Show and tell

IT HAS BEEN MORE THAN EIGHT YEARS since The Daily Show with Jon Stewart made its first foray into presidential politics with the presciently named Indecision 2000, and the difference in its coverage then and now provides a tongue-in-cheek measure of its striking evolution.

In 1999, The Daily Show correspondent Steve Carell struggled to talk his way off John McCain's overflowing press bus – "a repository for outcasts, misfits and journalistic bottom-feeders" – and on to the actual Straight Talk Express, while at the 2000 Republican Convention Stewart self-deprecatingly promised exclusive coverage of "all the day's events – at least the ones we're allowed into".

This year the news newbies have been transformed into a swaggering A Team – "the best campaign team in the universe ever", working out of "The Daily Show news-scraper: 117 storeys, 73 situation rooms, 26 news tickers" – promising to bring you "all the news stories – first – before it's even true".

Though this is the programme's mocking send up of itself and the news media's mania for self-promotion, it inadvertently gets at one very real truth: the emergence of The Daily Show as a genuine cultural and political force. When Americans were asked in a 2007 poll to name the journalist they most admired, Stewart, the fake news anchor, came in at No 4. And a study this year concluded that "The Daily Show is clearly impacting American dialogue".

While it scrambled in its early years to book high-profile politicians, it has since become what Newsweek calls "the coolest pit stop on television", with presidential candidates, former presidents, world leaders and administration officials signing on as guests. One of the programme's signature techniques – using video montages to show politicians contradicting themselves – has been widely imitated by "real" news shows, while Stewart's interviews with serious authors have helped them and their books win a far wider audience than they otherwise might have had.

Most important, at a time when Fox, MSNBC and CNN routinely mix news and entertainment, larding their 24-hour schedules with marathon coverage of sexual predators and dead celebrities, it has been The Daily Show that has tenaciously tracked big, "super depressing" issues such as the cherry-picking of pre-war intelligence, the politicisation of the Department of Justice and the efforts of the Bush White House to augment its executive power.

For that matter, the programme, which airs on the Comedy Central channel in the US and on More4 in the UK, and is not above using silly sight gags and juvenile sex jokes to get a laugh – has earned a devoted following that regards it as both the smartest, funniest show on US television and a provocative and substantive source of news.

The Daily Show resonates not only because it is wickedly funny but also because its keen sense of the absurd is perfectly attuned to an era in which cognitive dissonance has become a national epidemic. Indeed, Stewart's frequent exclamation "Are you insane?!" seems a fitting refrain for a post-catch-22 reality, where the surreal and outrageous have become commonplace – an era kicked off by the 2000 election stand-off in Florida, rocked by the terrorist attacks of 11 September and haunted by the fallout of a war waged on the premise of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.

Stewart describes his job as "throwing spitballs" from the back of the room and points out that The Daily Show mandate is to entertain, not inform. Still, he and his writers have energetically tackled the big issues of the day – "the stuff we find most interesting", the sometimes sombre stories he refers to as his "morning cup of sadness". And they've done so in ways that straight news programmes cannot: speaking in blunt, sometimes profane language, while using satire and playful looniness to ensure their political analysis never becomes solemn or pretentious.

"Hopefully the process is to spot things that would be grist for the funny mill," Stewart, 45, says. "In some respects, the heavier subjects are the ones that are most loaded with opportunity because they have the most potential energy, so to delve into that gives you the largest combustion, the most interest. I don't mean for the audience. I mean for us. Everyone here is working too hard to do stuff we don't care about."

Offices for The Daily Show occupy a sprawling, loftlike space that combines the energy of a newsroom with the laid-back vibe of an internet start-up. Many staff members wear jeans and flip-flops, and two amiable dogs wander the hallways. The day begins with a morning meeting where material harvested from 15 digital video recorders and even more newspapers, magazines and websites is reviewed. The meeting, Stewart says, "would be very unpleasant for most people to watch: it's really a gathering of curmudgeons expressing frustration and upset, and the rest of the day is spent trying to mask or repress that through whatever creative devices we can find".

The writers work throughout the morning on deadline pieces spawned by breaking news, as well as longer-term projects, trying to find, as Josh Lieb, a co-executive producer, puts it, stories that "make us angry in a whole new way". By lunchtime, Stewart (who functions as the show's managing editor and says he thinks of hosting as almost an afterthought) has begun reviewing headline jokes. By 3pm a script is in; at 4:15pm, Stewart and the crew rehearse that script, along with assembled graphics, soundbites and montages. There is an hour or so for rewrites – which can be intense, newspaper deadline-like affairs – before a 6pm recording with a live studio audience.

What the staff is always looking for, Stewart says, are "those types of stories that can, almost like the guy in The Green Mile" – the Stephen King story in which a character has the apparent ability to heal others by drawing out their ailments and pain – "suck in all the toxins and allow you to do something with it that is palatable".

To make the more alarming subject matter digestible, the writers search for ways to frame the story, using an arsenal of techniques ranging from wordplay ("Mess O'Potamia", "BAD vertising") to demented fantasy sequences (imagining vice president Dick Cheney sending an army of orcs to attack Iran when he assumed the presidency briefly last year during President Bush's colonoscopy).

Gitmo, an Elmo-style puppet from Guantanamo Bay, became a vehicle for expressing the writers' "most agitated feelings about torture in a way that is – not to be too cute – not torture to listen to, and that is not purely strident", Stewart says. And the cartoon strip "The Decider" featured Bush as a superhero who makes decisions "without fear of repercussion, consequence or correctness".

As the co-executive producer Rory Albanese notes, juxtapositions of video clips and soundbites are one of the show's favourite strategies. It might be Barack Obama speaking to a crowd of 200,000 in Berlin while McCain campaigns in a Pennsylvania grocery store. Or it could be a politician taking two sides of the same argument. One famous segment featured Stewart as the moderator of a debate between Bush when he was governor of Texas in 2000, warning the United States would end up "being viewed as the ugly American" if it went around the world "saying we do it this way – so should you", and President Bush in 2003, extolling the importance of exporting democracy to Iraq.

Often a video clip or news event is so absurd that Stewart says nothing, simply rubs his eyes, does a double take or crinkles his face into an expression of dismay. "When in doubt, I can stare blankly," he says. "The rubber face. There's only so many ways you can stare incredulously at the camera and tilt an eyebrow, but that's your old standby: what would Buster Keaton do?"

Given a daily reality in which "over-the-top parodies come to fruition", Stewart says, satire like Dr Strangelove becomes "very difficult to make".

"The absurdity of what you imagine to be the dark heart of conspiracy theorists' wet dreams far too frequently turns out to be true," he observes.

Stewart says he is looking forward to the end of the Bush administration "as a comedian, as a person, as a citizen, as a mammal". Though he has mocked both McCain and Obama for lapses from their high-minded promises of postpartisanship, he says he doesn't think their current skirmishes are "being conducted on the scale that Bush conducted things, or even the Clintons; I don't think it has the same true viciousness and contempt".

Soon after Stewart joined The Daily Show in 1999, in the waning years of the Clinton administration, he and his staff began to move the programme away from the showbusiness-heavy agenda it had under his predecessor, Craig Kilborn. New technology providing access to more video material gave them growing control over the show's content; the staff, the co-executive producer Kahane Corn says, also worked to choose targets "who deserved to be targets" instead of random, easy-to-mock subjects.

Following 11 September and the invasion of Iraq, the show focused more closely not just on politics, but also on the machinery of policymaking and the White House's efforts to manage the news media. Stewart's comedic gifts and his high-frequency radar for hypocrisy proved to be perfect tools for pointing out the foibles of an administration known for its secrecy, ideological certainty and impatience with dissenting viewpoints.

Over time, the show's deconstructions grew increasingly sophisticated. Its fascination with language, for instance, evolved from chuckles over the president's verbal gaffes ("Is our children learning?" "Subliminable") to ferocious exposés of the administration's Orwellian manipulations: from its efforts to redefine the meaning of the word "torture" to its talk about troop withdrawals from Iraq based on "time horizons" (a strategy, Stewart notes, "named after something that no matter how long you head towards it, you never quite reach it").

For all its criticism of the Bush administration, The Daily Show is animated not by partisanship but by a deep mistrust of all ideology. Stewart displays an impatience with the platitudes of both the right and the left and a disdain for commentators who parrot party-line talking points and engage in knee-jerk shouting matches. He has characterised Democrats as "at best ewoks" and mocked Obama for acting as though he were posing for "a coin".

To the former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, Stewart serves as "the citizens' surrogate", penetrating "the insiders' cult of American presidential politics". He's the man willing to say the emperor has no clothes, to ask why a pre-invasion meeting in March 2003 between President Bush and his allies took all of an hour – the "time it takes Optical Express to make you a pair of bifocals" to discuss "a war that could destroy the global order".

The Daily Show has provided a showcase for a number of gifted comedians who have gone on to other careers – most notably Carell, but while the show is a collaborative effort, as one producer notes, it is "ultimately Jon's vision and voice".

Stewart describes his anchorman character as "a sort of more adolescent version" of himself, and Corn notes that, while things "may be exaggerated on the show, it's grounded in the way Jon really feels".

"He really does care," she adds. "He's a guy who says what he means."

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is on More4, Monday to Friday, 8:30pm.