By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
The New York Times

It's been more than eight years since "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" made its first foray into presidential politics with the presciently named Indecision 2000, and the difference in the show's approach to its coverage then and now provides a tongue-in-cheek measure of the show's striking evolution.

In 1999, "Daily Show" correspondent Steve Carell struggled to talk his way off Sen. John McCain's overflow press bus — "a repository for outcasts, misfits and journalistic bottom-feeders" — and onto the actual Straight Talk Express, while at the 2000 Republican convention Stewart self-deprecatingly promised exclusive coverage of "all the day's events — at least the ones we're allowed into."

In this year's promotional spot for the show's convention coverage, the news newbies have been transformed into a swaggering A Team — "the best campaign team in the universe ever," working out of " 'The Daily Show' news-scraper: 117 stories, 73 situation rooms, 26 news tickers," and promising to bring "you all the news stories — first ... before it's even true."

Though this spot is the program's mocking sendup of itself and the news media's mania for self-promotion, it inadvertently gets at one very real truth: the emergence of "The Daily Show" as a genuine cultural and political force.

When Americans were asked in a 2007 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press to name the journalist they most admired, Stewart, the fake-news anchor, came in at No. 4, tied with the real news anchors Brian Williams and Tom Brokaw of NBC, Dan Rather of CBS and Anderson Cooper of CNN.

While the show scrambled in its early years to book high-profile politicians, it has since become what Newsweek calls "the coolest pit stop on television," with presidential candidates, former presidents, world leaders and administration officials signing on as guests.

One of the program's signature techniques — using video montages to show politicians contradicting themselves — has been widely imitated by "real" news shows, while Stewart's interviews with serious authors such as Thomas Ricks, George Packer, Seymour Hersh, Michael Beschloss and Reza Aslan have helped them and their books win a far wider audience than they otherwise might have had.

Most important, at a time when Fox, MSNBC and CNN routinely mix news and entertainment, larding their 24-hour schedules with bloviation fests and marathon coverage of sexual predators and dead celebrities, it's been "The Daily Show" that has tenaciously tracked big, "super depressing" issues like the cherry-picking of prewar intelligence, the politicization of the Department of Justice and the efforts of the Bush White House to augment its executive power.

For that matter, the Comedy Central program — which is not above using silly sight gags and sophomoric sex jokes to get a laugh — has earned a devoted following that regards the broadcast as both the smartest, funniest show on television and a provocative and substantive source of news.

"The Daily Show" resonates not only because it is wickedly funny but also because its keen sense of the absurd is perfectly attuned to an era in which cognitive dissonance has become a national epidemic. Indeed, Stewart's frequent exclamation "Are you insane?!" seems a fitting refrain for a post-"M*A*S*H," post-"Catch-22" reality, where the surreal and outrageous have become commonplace — an era kicked off by the wacko 2000 election standoff in Florida, rocked by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and haunted by the fallout of a costly war waged on the premise of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.

"Grist for the funny mill"

Stewart describes his job as "throwing spitballs" from the back of the room and points out that "The Daily Show" mandate is to entertain, not inform. Still, he and his writers have energetically tackled the big issues of the day — "the stuff we find most interesting," as he said in an interview at the show's midtown Manhattan offices, the sometimes somber stories he refers to as his "morning cup of sadness." And they've done so in ways that straight news programs cannot: speaking truth to power in blunt, sometimes profane language, while using satire and playful looniness to ensure that their political analysis never becomes solemn or pretentious.

"Hopefully the process is to spot things that would be grist for the funny mill," Stewart, 45, said. "In some respects, the heavier subjects are the ones that are most loaded with opportunity because they have the most — you know, the difference between potential and kinetic energy? — they have the most potential energy, so to delve into that gives you the largest combustion, the most interest. I don't mean for the audience. I mean for us. Everyone here is working too hard to do stuff we don't care about."

Offices for "The Daily Show" occupy a sprawling loftlike space that combines the energy of a newsroom with the laid-back vibe of an Internet startup: Many staff members wear jeans and flip-flops, and two amiable dogs wander the hallways. The day begins with a morning meeting where material harvested from 15 TiVos and even more newspapers, magazines and Web sites is reviewed. That meeting, Stewart said, "would be very unpleasant for most people to watch: It's really a gathering of curmudgeons expressing frustration and upset, and the rest of the day is spent trying to mask or repress that through whatever creative devices we can find."

The writers work throughout the morning on deadline pieces spawned by breaking news, as well as longer-term projects, trying to find, as Josh Lieb, a co-executive producer of the show, put it, stories that "make us angry in a whole new way." By lunchtime, Stewart (who functions as the show's managing editor) has begun reviewing headline jokes. By 3 p.m. a script is in; at 4:15, Stewart and the crew rehearse that script, along with assembled graphics, sound bites and montages. There is an hour or so for rewrites before a 6 o'clock taping with a live studio audience.

To make the more alarming subject matter digestible, the writers search for ways to frame the story, using an arsenal of techniques ranging from wordplay ("Mess O'Potamia," "BAD vertising") to exercises in pure logic (deconstructing the administration's talking points on the troop increase in Iraq) to demented fantasy sequences (imagining Vice President Dick Cheney sending an army of orcs to attack Iran when he assumed the presidency briefly last year during President Bush's colonoscopy).
The cartoon strip "The Decider," featuring Bush as a superhero who makes decisions "without fear of repercussion, consequence or correctness," became a way to satirize the president's penchant for making gut calls that sidestep the traditional policymaking process.

As the co-executive producer Rory Albanese noted, juxtapositions of video clips and sound bites are one of the show's favorite strategies. It might be the juxtaposition of Sen. Barack Obama speaking to a crowd of 200,000 in Berlin while McCain campaigns in a Pennsylvania grocery. Or it could be a juxtaposition of a politician taking two sides of the same argument. One famous segment featured Stewart as the moderator of a debate in 200 between then-Gov. Bush of Texas, who warned that the United States would end up "being viewed as the ugly American" if it went around the world "saying we do it this way — so should you," and President Bush of 2003, who extolled the importance of exporting democracy to Iraq.

Channeling Buster Keaton

Often a video clip or news event is so absurd that Stewart says nothing, simply rubs his eyes, does a Carsonesque double take or crinkles his face into an expression of dismay. "When in doubt, I can stare blankly," he said. "The rubber face. There's only so many ways you can stare incredulously at the camera and tilt an eyebrow, but that's your old standby: What would Buster Keaton do?"

Stewart has said he is looking forward to the end of the Bush administration "as a comedian, as a person, as a citizen, as a mammal." Though he has mocked both McCain and Obama for lapses from their high-minded promises of postpartisanship, he said he didn't think their current skirmishes were "being conducted on the scale that Bush conducted things, or even the Clintons; I don't think it has the same true viciousness and contempt."

Soon after Stewart joined "The Daily Show" in 1999, in the waning years of the Clinton administration, he and his staff began to move the program away from the show-business-heavy agenda it had under his predecessor, Craig Kilborn.

After Sept. 11 and the invasion of Iraq, the show focused more closely not just on politics but also on the machinery of policymaking and the White House's efforts to manage the news media. Stewart's comedic gifts — his high-frequency radar for hypocrisy, his ability, in co-executive producer Kahane Corn's words, "to name things that don't seem to have a name" — proved to be perfect tools for explicating and parsing the foibles of an administration known for its secrecy, ideological certainty and impatience with dissenting viewpoints.

Over time, the show's deconstructions grew increasingly sophisticated. Its fascination with language, for instance, evolved from chuckles over the president's verbal gaffes ("Is our children learning?" "Subliminable") to ferocious exposés of the administration's Orwellian manipulations: from its efforts to redefine the meaning of the word "torture" to its talk about troop withdrawals from Iraq based on "time horizons" (a strategy, Stewart noted, "named after something that no matter how long you head toward it, you never quite reach it").

Disdain across party lines

For all its eviscerations of the administration, "The Daily Show" is animated not by partisanship but by a deep mistrust of all ideology. A sane voice in a noisy red-blue echo chamber, Stewart displays an impatience with the platitudes of both the right and the left and a disdain for commentators who, as he made clear in a famous 2004 appearance on CNN's "Crossfire," parrot party-line talking points and engage in knee-jerk shouting matches. He has characterized Democrats as "at best Ewoks," mocked Obama for acting as though he were posing for "a coin" and hailed MoveOn.org sardonically for "10 years of making even people who agree with you cringe."

To the former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, Stewart serves as "the citizens' surrogate," penetrating "the insiders' cult of American presidential politics." He's the Jersey Boy and ardent Mets fan as Common Sense, pointing to the disconnect between reality and what politicians and the news media describe as reality, channeling the audience's id and articulating its bewilderment and indignation.

He's the guy willing to say the emperor has no clothes, to wonder why in Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's "It's 3 a.m." ad no one picks up the phone in the White House before six rings, to ask why a preinvasion meeting in March 2003 between President Bush and his allies took all of an hour — the "time it takes LensCrafters to make you a pair of bifocals" to discuss "a war that could destroy the global order."

"The Daily Show" boasts a deep bench when it comes to its writing, research and production and has provided a showcase for a host of gifted comedians who have gone on to other careers — most notably, Stephen Colbert of "The Colbert Report," as well as Carell, Rob Corddry and Ed Helms. But while the show is a collaborative effort, as one producer noted, it is "ultimately Jon's vision and voice."

Stewart described his anchorman character as "a sort of more adolescent version" of himself, and Corn noted that while things "may be exaggerated on the show, it's grounded in the way Jon really feels."

"He really does care," she added. "He's a guy who says what he means."