Sure, anybody can appreciate The Daily Show by just watching, but there are things you don't fully appreciate till you try to transcribe it

"All right, have it your way--you heard a seal bark!"

Do you have a minute? Or a few minutes, actually, I guess. This is going to take awhile, and we're going to be passing some unexpected landmarks. In the end we're not going to get much of anywhere, but heck, it's Saturday. If you have something more important to do, don't let me stop you.

Lately I have been taken to task occasionally for slighting The Daily Show in QOTD selections. I could blame the hot-headed selection committee, but I accept responsibility, even though I have of course done nothing wrong. (I try to live my life always according to the high ethical standards set by our House Republican majority, and in particular the leader of that majority, Speaker "Planet Denny" Hastert.) But gadzooks, I'm inclined to say, just as on occasions when I'm chided for slighting Paul Krugman QOTD-wise, "I was afraid I was going to that well too often."

It's been especially rough since both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report came back from vacation after Labor Day, with guns blazing. They've both been seriously and consistently terrific.

If anyone should have a beef, it's Colbert Report fans. It's incredibly tough doing satire from the vantage point of the O'Reilly-like persona Stephen C. has adopted, and I think he and the writers have been refining it and making it work in a way that it often didn't before. My great regret QOTD-wise is that I still haven't figured out how to reproduce in our format the great "The Word" segments, which depend on the brilliant interaction between the spoken script and the comments or amplifications or "clarifications" posted on the screen. Is there a Best of "The Word," Vol. 1 DVD in the works, I hope?

During this long national nightmare that has been the Bush administration, and especially in the early years when Master Rove was most successful at enforcing on not just the Republican pols he controls but the media and the country at large a kind of thought control that this country hasn't experienced since the McCarthy years of the '50s, I have never hesitated to credit The Daily Show with helping me keep my sanity. There were, of course, the expectable left-of-center publications like The Nation that didn't roll over, and there was of course the Internet to keep us from feeling totally isolated, but for reflections of the real world in the mainstream media, there wasn't much. The Times Three, of course: Paul Krugman, Frank Rich and Bob Herbert. And the odd lonely voice here and there. Later there would be Air America Radio, which for all its fumblingly inept management has played a major role in giving us in the "reality-based community" a voice. But through it all, on Comedy Central of all places, there was The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Since my TVs and my computer don't talk to each other, or communicate in any way (which is just the way God meant it to be--do you find any streaming video in the Bible?), when I want to "capture" a moment from The Daily Show for our readers, I have to do it the old-fashioned way, with . . . let's see, there must be a scrap of paper here somewhere, and a pen . . . pen . . . no, a pen that writes, ferchrissakes . . . that and my DVR and remote.

Anyone who's ever tried to transcribe any speech or conversation knows what a tedious process it is, even more so for those of us whose DVR box and computer are in different rooms, making direct-to-keyboard transcription impossible, and who don't write in any kind of shorthand system. This adds to the process the intermediate steps of (1) scribbling out the transcript and then (2) trying to decipher the scribbling.

I once tried to explain this process to Howie with reference to E. B. White's classic description of the process by which the first batch of drawings by James Thurber to see print were made ready for publication. It appears in a note that White provided for the book that he and Thurber collaborated on, Is Sex Necessary?, first published in 1929.

Oh drat! The plan at this point was for me to allow a decent interval to apply my modest and steadily age-diminishing typing skills to typing out the relevant portions of White's account of how the drawings in Is Sex Necessary? came to be . . . well, the drawings in Is Sex Necessary? But my copy appears to be missing, having undoubtedly been filched by the clever fiend who periodically slips into my apartment to spirit away an item that I'm about to be looking for (leaving behind all those zillions of other items).

Okay, we go to Plan B.

It so happens that Thurber contributed an "author's memoir" to the 1950 republication of his first collection of drawings, The Seal in the Bedroom and other predicaments, originally published in 1932. Its title drawing, as you may have guessed, is the very one reproduced above. In that memoir, Thurber offered his own account of this bit of history. Let's run through that, and then I'll attempt to add from memory the crucial information contained in White's account.

So here is Thurber himself, looking back in 1950:

The few interviewers who have shown a mild interest in trying to find out how such drawings as mine ever came to be published have told their several versions of the important part White played in the process, but my own account seems to me to belong here. In the spring of 1929, then, he tried to get The New Yorker to publish a drawing I had done with a pencil on yellow copy paper. It showed a seal on a rock staring at a distant group of human beings, and saying, "Hm." The magazine's art meeting rejected it and sent along, for my instruction and guidance, a professional's drawing of the head of a seal, with the message, "This is how a seal's whiskers go." White sent my drawing back to the next art meeting with the message, "This is the way a Thurber seal's whiskers go." It was rejected again, without drawings or messages. White and I then wrote Is Sex Necessary? and he forced our shocked publishers to publish my illustrations for that book. The New Yorker then asked me to have another look at the seal on the rock, but I destroyed it. I set about doing another one, and what came out of that, by accident and ineptitude, was the drawing in this book of the seal in the bedroom.

I gave the original drawing to Bob Benchley, who had sent me a telegram the day it was reproduced in The New Yorker, the first telegram I ever got about anything of mine. About 1934 he lent it to a New York art gallery for an exhibition that lasted three weeks. The gallery kept it for seven years, in the basement wrapped and tied and addressed to Bob. When I found out about this, I went to the gallery and dug it up and gave it back to him. "Why didn't you tell me it had been gone for seven years?" I asked its owner. "I thought maybe it was on permanent loan," he said. And it darn near was.

Now let's fill in from White's history (relying on memory, remember):

(1) White paints a vivid portrait of the circumstances of the creation of the original Thurber drawings. The two of them were then sharing what by all accounts was a really tiny office at The New Yorker (then in its first few years), and Thurber had the habit of dashing off these drawings--in pencil on yellow copy paper, as he tells us--in endless succession. They were apparently dashed off so quickly that they littered the tiny room. Less sensitive souls than White would have considered them primarily a waste-disposal problem.

(2) White includes a fuller account of the meeting with their editor at which the unsuspecting soul was given his first shocked exposure to Thurber drawings--none had ever been published yet, remember. When White produced the sheaf of them he'd personally and laboriously inked over for this purpose, once the fellow recovered he said something like, "I take it these are rough sketches from which the finished art is to be produced." White rejoined something like, "No, this is the finished art."

(3) Which brings us to the matter of White's inking over of the "raw" artwork, which is in fact the whole point of this odyssey we've undertaken here. It's important to consider that Thurber was close to blind. He had lost the vision of one eye in a childhood bow-and-arrow accident, and had extremely poor vision in the other eye. The dashed-off light pencil drawings were, by White's account, barely visible. And so with great trepidation, and with the feeling that he was committing some sort of act of vandalism, he took a bottle of India ink and a pen and painstakingly brought the underlying scrawls (Thurber's very word for them, as we'll see in a moment) to stark visibility.

As White put it, at least as best I recall it, it took Thurber seconds to produce the original drawings, and hours for him to perform his ink-over vandalism. "The difference between genius and pluck" is, I believe, the phrase he used.

And that's how I feel, doing my laborious double-transcriptions of Daily Show bits and even whole segments.

Of course, I'm sure the Daily Show material is written with a great deal more care and craftsmanship than either Thurber or White suggests Thurber drawings generally received. In fact, in that 1950 "author's memoir," the artist drives the point home:

I went back over these drawings in the wistful hope that I would find evidence on which to base a fond belief that my work, or fun, somehow improved after this "first phase." The only change I could find, however, in comparing old and recent scrawls, was a certain tightening of my lack of technique over the eras, the inevitable and impure result of constant practice. In the case of a man who cannot draw, but keeps on drawing anyway, practice pays in meager coin for what it takes away. It would have taken away even more but for the firm and polite interference of Andy White, who came upon me one day fifteen years ago laboring over cross-hatching and other subtleties of draughtsmanship beyond the reach of my fingers. "Good God," he said, "don't do that! If you ever became good you'd be mediocre."

Okay, this is one of those long journeys we've undertaken to--in the end--shockingly little purpose. I needed somehow to convey to you the feeling I get when I toil over my transcribing activities. But, as I suggested, there are compensations. Let me propose just one of them now.

Where comedy is concerned, it's always difficult for those of us who weren't present at the creation to apportion credit--or blame--for the finished product. Before the words come out of the performers' mouths, they have to come from somewhere, and we don't get to see the assortment of producers, idea chuckers, writers and rewriters behind the scenes. In the case of The Daily Show, I assume that most if not all of the on-air "reporters" also play a greater or lesser role in writing their material. I also assume that Jon Stewart himself, in his capacities as both the guy with his name in the title (which is, properly speaking, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart) and one of the show's executive producers, plays a role in shaping the entire show.

Now, this could be tricky, because an insecure host might consider himself in competition with his fellow cast members. In reality, though, the funnier the people around Jon are, the better he looks--even if it means that some of his colleagues come away with bigger laughs.

(Parenthetically, it is sometimes pointed out that one of the invisible keys to the brilliance of The Mary Tyler Moore Show was Mary's understanding of exactly this point--that she didn't need to get the most or the best laughs, that in fact the show worked best when the fullest and best use was made of her incredibly talented costars.)

But one thing you notice when you're scribbling or typing Daily Show bits, which I think is easy to overlook when you're just watching the show, is what a good and generous straight man Jon is. In recognition of which, I am hereby awarding him the George Burns Trophy for Service to Comedy, in honor of the comedy world's most celebrated straight man.

Consider this Daily Show bit I transcribbled the other day, with the brilliant John Oliver reporting from Washington as "Senior Washington Correspondent":

Eventually the heavy artillery was brought in, in the form of our guy, Senior Washington Correspondent John Oliver.

JOHN O: Jon, I can tell you tonight the anger here is building. There is a real sense that this time the Democrats must be held accountable for their actions.

JON S: The . . . the Democrats?

JOHN O: Jon, Congressman Foley has been dangerously flirting with young pages for years. So isn't it interesting that just one month before an election, the Democrats happen to be told about it? And isn't it just like them to make a convenient stink over an unconscionable breach of ethical conduct? If they'd heard about it before, they'd have had every chance to bring it to the attention of the cofounder of the committee to prevent the exploitation of children . . . I believe his name is . . . [searching back and forth through his pocket-size reporter's notebook] . . . uh . . . [still searching, finally finds page and reads out slowly:] M. Foley, Republican of Florida.

In order for John O to be able to spin this preposterous but hilarious fantasy of the Democrats being forced to pay the price for engineering the Mark Foley scandal, Jon S has to be in there pitching, diligently registering appropriate surprise with his "The . . . the Democrats?" Later in the bit, John O confirmed to a visibly astonished Jon S that, yes indeed, it was the Democrats--and the pages--who were responsible for the scandal. (Who knew that instead of inspired satire this would turn out to be the Republican Noise Machine playbook?)

It was a running Burns and Allen joke that George stumbled into a gold mine when he learned to stand next to the amazing Gracie and feed her lines like "He did?" and "What did she say then?" Of course George did a whole lot more than that. As I understand it, he basically conceived and oversaw the writing of The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show.

Nevertheless, he was a sublime straight man. The craftsmanship of the George-and-Gracie scenes could be breathtaking, and George always made it look effortless. Now that we've come this far (and yet traveled nowhere!), we can't leave without an account of my favorite Burns and Allen moment--again, alas, re-created from memory. I can't imagine how long it's been since I saw the show in question.

It starts as a basic George and Gracie setup: Gracie is recounting the scene of chaos she found herself in the midst of--maybe on line in the bank, or at the post office, I have no recollection. All I can tell you is that the confusion of this particular episode involved a Mrs. Roberts. Which is significant because, at an apparently opportune moment, George asks Gracie, "Did you get to see Mr. Roberts?"

Without missing a beat, Gracie answers, "Of course, we saw it together last year when we were in New York. Henry Fonda was marvelous."

Now we're not done yet, but I have to interject here. Everyone who watched the show would have known that Mister Roberts was then a huge hit on Broadway, and no account has ever questioned that Henry Fonda was indeed marvelous. In fact, the play had special significance for The Burns and Allen Show, which lost a cast member to it: the great Fred Clark (right), the first permanent Harry Morton. Clark was costarring in Mister Roberts, and elected to stick with the show rather than return to California for the new season of Burns and Allen

George in fact explains this in one of his famous asides to the audience in the show that opened that season (which nobody else I've talked to seems ever to have seen--I swear I'm not making it up, though), immediately after the first scene featuring the new Harry, the ineffable Larry Keating (seen here with Bea Benaderet as Blanche and George and Gracie). The show had paid its "friend" Fred Clark the singular tribute of not attempting to "recast" him but instead of totally recasting the role, turning Clark's sleazy, lazy, face-filling real-estate schemer into Keating's pompously patrician accountant, about as wild a leap as you can make while keeping Harry and Blanche hopelessly mismatched.

Anyway, Gracie answers George's question about Mister Roberts with good cheer and, as noted, without missing a beat. But she can hardly help being concerned. This is the man she loves, after all. How can she not worry? And so she asks George why he's changed the subject.

George doesn't miss a beat either. "Well," he explains, "I just thought while we were talking I'd try to make a little conversation."

I think of this line a lot. Isn't it the operative principle of today's talk radio--and our 24-hour cable "talk news"? While they're talking, they just try to make a little conversation.