Mike Rowe revealed on Thursday the one dirty job he couldn’t get: host of “The Daily Show.”
Responding to a fan on Facebook asking him how he deals with rejection, the “Dirty Jobs” host posted a picture of himself crying and holding a rejection letter from Comedy Central that explained he would not be the host of the show.
“When ‘The Daily Show’ was first conceived, Comedy Central spent a year looking for the right host,” Rowe explained. “The audition process was extensive, and when the dust settled, it came down to two — Craig Kilborn and me. The job went to Craig, and I was crushed.”
And the TV personality even took another stab at the opportunity when Kilborn left the show in 1998. “This time, I wasn’t going to let it get away. I did the very best job I could, and all modesty aside, I killed it,” he wrote.
“Afterwards, I was told by the producers and writers that I was about to become the new host of ‘The Daily Show,’ unless — by some miracle — Comedy Central were to suddenly cough up the kind of money that could entice a proven entity like Dennis Miller or Jon Stewart,” he continued.
It’s impossible to know how things would have been different had they gone with him over Kilborn or Stewart, but Rowe isn’t sweating it.
“It was a critical step in a long series of failures that got me to the sewer, where my redemption awaited, and a new level of job satisfaction that I frankly, never imagined,” Rowe wrote.