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COURTESY NBCUNIVERSAL MEDIA o the week 's top videos. "Yes," a deadpan Stewart said to peals of laughter, "Carson Daly revolutionized counting." A h, yes — Carson Daly, punch line and punching bag. It's been the recurring theme of a career that, 11 years after that roast, re- mains in ascendancy. Say what you will about Daly — that he's a "massive tool" (per Jimmy Fallon's long-ago impression on Saturday Night Live) or that he's "vanilla" (according to Salon in a May 2013 profi le). That 's fi ne by him. "I know how lucky I've been," the 41-year- old Daly says one early afternoon, sitting in a well-appointed trailer parked outside a downtown Los Angeles warehouse. In a few minutes, he will take a freight elevator to the third f loor and begin inter- viewing contestants and their friends and families for the seventh season of NBC's The Voice, a hit since its launch in 2011. He will ta lk to a contesta nt about her mother's sudden death du r i ng a f a m i ly v ac at ion when she was 12 years old. He will tell her about losing his own father, Jim, to can- cer when he was 5, in 1979. It is a private moment, almost like no one else is watching, li ke t here a ren't ca mera s o v er e v er y s hou lder a nd around every corner. "He's a genuine guy," says The Voice's co-executive pro- ducer Mike Yurchuck. It 's part of his job to brief Daly on the contesta nts before interviews. He recaps their oft-tragic tales fi lled with the Most of the attendees echoed a single theme throughout the night: Just why are we honor- ing Carson Daly? "Carson is being honored for his contribu- tions to the dating of actresses — that can't be it," said The Daily Show 's Jon Stewart, himself an MTV talk-show host in the early 1990s. Stewart then rolled a TRL "high- lig ht " reel consist- ing of Da ly ticking Y OU WILL BE FORGIVEN for hav ing for- gotten this particular pop-culture footnote: MTV's first-ever Bash, a celebrity roast that aired in July 2003. Its guest list was fi lled with the famous and the infamous who appeared live and on video: Britney Spears, Madonna, Sarah Silverman, Pamela Anderson, Kid Rock, Nelly, Jimmy Kimmel, Jessica Simpson and then-husband Nick Lachey, Justin Timberlake, Andy Dick, Sean Combs and Jennifer Love Hewitt, who'd once dated the guest of dishonor, Carson Daly. ¶ On the Hollywood Palladium stage, they took their turns taking shots at Daly, who, after four years of hosting the onetime music network's most-watched show, relinquished his duties as host of MTV's Total Request Live (TRL) to host a late-late-late-night talk show on NBC called Last Call With Carson Daly. RAISING HIS VOICE: The Voice's Season 7 crew (from left): Adam Levine, Carson Daly, Gwen Stefani, Blake Shelton and Pharrell Williams To learn more about Last Call With Carson Daly, visit www.nbc.com/ last-call-with-carson-daly A A .CO M/A M E R I C A NWAY N OV E M B E R 2 01 4 69

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