Jon Stewart must be an incredibly sick individual to work so hard to get laughs out of something he considers to be torture. And his audience too, must be awfully sick to find so much humor in it:

Stewart’s audience seems to understand – at some level – that if you can be waterboarded 183 times and live to tell the tale, it’s probably not torture – at least not torture in the traditional sense. After all, this audience wouldn’t laugh at jokes about taking a power drill to someone’s face, or hanging someone from a ceiling and electrocuting them – as our enemies do. Even Stewart apparently recognizes that this is something different; it’s hard to imagine a routine like this one otherwise.

Stewart may not have intended it this way, but he provides an excellent illustration of just how unserious this entire discussion is – except that is, for the government employees involved in interrogation of prisoners, and the American people whose security depends on the best intelligence possible.