So Jon Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity" came and went a couple weeks ago. I'm sure a lot of the people who gathered in D.C. and Portland and other cities (note: these events were all in major cities) had a good time and said some nice things about the need for more civility in our public discourse, and I'm likewise sure that most folks went home feeling fairly good about themselves. And I don't want to be that guy who talks down to everyone who thinks our political dialogue should be a little less rancorous and a little more conciliatory, but let's just stop for a second.

This is really a bad joke, isn't it?

Stewart's rally, of course, occurred on the same day and in faux opposition to Stephen Colbert's "March to Keep Fear Alive." As he often has over the years, Stewart played the reasonable, measured and quietly patriotic straight man to Colbert's caricature of a credulous but massively jingoistic right-winger. And as we often have over the years, America had that laugh. Maybe it's a little bit cheap and maybe it's even a little bit mean-spirited, but these guys are comedians and entertainers first, journalist and commentators second. And maybe that means we should just be able to have that laugh without guilt.

But then Stewart committed a little comedic sin: he started taking the joke seriously. The "Rally to Restore Sanity" became something more than a jumbo version of Stewart staring plaintively into the camera following some absurd statement from Colbert, letting the audience know he was in on the joke. Stewart transitioned into being an actual advocate for more bipartisanship, more dialogue, more "sanity" and less "craziness" in our politics.

The problem with being an advocate as opposed to a comedian is that an advocate can't get away with letting every member of the audience interpret things in their own way and have their own chuckle. When you're a serious advocate for something, people start asking what your statements actually mean, and laughter stops being a convenient dodge. And that's when Stewart got into trouble.

Asking, "well, what do you mean when you say 'restore sanity'" pushes the conversation into awkward territory, because it requires us to think about what sanity is, and who we do and do not consider sane. There were lots of people in Stewart's audience who, confronting the topic seriously, were quite willing to say wait a minute, Jon, the crazy's all coming from one side:

"When Jon announced his rally, he said that the national conversation is dominated by people on the right who believe Obama's a socialist, and people on the left who believe 9/11 was an inside job. But I can't name any Democratic leaders who think 9/11 was an inside job. But Republican leaders who think Obama's a socialist? All of them!

"...Two opposing sides don't necessarily have two compelling arguments. Martin Luther King spoke on that Mall in the capitol, and he didn't say, "Remember folks, those Southern sheriffs with the fire hoses and the German shepherds, they have a point too!" No, he said, "I have a dream, they have a nightmare!" This isn't Team Edward and Team Jacob. Liberals, like the ones on that field, must stand up and be counted, and not pretend that we're as mean or greedy or short-sighted or just plain batshit as they are."

So was the whole problem with Stewart's premise this false equivalency between liberals and conservatives? Well, partly. I think Maher's criticism is more or less correct from the standpoint of the left, but the problem with Stewart's thinking is more fundamental than Maher maybe realizes. I think Stewart legitimately thought his rally was an appeal to both sides. I think he saw his call for liberals and conservatives to treat each other (at least a little bit more) decently as fundamentally fair, because he meant to direct it at liberals and conservatives.

Way back at the start of this little soliloquy, I noted that all of the Rally to Restore Sanity events took place in major cities. That's not a coincidence, that's Stewart's audience: the young, the urban, the liberal. And I think that audience came out for the rally because they saw it as a fun way to extend that same old Stewart/Colbert joke: the reasonable liberal attempts to engage the arch conservative, hilarity ensues. When that bit is played as a joke it's darkly funny, because we're on Stewart's side and we recognize that engaging the opposite side in today's political environment is often futile. His audience got offended when Stewart tried to turn the bit around on them because they know something he apparently doesn't: the other side ain't listening. There were no conservatives who came out to Rally to Restore Sanity, because they also understand that Stewart and Colbert are ultimately making fun of them.

At the end of the day, political humor has to take a position. If it doesn't it becomes empty; nothing more than the laughter of the jaded, tossed derisively at the people who still find things to believe in. Colbert I think will always be Stewart's lesser, because Colbert seems content to have that very laugh, over and over again. Stewart seems to sense that picking a side will ultimately diminish him, as it has most every other modern political comedian (Maher, Dennis Miller, Chris Rock, Lewis Black, Jeanine Garofalo, and on and on.) He seems to want to use his platform for something, but he's not sure how to do it without losing it.

And the answer may be that he can't, and he'll go along more or less as he has until someone supplants him, or he finds something so offensive to his sensibility that he feels compelled to take a firm side. I doubt that he wants to play Colbert's straight man forever.

(as a final aside, if Stewart really believes his argument about the wisdom of calling Bush a war criminal, someone needs to sit him down with Eichmann in Jerusalem, because god damn.)