The bad news is that both the Daily Show and the Colbert Report have, over the last few months, decisively jumped the shark. Maybe they changed writers; or maybe the old writers just ran out of snark and irony and steam, and decided that polemics were as funny as (and infinitely easier to write than) satire.
The good news is that even a broken clock is occasionally right. So here is a Daily Show bumper crop from yesterday’s edition. The first is Jon Stewart’s riff on Sarah Palin’s curious gubernatorial swan song; the second is his extended interview with Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol.