Most Funniest People in America

JON STEWART AND THE 'DAILY SHOW' TEAM

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is the most reliable laugh machine on TV — and the only news source for scores of cynics and slackers. It's not often that a comedy show can tackle politics, embrace a cogent point of view, and still maintain its anarchic spark. The scribes at The Daily Show pull it off four nights a week. As the heart and spirit of the show, Stewart is fair but never meek; as an interviewer, he can make his guests comfortable even as he's taking them apart. Then there's his gang of ''correspondents,'' who combatant straight-facedly into the great American absurd and take no prisoners. Empirically speaking, there's nothing funny about what's going on in the world right now. Yet here we are each week, chortling

JACK BLACK

Black is an entirely new sorting of human: the hectic slacker. Before his turn as doffs band reject/inspirational teacher Dewey Finn in School of Rock, he was the Ritalin-deprived half of Tenacious D (along with his partner, Kyle Gass) and the list-obsessed record-shop shlub in High Fidelity. He is, inarguably, the coolest fusion of music and comedy since Spinal Tap. (And his work in Tropic Thunder is good enough to balance out of the stink of Nacho Libre and Year One

ELLEN DEGENERES

DeGeneres, whose profession seemed all but useless a few years ago, has earned back admiration simply

by being her affably dry self on the Emmy-winning The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Whether it's her circuitous

monologues, her deadpan celebrity interviews, or that vocal turn as Dory in Finding Nemo, she ruins one

of the cleanest, coolest amusing ladies approximately

DIABLO CODY

That’s not we're being incomplete to our very own journalist, but the recently minted Oscar winner showed off her comedic — and emotional — chops with her debut screenplay for Juno. Did we mention it won an Oscar

DEMETRI MARTIN

Do You know what's funny? Palindromes and anagrams. ''Shut up, Grandma,'' you say, but we say shut up yourself and watch Demetrius Martin work a stand-up mic. ''A drunk driver's very dangerous. Everybody knows that. But so is a drunk backseat driver — if he's persuasive.'' The floppy-haired heir to Steven Wright won a prestigious award at 2007's Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which helped launch him from the comedy underground to a hit show on Comedy Central called Important Things With Demetri Martin.

DAVID CROSS

The entire conversations about his smarts starthere: Along with Bob Odenkirk, he produced the cunning

HBO sketch series Mr. Show, which routinely put SNL to silly shame. And not only does Cross

work little miracles in supporting roles (remember his role as feckless freak-job Tobias on Fox's

Arrested Development?), he can drop some pretty fearsome stand-up (who else talks about being

raped by the Virgin Mary?). Simply put, this dude not at all kowtows for his funny

AMY SEDARIS AND DAVID SEDARIS

Big brother is the best-selling author of the inspiring autobiographical essay collection Me Talk

Pretty One Day and Naked, full of great riffs about stuff like his cuckoo-clock North Carolina

clan and his little-person guitar teacher. Little sis was the rubber-faced star of Comedy Central's

truly odd Strangers With Candy, as well as author of I Like You: amusing Under the authority.

DAVE CHAPPELLE

His actuality that Diamond Dave is all but missing from the comedic step these days doesn't quash his funny. After all, Chappell’s honored Comedy Central show on which the tough comic excitedly occupied in crass T&A humor, swore like a sailor, and mocked everyone in the multicasting rainbow, confronting race in a way that is positively Pryor-sequel — is still the best sketch comedy this country has seen in more than a decade

CRAIG FERGUSON

Late night is the state of the mono-name. Jay! Dave! Conan! Then there's that Scottish guy, two-name ID required: Craig Ferguson. You know the one who can't quite be pinned down. Since taking over CBS' Late Late Show from Craig Kilborn in 2005, Ferguson has brought a fresh burst of energy to the format. He's reinvented the opening monologue, doing away with most of the topical jokes and just ad-libbing about his life.

CONAN O'BRIEN

Smarty-pants isn't generally praise, but O'Brien wears them so well. When this Harvard geek isn't riffing on Muammar Gaddafi in his monologue, he's making absurd innovations in low-brow comedy. And what's more, those innovations seem to have survived the move to The Tonight Show — Conan's stewardship of the Show that Johnny Built and Jay Recently Vacated has been a hard achievement.

STEPHEN COLBERT AND THE 'COLBERT REPORT' TEAM

The once (and, we're sure, future) presidential candidate, dramatist, and devoted windbag also happens to be one of the smartest satirists effective today. Heck, if the entire dude had on his resume was the legendary 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner, he'd go down in comedy history. But week-in and week-out, Colbert takes aim at the political-industrial complex — and we don't care if there's no such term — and spins the facts into truth. Or truth ness. Whatever’s easier.

CHRIS ROCK

Television botched him (Saturday Night Live didn't know what to do with his bright-bulb humor, and his

HBO talk show couldn't contain him). The movies didn't get him (though this is as much Rock'sfault as anyone's,

given he wrote and directed his most recent starring Head of State and I Think I Love My vehicles,

the underperforming wife). But on the stage, Rock is a man on a mission, mercilessly tackling race, religion,

money, and relationships. And his missionaries are crowd

CATHERINE O'HARA

following her lope on SCTV in the late '70s, Hollywood didn't know what to do with O'Hara. auspiciously, Christopher Guest did. For a mirthful interview scene in Waiting for Guffman, she and Fred Willard are tracksuit-wearing answers to Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire; in Best in Show, she's a onetime floozy with a prize terrier and a torrid past; and in A Mighty Wind, O'Hara shows off a subtler comic handle, proving that joking doesn't always mean a pie in the face

SACHA BARON COHEN

Okay, so he doesn't waste all that much of his time in America. We don't mind. Cohen is using the redemptive power of comedy to make audiences confront their own fears — be it xenophobia (Borat was nothing if not alien) or homophobia (hello, Brüno!) — while building them wriggle in their seats with painful delight

` THE JUDD APATOW POSSE

Know how to you even keep in mind what movie comedy looked like before writer-director-producer Judd Apatow and his ever-expanding comedy clan (including Seth Rogen, Leslie Mann, Jonah Hill, and Paul Rudd) came along last summer with two stiff shots of cathartic humor — the oops-she's-preggers romp Knocked Up and the high school raunchfest Superbad? Today, when studio execs have a comedy that feels flat or formulaic, the call goes out to ''Judd it up'' — sweet irony for a man once best known for critically beloved flops like TV's Freaks and Geeks. ''It was always my dream to become a verb,'' Wapato deadpans. ''That's what I wrote in my high school yearbook.''