Jon Stewart is making my ass tired

Much as I usually like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, I'm finding myself increasingly unable to watch the entire show these days. The reasons are threefold:

1) Jon seems to be coasting lately. It used to be funny when he'd be lackadaisical about messing up a bit or dragging a laugh line out too long or making an obscure joke that only the studio audience would get. Now he does all three things too often and/or for too long. I feel like my 14 minutes of comedy (30 minutes minus the ads and the usually tedious interview) has shrunk down to about 11.

2) The focus on Fox News and their crazy mob followers is depressing me no end. Yes, Stewart and his writers do a nice job of pointing out their craziness (signs at town hall meetings saying "Government, Keep Your Hands Off of Medicare!") and their hypocrisy (showing that the Fox commentators who fully back today's screaming health-care reform protesters railed against the screaming anti-war and anti-Bush protesters of a few years ago). But the sense that they are preaching to the converted has become smothering, and the narrow focus on the health-care "debate" to the exclusion of most any other kind of political or news satire is stretching my nerves thin.

3) We record The Daily Show and the Colbert Report together as a one-hour block, and as Colbert still seems to make me laugh, I am anxious to speed through Stewart to get to Colbert.

This makes me a little sad, but I'm hoping when the health care monolith either stands erect or crumbles to the ground, Jon and company will feel like they can move on.

PS: I don't know what the phrase, "makes my ass tired" really means or where it came from. My dad used it all the time, in a kind of frustrated, weary way, and I guess it just means that I'm tired of something, but, as ass-related humor always makes me laugh, I like using this phrase whenever I can.