had his pocket knives as usual, so we just handed them over. They took my drivers’ license and put it and the knives in a ziploc, which we got back after the show. If I’d know that they would do that, I would have brought my camera so I could have taken pix of NY. Sigh.
6. Get inside the studio and take a seat.
7. Get riled up by the opening guy.
   The opening guy when we were there was Paul Mecurio, who was crude and insulting but very very funny. He got us plenty riled up and excited. Then the show itself started.
8. The show itself is taped in real time, including breaks where commercials would go. Any time they’re not actively taping, they play very very very loud music, presumably to get our adreniline levels up so we’ll be noisy during the taping.
   The guest when we were there was Al Gore, which was AWESOME. Unfortunatley, it also meant that the interview lasted two segments, so we only got to see one of the correspondents – Rob Riggle. He did a mildly amusing piece on gas prices.
9. When the taping is over, you get the hell out of dodge.
   The taping seemed to go by really fast, probably because we were in line by 2pm and didn’t sit down until around 6pm, but were out of the studio by 7pm.

A few random things:

• Jon Stewart is even shorter in person. However, this does not make me want to jump him any less.
• Rob Riggle wore regular suit pants and tennies when he was doing his segment, even though that meant that from the waist up he looked like an extra from Mad Max and from the waist down he looked like a regular correspondent. Heh.
• The pub Bull McCabe’s, right across the street from the studio, has very very tasty food.
• While walking past the studio shortly after arriving, we saw Jason Jones walking by, presumably on his way to work. He looked very unshaven and grungy but when I grinned at him and gave him a thumbs up he smiled back, so that was cool.

I think that’s everything. It’s probably going to be my turn on GH2 soon, so I’ll sign off.