Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

Back before Stephen Colbert handed it to the President and Steve Carell got big in movies and network television, they were primarily known as The Daily Show’s two funniest correspondents. Their mock debate series, called Even Stevphen, remains one of my favorite parts of the pre-Colbert Report days. Thanks to Youtube and a few intrepid users, you can see all of the old Even Stevphen clips. The perfect timing and loopy rhetoric make for a biting send-up of shows like Crossfire, and moreover, represent some of the funniest dialogue in television history. In roughly chronological order, the entire Even Stevphen oeuvre is:

• Weather. Good or Bad?
• Elian Gonzalez
• Patients Bill of Rights/Existence of God
• Medical Marijuana
• U.S. Involvement in the Middle East (with Lightning Round!)
• Republican Conspiracy
• The Clinton Years
• Stem Cells
• Death Tax
• Halloween
• Reality TV
• Islam vs. Christianity
• The War in Iraq (a retrospective)
• A “Best Of” montage that aired recently
• Spring Break and Responsible Drinking. Not technically an Even Stevphen, but it’s got both Colbert and Carell, and it’s very much in the spirit of things.

If you know I’ve got the order wrong on some of these, let me know.

Some of the clips date back to 1998 or so, before the widespread use of digital recording equipment, and so I think the earlier videos are of suspiciously high quality. Are we really to believe that a fanatical Daily Show viewer had been sitting on pristine copies of the older footage for eight years? In the September 2005 issue of Wired, Jon Stewart and Ben Karlin all but said that they don’t care how people are getting the show, as long as they’re getting it. So could it be that someone at the Daily Show is uploading these videos straight from the source? I think the answer is yes. Everybody wins!