You know The Daily Show, right? It's a fake news show that mocks real news. Pretty funny, usually.

Anyway, some poll or other showed that a large portion of their audience gets their news solely from The Daily Show.

Jon Stewart, the host, along with various other writers on the show, object to this idea regularly. They say that the audience wouldn't get the show if they didn't already know the news. Basically, their theory seems to be, the news is the setup for the joke, and their show is the punchline.

But I don't think that's true. People know how a joke is structured. They can tell when Stewart is going for a laugh (especially since they have a live audience), and then work backwards to the source of the joke.

For instance, a friend of mine once justified his downloading of music by saying, "I'm not going to buy Belinda Carlisle's Greatest Hits just so I can listen to 'Heaven is a Place on Earth."

Now, if you just stopped me on the street and asked who Belinda Carlisle was before I heard this joke, I would have no idea. Maybe I could guess she was a musician, but even that's iffy.

But based on that joke, I can tell, one, that she wrote (or at least performed) "Heaven is a Place on Earth," and two, she probably doesn't have a large number of other good songs.

Couldn't this carry over to an entire half hour of comedy? I think so.