Jon Stewart's Quitting. Will He Keep Watching Fox News? Here's His Elaborate Answer to That Question.

You know the expression, "Not even if you were the last man on earth?"

That's how Jon Stewart feels about Fox News.

In a long, freewheeling interview with the Guardian published Saturday, the longtime "Daily Show" host spoke about why he decided to quit the show he's hosted for 16 years.

The liberal jokester also discussed his attitudes toward media culture in general and his old punching bag, Fox News — and it wasn't pretty.

In this image taken from video and provided by the Fox News, "The O'Reilly Factor" host Bill O'Reilly points across the table at "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart, on the set of the "The O'Reilly Factor," Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2010 in New York. (AP Photo/Fox News Channel)

“Watching these channels all day is incredibly depressing,” Stewart said of his job observing the very best and worst television news has to offer. “I live in a constant state of depression."

He had a peculiar analogy for his job: "I think of us as turd miners. I put on my helmet, I go and mine turds, hopefully I don’t get turd lung disease.”

Now that he's quitting, would Stewart consider watching Fox News under any circumstance?

“Umm… All right, let’s say that it’s a nuclear winter, and I have been wandering, and there appears to be a flickering light through what appears to be a radioactive cloud and I think that light might be a food source that could help my family," Stewart responded. "I might glance at it for a moment until I realize, that’s Fox News, and then I shut it off. That’s the circumstance.”

It's a far cry from a year ago, when Bill O'Reilly opined that Stewart needed Fox News to keep his own show going.

Read the full interview with Stewart at the Guardian.

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