Jon Stewart has become a legend in television. The long-time host of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart started as a comedian and quickly rose to fame through his many standup shows and television appearances.
The now 59-year-old sure has a great story to tell about his career. But it is nothing compared to the story about him and his wife, Tracey McShane.
Stewart and Mcshane have been married for more than 20 years and have raised two children together. But it was pretty much faith that brought them together, as a friend set them up on a blind date. This is the beautiful love story of how they met and fell in love.
Every love story is different, and when talking about it, isn’t that also the most beautiful thing about love? When it comes to dating, relationships, and marriages, they all are unique in their own way. And that also goes for the way we meet people when they start dating.
Today, the internet has made dating a little bit different. You can go on one of the hundreds of dating apps or websites to find your true love, and even though it’s different from how it was 20 or 30 years ago, it doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
Jon Stewart and Tracey McShane’s love story
While going on a date might have been different years ago, the feeling of getting to know a person and falling in love will always be the same, no matter if it’s in the 1950s or this past year.
Some people would like to get to know a person before dating. But for television host Jon Stewart, that wasn’t quite the case.
The New York City native has been married to Tracy McShane for more than 20 years. But when looking at the way Hollywood and show business works today, one thing stands out in their case.
Stewart was a celebrity, while Tracy was, what one would call, an “ordinary person.” However, that doesn’t matter at all when it comes to love – and Stewart and McShane have the most beautiful love story.
Here’s all you need to know about the famous talk show host and his wife.
Jon Stewart was born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz on November 28, 1962 in New York City. It wasn’t until later that he legally changed his last name to Stewart.
When he was 12 years old, his parents divorced. According to a feature piece in the New Yorker, Stewart was “deeply shaken” by his parent’s breakup and his “subsequent failure to find common ground with his father.”
Jon Stewart – early life
Stewart spent most of his youth in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. He attended Lawrence High School in New Jersey, and in 1984, he graduated from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He was also a promising athlete, playing on the men’s soccer team.
Stewart earned a degree in psychology, but he never went into the field for work. Instead, he took a series of eccentric jobs – and even starred in a puppet show about disabled New Jersey public-school children. And it wasn’t the last time he’d work with puppet dolls.
“I was a little lost from the age of eighteen to twenty-four,” Jon Stewart told the New Yorker. “I had my midlife crisis early. In 1986, I was living in Hamilton, New Jersey, working for the state and bartending and playing on a landscape company’s softball team. I started thinking, This is it for the next seventy years? So I told my mom I was going to New York to do comedy. I never discussed it with the—what’s the other one called?—dad.”
In 1986, Jon Stewart decided to pursue another career. He moved to New York to try and make it as a comedian, and at that point, he had no experience.
Stewart got gigs at the legendary club The Bitter End, where legends such as Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, and Curtis Mayfield performed.
Changed his real name
On the second night, he decided to change his name from his birth name, Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz, to Jon Stewart.
“The host’s hesitation at trying to pronounce my name the first night bothered me,” Stewart explained. “There was slight leftover resentment at the taunting. You don’t want a tauntable handle in show business. And some leftover resentment at my family.”
“But I didn’t really change my name—I just shortened it,” he added. I didn’t want to go as far as making it Dirk Cloud or Poopy Joe, the Rodeo Clown.”
After just three years doing standup comedy, Jon Stewart got his first big job hosting Comedy Central’s Short Attention Span Theater. Then, in 1993, after some other smaller jobs, he became MTV’s first talk show host, as the music channel started The Jon Stewart Show.
The 1990s became a big one for Stewart. He gained more fame and started to appear on more television programs. He starred on The Larry Sanders Show and had his comedy special.
As the 2000s came closer, Stewart got the job that changed his career forever. In 1999, he took over from Craig Kilborn as anchorman for the late-night and satirical television show The Daily Show, which dubbed itself “the most trusted name in fake news.”
Jon Stewart – ‘The Daily Show’
Jon Stewart also worked as the co-executive producer on the show, and in the years that followed, he won several prizes. In 2001, 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006, the show was awarded a Grammy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety, Music or Comedy Program. Today, Stewart has won 10 more Grammys for both The Daily Show and his work as a part of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Further, he’s also hosted the Grammys twice and the Academy Awards in 2006 and 2008.
Through the years, Stewart had hundreds of guests on the show. And in October 2010, Barack Obama became the first sitting president to appear on the show.
Five years later – in 2015 – Jon Stewart decided to quit The Daily Show after 16 years.
“It’s not like I thought the show wasn’t working anymore or that I didn’t know how to do it,” Stewart told The Guardian. “It was more, ‘Yup, it’s working. But I’m not getting the same satisfaction.'”
“These things are cyclical. You have moments of dissatisfaction, and then you come out of it, and it’s OK. But the cycles become longer and maybe more entrenched, and that’s when you realize, ‘OK, I’m on the backside of it now.'”
Jon Stewart – family, net worth
Now, Stewart is back with a new show at Apple called The Problem With Jon Stewart. And as his professional career moves forward, he is also a happily married man.
As of today, Jon Stewart is a huge celebrity, reportedly having a net worth of around $120 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth. But, his wife, Tracy McShane, isn’t a celebrity at all – and the way the two met is one great love story.
Jon Stewart was filming the 1997 film Wishful Thinking in Manhattan when suddenly a co-worker on set told him about a woman, Tracey McShane, she knew. Further, this co-worker wanted Jon to go on a date with her without meeting her first – a classic blind date.
“‘I know this girl who I think you would very much like,'” Jon recalled his co-worker saying. “And the way she described her was in such glowing terms, I thought, ‘well, I’d be a jackass not to go out with this woman.’ So I called her. What happened was I wrote her number on a dollar bill. And this was when I still smoked, so I went and bought cigarettes with the thing.”
One could say that it wasn’t a good start. Jon lost her number and didn’t call her for a while. Then, however, he got an idea.
How Jon Stewart met wife Tracey McShane
“You know how they used to give out like cast sheets where they have everybody’s phone number who worked on the set, and I got the number there because she was the roommate of the girl. And then I called,” Stewart said.
Jon and Tracey went to a Mexican restaurant, and from that point, they have been inseparable. Speaking with Larry King, Jon said that they clicked right away, even though the date wasn’t an instant hit.
“I have a tendency when I’m nervous to talk a lot, and she has a tendency when she’s nervous not to talk,” he said.
In an interview with Oprah, John revealed that he ”thought she hated me”
”I was embarrassed by how we met and so nervous that I couldn’t eat,” Tracy recalled.
In an interview on the Plant-Strong Podcast, Tracey McShane recalled the fantastic night. When she got to work the next day, her colleagues couldn’t believe she had been out with the one and only Jon Stewart. Especially since her friends earlier had recalled her being a big fan of his when watching him on TV.
“We stayed out to like three in the morning, and then I arrived at work the next day. He called me like 10 in the morning and said, Would you like to have lunch today,'” Tracey said.
“So we went out to lunch, and then we came back, and we were standing out in front of the building, and he had picked me up and was swinging me around in a circle. And the girls from PR who never knew any of this happened just were walking into the building, like, what is happening.”
Proposed through a crossword puzzle
In 2000, Jon and Tracey tied the knot, and when he proposed, he decided to do it in quite a unique way.
As Valentine’s Day in 1999 closed in, Stewart decided to contact New York Times puzzle master Will Shortz. Both Tracey and Jon loved The Times’ daily crosswords, so Stewart asked Shortz to embed his proposal in one of the puzzles.
The puzzle didn’t make the paper. However, it was designed to look like it was downloaded from the Times’ website and sent to Stewart.
Once they sat down and solved it, the full answer read, “Please, Marry Me, Tracey McShane.”
Tracey and Jon’s marriage is a true love story, with Oprah Winfrey even calling it “the real deal.”
In 2004, they welcomed son Nathan Thomas, and in 2006, daughter Maggie Rose was born.
Who is Jon Stewart’s wife Tracey McShane?
Tracey McShane was born in 1967 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and attended the California College of Arts and Crafts. Later, she took classes in graphic design at Drexel University. Tracey worked as a graphic designer, and after getting a degree in veterinary science, she changed her career and began working at the Bronx Zoo.
McShane has a great love of animals and later became an animal rights activist. Together with Jon, they became Farm Sanctuary affiliates, and eventually, the couple’s farm in New Jersey became home to many rescued farm animals.
Farm Sanctuary even named two rescued sheep after Tracey and Jon to thank the couple.
“The joy of interacting with animals as friends instead of using them for human consumption is life-changing. A trip to Farm Sanctuary should be on everyone’s to-do list, but you can also bring a little bit of sanctuary home when you sponsor an animal through the Adopt a Farm Animal Program,” Tracey McShane is quoted saying on the Farm Sanctuary website.
On October 20, 2015, Tracey published a children’s book, Do Unto Animals: A Friendly Guide to How Animals Live, and How We Can Make Their Lives Better. All the proceedings went to Farm Sanctuary – and during the last week of his tenure at The Daily Show, Jon Stewart showed his great admiration for his wife’s great passion for animals – and writing.
“It’s incredible. I’m so proud of her,” Jon Stewart said. “Listen, I’ve always known my wife is a kinder and nicer person than I am. But to know that she is funnier and a better writer — I’m not going to lie to you — stings a little bit.”
Jon Stewart and Tracey McShane’s love story. is truly wonderful. Please, share this article if you also believe in love at first sight!
