They gather under the tall Jon Stewart. They gather under the Jon Stewart who takes up the whole side of a building on Eleventh Avenue in Manhattan and is about three stories high. They gather under the Jon Stewart who has his hands clasped, his chin lifted, his eyes narrowed, his lips drawn in a tight line. They gather under the Jon Stewart who is professionally skeptical and won't take any bullshit. They gather under the Jon Stewart who is imitating a self-serious news anchor and who, while imitating a self-serious news anchor, has this message: "For Larry Flynt's Hustler Club, go one block down and take a right." They gather under the Jon Stewart who is funny and who, with his dark backswept hair set off by graying temples, is a few years younger than the Jon Stewart of today.

They are mostly young themselves, college kids who sit on the sweltering summer sidewalk when they're not pressed against the stanchions that have been set up to organize ticket holders waiting to see The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. They are not all young, however, and the oldest among them seem genuinely surprised when this gavone in a black Daily Show T-shirt comes out to the sidewalk and begins, like, yelling at them — when he tells them they'll have to submit to a TSA-like screening before they go inside, that if they get caught using their cell phones, their cell phones will be taken away, and that they won't be able to use the bathroom once they're in the studio. "I guess they have to screen for conservatives," says one guy who's come all the way from California, trim and gray-haired, wearing a T-shirt and chinos.

"But conservatives are so much better at taking orders than we are," says his wife, before changing her mind in light of the impasse over the debt ceiling. "Well, some of them. I wish the ones in Congress were better at it..."

In fact, everybody on line is accomplished at taking orders and being civilized and compliant. They understand that somebody who...