Larry King gives Jon Stewart portable restroom for Mall rally

By Lisa de Moraes

[This blog post has been updated.]

Daytime diva Oprah Winfrey gave Jon Stewart transportation to bring his studio audience from New York to his upcoming Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear on the Mall in Washington later this month.

CNN primetime anchor Larry King gave Stewart a portable toilet.

"There's some controversy about whether there are portable potties at the rally," Larry King said while interviewing Stewart on his CNN show Wednesday night about the rally, Stewart's new book ("Earth") and the midterm elections.

"We have been in contact with the Porta-Potty people," Stewart said. "Right now they say they are 'efforting' Porta-Pottys. We will have toilets -- they may not be enclosed. I guess what I'm saying is we will either have toilets, or we will have shovels."

"Well we have something for you," King said. "I wanted to do my bit, for the rally attendees. This will be shipped to you. Open the curtain, please!"

(Video of King presenting a gift to Stewart.)

Down comes the curtain, revealing a brand-spanking-new traveling toilet.

"There it is! The first potty for the rally!" King bragged

"Is that the hyperbaric chamber that they store you in when you're not working?" Stewart asked.

"I don't know if you know this, but you can get Porta-Pottys pretty easy -- we've got a ton of them," Stewart broke the news gently to King. "Can we still take this one? We will delineate it as yours. I'm honored."

"You don't know what to say, do you?" King cackled gleefully. "Jon Stewart is stumped!"

"You know what -- that's the one I'm gonna use," Stewart said. "You're a good man."

Like Stewart said, Comedy Central has lined up plenty of portable restrooms to accommodate even the most optimistic estimates for attendance at its Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear on the Mall the afternoon of Oct. 30, contrary to a report in the New York Times that suggested otherwise.

"The organizers have arranged and contracted for facilities that exceed the recommended amount by the National Park Service," Stewart's cable network said Wednesday.

This had been of enormous concern -- here at The TV Column anyway -- since, earlier this month, when the New York Times reported that the Marine Corps Marathon had gone to great lengths to make sure its portable toilets would not be used by rally attendees. (The annual Marine Corps Marathon is happening the morning after Comedy Central's rally.)

Earlier this month, Marine Corps Marathon director Rick Nealis said that instead of using the usual plastic-strip ties that do so much to keep interlopers out of traveling toilets on the eve of the race, he planned to go that extra mile and would, for the first time use "real, live padlocks" on the 100-ish potties he was setting up around the Mall on Oct. 30 in advance of the race, to make absolutely sure no Stewart or Colbert fans could enjoy them.

"I understand that they were having problems ordering Porta-Pottys, that they might have to go as far as Baltimore to get them, but I just didn't want to share," Nealis is quoted as saying in the Times.

But when Washington Post TeamTV Comedy Central bureau chief Emily Yahr called Nealis the very day that report appeared, plans had already changed. Even though National Park Service spokesman Bill Line assured TeamTV's Mall bureau chief David Montgomery there are plenty of toilets for rent in the greater Washington/Baltimore area to accommodate both events, the Marine Corps Marathon decided it was taking no chances and changed its order to make sure its traveling toilets would not be used by Stewart fans.

"We realized the smarter thing to do is just to have them delivered later," Nealis told Yahr. "So where I might have the delivery come at 2 p.m. Saturday afternoon, now it will come around 10 p.m."

Nealis said the whole sharing thing really did not work for him.

"One of the problems was, what if everybody did use [the Porta-Potties] and you ran out of toilet paper ... runners would be tweeting, and on Facebook, and that's not something, on our level of expertise ... that they're expecting from the Marine Corps Marathon."



Watch the conversation with Larry King and Jon Stewart here: