Well, if you buy Josh's likening of methodical, plodding issue analysis to "spinach", I think the answer to your question is that comedy in the form of satirical ridicule may well continue to play a powerful role going forward.

Although it can and sometimes is (sometimes appropriately) aimed at the great unwashed masses, satirical ridicule may be the most potent weapon corrupt, self-serving--or merely mortal--insider elites, in both politics and business, have to fear.

Not many people really understand the ins and outs of the current financial meltdown. But a sizable portion of the engaged public can understand it very well when a mainstream intitution such as CNBC, largely serving the agenda of the wealthy and powerful elites, has its credibility blown up in plain view.

And that can be a powerful political force, in the dual sense of both weakening the influence of the people and institutions who used to think they had a corner on the market on what's what, and emboldening all others, among whom some are likely to have crucial key insights that would have been crowded out under the old rules. The latter still have to fight their way through the crowds to get heard in the relative free-for-all that gets opened up. And there can be no guarantee that their voices, rather than less insightful others who are simply more successful in gaining attention, will get heard.

This hardly means that collectively, we as a society are necessarily going to get the fixes right. That's all contingent, as it always is.

But when the self-regarding VSPs (in this case, of the financial world, not the foreign policy world) no longer monopolize the definition of the problem and what is politically possible, it opens up a lot more space for expanded and potentially more fruitful analyses and a less constricted set of options and debate.

I identify with Jon Stewart and Tina Fey here. We all got it. That was the problem for the other guys. We were watching while Bush did all that stuff, and nodding at the Daily Show. We saw the same shrill bumpkin Fox News Type complaining about America. We saw the old man looking befuddled and heard his bridge coming unglued.

But there was more. We all watched, incredulous, as the Republican Party changed the entire government into a Clinton Crucifixion Party. Nothing got done except for that in-depth blowjob expose, and while we all had to accept that it was in exceedingly poor taste, we were impressed that the RNC (Never, ever say GOP!) could blow so much cash over so little... spilt...milk?

And we saw Ollie North become a hero of this 'RIGHT!', after smuggling stolen American missiles out of the country and giving them to the Iranian regime in exchange for Iranian currency they spent on prohibited violence in South America.

So when it came time for the All-Lies-All-the-Time Administration to lie and cheat and steal and obviscate and dissemble for eight straight years, we were pretty familiar with the absurdity of it.

Flip to the Limbaugh show, and to Ann Coulter. They were using some parody of humor to rile up their audiences, mocking everything too.

Comedy isn't easy. To communicate absurdity with weighty themes and continue to the thematic end is a serious challenge. You have to be literate. This is why we won the joke-off.

But Gore and Clinton and every other Democrat was lampooned too. The damage wasn't done to them. Damage was done to the absurd candidates posing as the serious guys. The ones who were beyond reproach, but could only come across as snarky. Third-grade wiseass stuff. Smirks.

I don't think comedy did Kerry in. I think he missed the target every time he tried to hit it. He didn't connect with us. He yawned at us.

I think we got lucky this time, because it was important and everyone in the country- including the people who voted for but equally mistrust Bush. Next time, hopefully the stakes won't be so real.

I'd like to direct your attention to a graph plotting General Election events against the TPM Tracker, a composite of daily polls leading up to the election. The graph helps to illustrates association between daily and accumulative shifts in public preferences and major campaign events.