HOLLYWOOD - Some of the best coverage of the Republican and Democratic national conventions came from a fake news source - Comedy Central's ''The Daily Show.'' For two weeks, the cable series, hosted by Jon Stewart, dispatched its straight-faced correspondents onto the convention floors in Philadelphia and Los Angeles and mocked leaders, delegates, the news media - and most of all the notion that something of social import was taking place.
It was all a lot of fun.
And yet, one couldn't help feeling that ''The Daily Show'' wasn't slinging incisive arrows at the political establishment. The jokes had the tone of something ''establishment'' too - designed to make us feel part of an ''in'' crowd that assumes the worst of politicians but skips past the issues (what issues?), and in the process sends us deeper into our snooze of cynicism. Political comedy - at least in the grand tradition of a Jonathan Swift or a Mort Sahl - is supposed to be unsettling, not reassuring.
But to a young electorate getting a kind of passive political education from entertainment programming in growing numbers, ''The Daily Show'' and others offer a safe and comforting message: Care even less than you already do.
To a large degree, the job of the late-night comedian is to target no politics in particular while lampooning politics in general, a principle scrupulously adhered to by Jay Leno, David Letterman, Stewart, and most of their late-night compatriots.
This is nothing new. When Kenneth Tynan profiled Johnny Carson for the New Yorker in 1978, he encountered various no-fly zones in the interviews, among them ''all subjects of political controversy.''
''It is only fair to remember that he does not pretend to be a pundit, employed to express his own opinions,'' Tynan wrote of Carson. ''Rather, he is a professional explorer of other people's egos.''
Far from achieving a Carson-esque neutrality, however, the late-night gang these days, through their unending stream of easy cynicism about the political system and the leaders running it, do communicate a point of view. Disaffected and blase, they are the embodiment of today's apathetic voter.
''We know that some people watch us for the news, but there's not much we can do about that, unless we open up some sort of mental welfare agency,'' says comic Lewis Black, a regular contributor to ''The Daily Show'' who admits to being somewhat chagrined that the show, which Comedy Central says averaged about 575,000 viewers during the two convention weeks, passes as political news for some.
It would be difficult to take comics to task for mocking politics, but there is a tonal difference in the mocking - an absence not so much of humor as of a lack of commitment to whatever the politics being lampooned.
''The earlier political comics were more opinionated and less indiscriminately and bitterly dismissive,'' says Todd Gitlin, professor of sociology at New York University.
Gitlin is the author of ''The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.'' The '60s were also halcyon years for political comedy, marked by such performers as Sahl, Lenny Bruce, and Dick Gregory, who busted through taboos about race, sex, and politics - outsiders attacking the establishment from several angles. Nobody can expect the same of a late-night comedian today. But why, at a time when comics have far more creative latitude than they did 30 years ago and information has never been more readily available, has the satirical political commentary grown so paradoxically safe?
''You cannot expect to be a fantastic political humorist and have a broad audience. Look how many times Mark Twain went broke,'' says Gregory, who turned racial stereotypes and prejudice into comedic weapons three decades ago, paving the way for Richard Pryor and Chris Rock. Now 67, the comic-turned-social activist lives in Massachusetts.
Maybe, as some people suggest, we simply live in satirically moribund times. Sahl, by contrast, bit into the news when the news was less an extension of a network's entertainment division - when there was a Cold War on and political humor wasn't so sanctioned (Sahl worked at a time when a gig could result in bodily harm). Bruce went to the mat over the First Amendment, taking his comedy into both the clubs and the courtroom.
Today, some political satirists have found their pulpit on the fringes of the entertainment scene. This niche includes Harry Shearer, whose public radio program ''Le Show'' is in its 17th year, and Michael Moore, the renegade filmmaker whose documentary series, ''The Awful Truth,'' on cable's Bravo displays his confrontational brand of sociopolitical satire. The late-night hosts, Moore says, do affect politics today, but in a much different sense.
''Jay Leno likes to say, `I'm an equal-opportunity offender.' Well, then you're not offending anyone,'' says Moore.
''When you take that position, you increase the cynicism in America. Because what you're doing is you're saying to the public, `I don't have political beliefs. I hate it all. I think it all stinks and you should too.' And once people think it all stinks, they don't want to participate anymore,'' Moore says, citing the fact that less than half of eligible voters cast ballots in the last presidential election.
Moore and Shearer, of course, are outsiders - or at least satirists without a mass audience and corporate bosses to placate. This is hardly Leno's mandate; five nights a week, he will tell you, he is paid extremely well to deliver topical, softball jokes for the tender amusement of people ending their long day. As such, Leno doesn't think his monologue reflects a prevailing cynicism; instead, he says, he is feeding a nation that remains blissfully uninformed and uninterested in politics generally.
''Americans think they like politics the way they think they like cars,'' he says. ''Americans don't like car racing, they like car crashes. It's the same thing with politics. They like politics? No, they don't, they like Monica Lewinsky and people caught with their pants down.
''Mort Sahl would go on `The Ed Sullivan Show' and do Joe McCarthy jokes to a country frightened about McCarthy,'' Leno adds. ''He was preaching to the unconverted. Not everything he said was a joke, but it was extremely clever. In the TV world right now, funny beats clever.''
