Is it funny yet? Jon Stewart and the comedy of crisis.(Annals of Entertainment)('The Daily Show with Jon Stewart')

One evening last November, Jon Stewart leaned on his anchor's desk and chatted with the audience before taping an episode of "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." The show, which airs on Comedy Central, is a news-parody program, and Stewart was being quizzed about the war in Afghanistan. Someone asked if he would have John Ashcroft as a guest. "No," Stewart said with regret, as if he were preparing to explain the intricacies of trying to book the Attorney General. "Technically, Ashcroft is not allowed to stand next to a Jew. We're like Kryptonite to him."

That night's guest, Stewart went on to say, would be David Halberstam, the author of "War in a Time of Peace," a new book about America's isolationism during the nineteen-nineties. The applause was tepid: the crowd, mostly Fordham University students who live near the studio where the show is taped, in Hell's Kitchen, seemed to fear an unscheduled lecture. Stewart, who can read a crowd's mood as if it were stencilled on cue cards, instantly said, "We did that because of all the E-mails from you kids, saying, 'Yes, Felicity's nice, but what about Halberstam?' "

Stewart's guests have traditionally been entertainers like Ted Danson and Stephen Baldwin, who show up to plug their latest projects for four minutes. But since September 11th "The Daily Show," which airs Monday through Thursday nights at eleven o'clock, has been transforming itself nearly every day. The show won an Emmy for its writing about the last Presidential campaign, which Stewart and Bob Dole dissected in a reg- ular feature called "Indecision 2000: Choose and Lose"; and after the terrorist attacks it became even sharper. Guests who could discuss the war were the norm -- even as the show hammered the media's endless examination of the crisis, in segments with such titles as "Operation Enduring Coverage," "Operation Self-Congratulation," and "America Freaks Out."

When the taping began, Stewart breezed through a few jokes about the day's top news stories and then welcomed Halberstam, a silver-haired eminence in a dark suit. Though Stewart asked deft questions, Halberstam showed no interest in entering into the terse give-and-take that television requires. "The oceans, which had become ponds because of the nuclear war," he intoned, "had become oceans again." Just offstage, the show's head writer, Ben Karlin, rolled his eyes at the executive producer, Madeleine Smithberg. When Stewart finally heard a stray appositive -- "what my colleague Les Gelb calls 'teacup wars' " -- he pounced.

"Yes, but I've always found Les Gelb to just be a blowhard," Stewart said. Halberstam raised a wintry eyebrow. Moments later, Stewart was bidding farewell: "It's a beautiful read" -- he'd admitted earlier that he hadn't read the book -- "and, as always, great to see you."

"We've never met before!" Halberstam protested. Then he laughed, seeing, finally, that, unlike every other talk show he's been on, "The Daily Show" is not even insincerely sincere.

After the taping, Stewart walked over to Ned Kelly's, a nearby pub, to have dinner. He had changed out of his suit and tie into a T-shirt and jeans, a black leather jacket, and a blue watch cap. Five feet seven inches tall and compact, Stewart, who is thirty-nine, looks like a college kid, except that his hair is now a distinguished gray. He is conventionally handsome, and yet his face is all nose and recessed, worried-looking brown eyes. When he was the host of "The Jon Stewart Show," on MTV in 1993-94, he was so anxious and so prone to catch colds that his staff called him Susceptible Boy.