Stewart's a genuis beyond a doubt, and while I've read people bemoaning his popularity as a sign of cultural decay or decline in literacy, what I see is the historically-familiar avatar of the Social Commentator-Humorist. Stewart's Mark Twain working in a 21st Century medium, and as time goes on the comparison is looking less and less hyperbolic.

Each age has its preferred style of public communication. Stewart's is coming back after more than a century, during which time the stylistic pendulum swung far in the direction of ponderosity and tendentiousness and all-around gravel-voiced gravitas. We can remember the zenith of that tendency in the golden age bracketed by Murrow and flowering in Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley, and the long decline starting with Brokaw and ending with such amiable dunces as Katy Couric and Brian Williams, who seem merely puzzled by the news, suspended halfway between an appreciation of the gravity of the situation and an appreciation of the irony of it all.

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro, said Hunter, and the times and the thinning of the blood of the Walter Winchell tradition call for somebody as weird as Stewart to properly understand and interpret the weird times in which we live.