lots of very 90's teevee tropes in this

-sparse audience occasionally erupting with spastic machine gun laughter
-the spacey ironic detachment of both guest and host (influenced by I think that awful MTV show Remote Control, of all things)
-BAD TRACKING...that poor VITC

The ORIGINAL Daily show had no audience, but you could hear the crew cracking up. I miss that sometimes, that small intimate studio feeling. I love what Jon Stewart has done. He's the most important media critic around, at a time when we need sharp media critics, but he keeps going for the big applause line, and that's a little annoying. To be fair, he's just giving the studio audience what they want. They come to the Daily Show to make some noise.

Think I'll Google Craig Kilborn and find out if he's still alive.

I guess I should have made it explicit. The reason why Jon Stewart is the most important media critic is because he's on TV. There's really no other reason. He's probably not the smartest or most original media critic, but I rarely read media critics, so I wouldn't know for sure. He's on TV, so he reaches the largest number of people. I think having the largest audience is a perfectly valid criteria for being the most important.