Jon Stewart once told Rachel Maddow that he saw himself more in the line of Jerry Seinfeld than of news commentators such as Maddow herself. To this I would have to respond (as per Lloyd Bentsen to Dan Quayle in the 1988 vice presidential debate): “I knew Jerry Seinfeld. And Mr. Stewart, you’re no Jerry Seinfeld."

To be clear, I haven’t actually met Jerry Seinfeld, alas. My intimacy with him consists in my having watched all 180 “Seinfeld” episodes at least seven times each (as my wife, who prefers “Story Trek” or anything with Cary Grant, is prone to remind me, with some irritation). But Seinfeld’s humor comes from a serenely apolitical place unknown to Stewart. Seinfeld’s laughter generally breathes a freedom, a kind of lofty but benign detachment from the “serious” concerns that fight to rule the world, that Stewart, despite his best efforts, could never attain.

Laughter, it turns out, is a serious philosophical subject. How could it not be, since it is so distinctively, mysteriously human? Plato saw the pleasure of laughter as deriving from recognition of one’s superiority to the ridiculous objects of one’s amusement. The greatest comic, it would seem, is the philosopher who stands back and laughs at the whole mess we humans make of things. In the early 20th century, the great French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote a treatise attempting to plumb the mystery of funniness: he agreed with Plato that laughter implies detachment from what most people take too seriously, but he also discerned a serious social function in laughter. Bergson thought humor helps reconcile us to the social norms that progressively shape our humanity. Plato, I dare say, would have found Bergson’s serious social theory of laughter funny.

Seinfeld, I would venture, is a little more like the philosophical Plato, and Stewart a little more like the progressive Bergson. So it’s not surprising Seinfeld recently said he is declining to play college campuses because the political correctness there is so stifling. But of course leftish 20-somethings are the very audience upon which Stewart’s career was based. He liked to claim to be above the fray, delighting in what was absurd on both ends of the political spectrum. And Stewart was very witty, and sometimes even succeeded in spreading the ridicule over red and blue alike. But it was never hard to see where the ideological center of gravity was for Stewart’s audience, and he always played to his audience. He established himself in the first place by hammering on the theme that George W. Bush was a fool (if not a deliberate villain). And while he may have proved capable, after 2008, of gently needling Obama here and there, there was never any question of really targeting the great transformative mission of our first black president.

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On the abortion question (which seems a hard one to reduce to laughter), an interview with Mike Huckabee once brought Stewart to admit (not on Stewart’s “The Daily Show” itself, I think) that he was seriously conflicted about this issue. But then his response to the Alabama law that attempted to restrain the freedom of minors to abort a child without parental consent was only the most absolutely dismissive ridicule. In fact, Stewart never showed enough philosophic or comic detachment even to begin to question the sacred liberal premise that a woman “owns her own body” (and any body that happens to find itself therein).

A “Seinfeld” comparison is in fact available on this point: an episode that deals with abortion makes at least as much fun of Elaine’s dogmatic pro-abortion-rights position as of that of the hunky anti-abortion boyfriend she has to let go for his ideological sin. OK, it’s not profound, but it is above the fray in a way that would be unthinkable for Stewart’s audience, and therefore for Stewart.

Farewell then, Jon Stewart and “The Daily Show.” Your wit is undeniable, but your unquestioned and oh-so-earnest liberalism is not half as neutral, or objective, or smart as you like to think. Or half as funny.

Ralph Hancock is a professor of political science at Brigham Young University and president of the John Adams Center for the Study of Faith, Philosophy and Public Affairs. His opinions do not necessarily reflect those of BYU.

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