A crowd estimated at more than 250,000 turned up in Washington, D.C., today to watch Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert host the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, but that doesn’t mean the hosts have developed big heads. During a press conference following the event at the National Press Building, Stewart insisted that though they inspired hundreds of thousands to travel to the nation’s capital to engage in rational dialogue, they hardly consider themselves significant political figures. “We’re not running for anything,” Stewart told reporters. “We do television shows for people that like them. And we hope people continue to like them so Comedy Central can continue to sell beer to young people.” Read on for the highlights from the press conference:
- Stewart and Colbert have been planning the rally since March. Not that they expected it to actually happen. “The number of scripts we generated, the number of ideas, the number of people we talked to — to have it all coalesce and funnel through this three-hour window and for it to happen is just [an] incredible joy,” Colbert said.
- Many watched the rally — at the Mall and at home. According to a rep from Comedy Central, 4 million streamed the rally on computers from home, while more than 250,000 people were in attendance. And a good chunk of those 250,000 people rode to the rally in one of Arianna Huffington’s free buses: At the press conference, she said she had 200 buses carrying 10,000 people.
- Stewart wrote his keynote address one night before the rally. “I stayed up late last night until I was done…. I just wanted to speak a little bit from the heart,” Stewart said. Colbert, on the other hand, claimed he took even less time to write his own address: “I improvised everything I did.” READ FULL STORY »
