Stewart/Colbert return, somewhat defanged

(Warning: for those with no access to Comedy Central's East Coast feed, this contains nothing but spoilers for tonight's episodes of "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report.")

For a late-night TV host, there's a thin line between making it clear you're delivering an inferior product because you have no writers and humiliating yourself, and no one wants to cross that line. Perhaps inevitably, then, did Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert fudge a little - well, probably a lot - when it came to the "pencils down" edict. ("But we didn't use pencils!" They'll protest. "We used laptops! There's no 'Laptops Closed' campaign!")

Jon Stewart is renaming his show "A Daily Show with Jon Stewart" until the strike is resolved - and clearly prepared a bunch of material in advance. Same with Stephen Colbert, who decided also to rename his show, to "The Colbert Report," only now the "t's" are pronounced.

You can guess some of what happened. Stewart, who opens each show scribbling on his script, was instead jotting on his desk. "That's me drawing on what should be a script." (Colbert did a similar thing, announcing, "Which brings me to tonight's 'Word,' and, of course, not having one, punted. Saw it coming a mile away, but what a nice distillation of what real scripts actually bring a show.) Colbert, I'd say, did a measurably better job than Stewart, but probably because he can play his blustery @sshole of a character all in favor of a strike while Stewart has to be his regular avuncularly smart-alecky self.

Rather than a strike beard, Stewart sported what he called a unibrow. "I hope this is the symbol of solidarity that catches on," he said. Most of his other material was similarly wan, with very short bits on Huckabee winning Iowa and "American Gladiators" and, shockingly, nothing about all the amazing political idiocy that transpired in the two months he's been off the air.

Discussing the strike, he resurrected a trademark "Daily Show" joke when evoking the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, "or NAMBLA." A pause. "That joke is grandfathered in."

Much as David Letterman did on his first night back, Stewart explained as best he could the strike. He was sympathetic to the WGA, but obviously miffed that his show didn't get the same waiver Letterman's did.

"This is a dire situation but let's have a little perspective here," Stewart said. "This really is a math problem." The last time the late-night shows went dark all at once was after Sept. 11, he noted, and the shows were gone for about a week. "So, if I'm doing my math right, the writers strike is now nine times worse than Sept. 11."

He brought up his snubbing at the hands of the WGA to his guest, Ron Seeber, a professor of labor relations at Cornell (the interview consumed about two-thirds of the episode). "Are they being arbitrary, denying some shows that would willingly (meet the WGA's terms)?" he asked, notably blanching. "Why would you turn something like that down? ...

"Is it anti-Semitism?" he asked, milking the hurt over his spurning. "The whole reason I got into this business is because I thought we controlled it."

Perhaps anticipating the sort of beating Jay Leno is taking for writing his monologues, he closed by imploringly asking Seeber, "Do strikes ever end with hugs?"

Despite his best efforts, Stewart's show clearly was compromised; Colbert's not so much (Colbert doesn't rely upon reports from correspondents like Stewart does). "The Daily Show's" biggest laugh came when Stewart cut to Colbert, sporting a strike beard that would make the guys in ZZ Top look like pimply adolescents and feeding scripts into a paper shredder. "I'm very alarmed by how prepared you were," Colbert scolded Stewart.

Colbert's show felt a little more like an ordinary episode of his show. He opened his show in the usual melodramatic fashion: "Tonight (pregnant pause) - then (pregnant pause) - plus (pregnant pause) - this is 'The Colbert Report.'"

He directed his audience to pad the show with its applause, resting his feet on his desk and reading the paper while the cheering continued past any reasonable moment.

He made more use of clips from previous shows, including Huckabee's three appearances in which Colbert was offered the Vice-Presidency and a montage of moments in which Colbert engaged in screeds against labor unions. He brought in two guests, conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan, championing Barack Obama, and author Richard Freeman, championing the American worker. (Colbert, in his own parlance, nailed Freeman but good, asking him for his final question if the author was a member of a labor union; he confessed he wasn't. Colbert beamed, triumphant.)

But these strike shows are a marathon, not a sprint, and tonight's first installments underscored just how difficult it is to bring A-level material on a nightly basis. And the two guys will probably enjoy this even less if the WGA comes down on them in the same way they did on Leno for writing his monologue.