Jon Stewart told Wyatt Cenac to f— off when he worked at ‘The Daily Show’

Marc Maron’s”WTF” podcast has produced a number of fascinating show business confessions from its subjects, and his most recent one was a bit of a doozy. Comedian Wyatt Cenac, who was a correspondent on “The Daily Show” for a few years, told Maron that he once got into an intense altercation with Jon Stewart over an impression the host had done of then-Republican candidate Herman Cain, which Fox News had criticized for being racially insensitive. Cenac, for once, agreed with them, and tried to address his concerns to Stewart, who didn’t take kindly to hearing it. Per the Hollywood Reporter:

“I raised a concern, like, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ … He got incredibly defensive. I remember he was like, ‘What are you trying to say? There’s a tone in your voice.’ I was like, ‘There’s no tone. It bothered me.’ … And then he got upset. He stood up and he was just like, ‘F— off. I’m done with you.’ And he just started screaming that to me, and he screamed it a few times. … ‘F— off! I’m done with you.’ And he stormed out. I didn’t know if I had been fired.”

At the time, Cenac was the only black writer, and felt obligated to speak up about the issue. “I was the one black writer there. It was this thing where it’s like, when you’re the one — whether you want to or not — you’re speaking for everybody. I felt like I had to speak for all the minorities, because there’s nobody speaking for them.”

Though he stuck it out another year on the show, he eventually left. But he also expressed some empathy for Stewart’s reaction, saying, per the AV Club,“Sadly, I think that’s the thing in a job like that. Because you’re getting shots, from so many sides, you sometimes need an outlet to explode on. And that outlet became me.” You can check out the whole interview here.