Last night marked the return of two of Comedy Central’s three biggest cash cows, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report (the third being airings of fifth-rate teen sex romp movies).

It was…awkward.

Over the past two months, Sara and I have been robbed of watching these two stellar late-night talk shows before we tumble off to bed. In the interim, we’ve worn out our collection of Simpsons DVD sets. Go ahead, ask me what Ralph-ism was used in episode 504. I dare you.

But, last night we were once again able to drink in the sweet nectar that is Jon and Stephen, to a degree. Both of them are talented comedians, Stewart having been a popular stand-up comic for years and Colbert honing his chops as a member of Second City, so ad-libbing for a half hour television show wasn’t too difficult for either of them. Colbert, in my opinion, seemed to fare better, having a persona to hide behind and using a multitude of clips from previous shows to eat up time.

Jon Stewart, on the other hand, was funny as usual, but a bit more abrasive than Colbert. Since he’s the Executive Producer for both the Daily Show and The Colbert Report, it seemed that the failure to come to a short-term compromise with his team of writers, a la David Letterman’s Worldwide Pants company, left him feeling more than a little bitter toward the ongoing strike.

While it was obvious that he’s a supporter of the WGA (he’s a member, duh), he also appeared tired of the ongoing dispute, throwing almost as many barbs at the writer’s guild as he did at the tight-fisted television and movie producers. To show what he feels is the apparent absurdity of the whole situation, he liked the current situation to that of the late-night talk shows after Sept. 11, 2001, pointing out that they were off the air for only a week after that disaster, but that in the midst of the current mess, they’ve been off the air for nine weeks.

“Which means that the writer’s strike is as bad as NINE 9/11’s!” said Stewart. Well put, sir.

It was nice to have two of my favorite men of late-night back on the air to skewer our political and cultural foibles. Not that I was having a hard time figuring out which absurdity to laugh at, but because they do it so much better than I do, while dressed in a snappy suit and tie.

I hope that the strikers reach an amiable, or at least civil, agreement to come back to work soon. It’s gone on far too long and the longer it drags out, the more pig-headed each side is going to become. We’re already starting to see the networks scrape the bottom of the barrel for reality TV and game shows (American Gladiators, just about anything premiering on FOX) and I’m not sure that those of us with an IQ over 80 can handle it much longer.