Jon Stewart Does the Wang

Surely you're familiar with the question "Who are the top five people you'd invite to a dinner party?" And Jesus and Mark Twain invariably end up on the list.

Well, Jon Stewart is rivaling those two for the top spot, as shown by his performance this past weekend at the Wang Center. Jon Stewart would make the best dinner-party companion because he knows how to mix high-, middle-, and low-brow. OK, there wasn't all that much high-brow unless you count a brief reference to French existentialism, and one of his first jokes was about "The Wang," but Stewart moves effortlessly from the serious to the not-so-serious, from Dennis Hastert's corruption to his dog's explosive diarrhea.

Although he recycled some of his old chestnuts, such as "Reasonable people with moderate views don't usually light their torches and head out to town with pitchforks shouting, 'Be reasonable!'" he threw in some clever observations about how the Wang looks like the inside of Marie Antoinette's privates and how, in the general scheme of things, Mother Earth just equates the existence of human beings to a brief case of eczema.

Despite the size of the Wang (excuse Bostonist's pun – Stewart started it!), Stewart was able to keep the large audience engaged throughout the show. He gently heckled some front-row latecomers, and he reached out to the nosebleed seats when a woman shouted, "Shut up!" during a lull in the show. Stewart quickly responded, "God, I'm monopolizing the conversation!" No wonder everyone from Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf to Samuel L. Jackson feels comfortable taking questions from Stewart. He made the entire audience feel as if they'd just emerged from a riotous, but insightful, cocktail chat. Great reviews have been coming in from both the early and the late show – most notably was the comment he made after both sets on the streets of the Theatre District: "it was better that way (going to the earlier show) since if he completely sucked, there was still time to have a real evening out."

Post by Caroline Roberts. Photo from Flickr user and local (for now) blogger abbyladybug - who captured Jon Stewart in the same pose no less than three times outside the Wang.