"The Daily Show's" intellectual fuddie-duddies

Bill O’Reilly likes to call viewers of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report” stoners and slackers. Here’s another name he can give them: Readers (or, at least, patrons) of serious current-events literature.

The New York Times reports that both shows actually help sales of books written by the historians and political analysts who sit and chat with Stewart or spar with Colbert.

In recent weeks, Stewart has hosted Nobel Prize-winning economics guru Muhammad Yunus, Ishmael Beah, whose book “A Long Way Gone” details life as a child soldier in Sierra Leone, and Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, who was peddling his memoir “In the Line of Fire:” Great targets for high comedy, all.

In the Times story, Martha Levin of Free Press calls the programs “the television equivalent of NPR. You have a very savvy, interested audience who are book buyers, people who do go into bookstores, people who are actually interested in books.”

Another publicist in the story says, “If I had my choice between Charlie Rose and Jon Stewart, I’d pick Jon Stewart, no question.”

Here's today's Daily News story on "The Daily Show's" influence in comedy rather than intellectual pursuits.

Now that serious discourse on television is allowed only on a couple of comedy shows, perhaps the Fox News Channel will take a tip from Keith Olbermann and add a laugh track to all of its shows, not just “The 1/2 Hour News Hour.”