This year’s election is over and, one hopes, the silliness has either abated or is abating.  You’ll be able to listen to radio or TV without being deluged with political ads, which is a good thing.  Only those who watch cable political news/chat shows will have to hear about cable political news/chat shows.

Life will once again be something like normal.  All the manufactured crises will be over for a time, at least until the presidential election of 2012 gears up – which will, of course, happen sooner than anybody wants.  In other words, if you’re hoping Sarah Palin will go away anytime soon, I have bad news for you.

The way elections play out in this country is one of the most inexplicable things about our culture.  Everybody claims to be disgusted with the process and thoroughly turned off by it.  But it never changes, except maybe that it gets worse.  The way elections go here serve somebody’s purpose.  Obviously, the more controversy is ginned up, the more the media benefits, so it’s in the media’s interests to make sure elections are as nasty as possible.  But still, consider this:  If people weren’t buying what the media was selling, there would be no incentive for the media to do what it does.

Of course, there’s a sort of meta-issue involved here too; the media is selling itself.

That was particularly evident last weekend when the national media fell all over itself trying to cover the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington.

The chattering classes have developed a bit of a history when it comes to Stewart and Colbert, the two most brilliant political satirists of our day.

In the first place, it drives the regular media crazy that a significant portion of the population – something like 10 percent – gets its main news analysis from Stewart.  And I’d venture a guess that a significant portion of that 10 percent includes younger audience members, the ones most prized by advertisers because they have wads of disposal income and no children to spend it on.

But what really drives the chattering classes crazy is that people are even listening to Stewart at all.  He’s a comedian for God’s sake.  He’s never worked as a flack for a politician.  He doesn’t have all that inside knowledge that so informs the work of the Serious Commentators.

But worse than all that, Stewart has had the temerity to suggest – as he did toward the end of last weekend’s rally – that perhaps the way journalism is being practiced in this country serves neither the nation nor the best traditions of the profession itself.  He has dared to tell the Washington press corps that it’s doing a less than stellar job.  Lordy lordy, he doesn’t just criticize the politicians, he criticizes the reporters; in fact, he probably criticizes the reporters more.  How dare he?

Colbert, whose style is somewhat different than Stewarts – he plays a character, basically a less reasonable form of Bill O’Reilly, which is like playing a more out-of-control form of Lindsay Lohan – hasn’t quite taken the same kind of guff from the national press, at least recently.  You might remember a few years ago, when he gave a brilliant but snarky speech before the annual White House Correspondents Dinner.  His audience walked away mightily irritated.  The next year, having learned their lesson, they opted instead for the cutting-edge comedy stylings of … wait for it … Rich Little.

In the run-up to last weekend’s rally, there was a lot of portentous crap written because Stewart apparently played it a little too close to the vest about who would be on the program.  People were actually writing stories saying, “What is Jon Stewart hiding?”

And afterwards, a lot of the talking heads were gassing about What It All Meant.  They parsed Stewart’s half-serious concluding statement, which basically was a plea to ratchet down the noise and conflict – and coverage of same.

All in all, it probably was the best-covered comedy show in the history of entertainment.  It didn’t hurt that it happened on a Saturday, when everything else Washington reporters cover is closed for the weekend, and that it was a fairly short event, which meant the reporters probably didn’t have to work a full day – or at least could take next Friday off to make up for it if they had to.  And it also allowed the reporters to put honest-to-goodness funny stuff in their stories.  One of my favorites was a sign carried by one of the people in the crowd:  “Does this sign make my butt look big?”

What makes so much of the discussion before and after the rally absurd is all that hot air was expended on a comedy show.  You could see some commentators actually physically strain to attach significance to it.  By God, it was going to Mean Something if they had anything to say about it.

I’ve been a big George Carlin fan my whole life.  He was arguably the best comic of his generation and almost certainly the most intelligent.  And one of the reasons I loved his comedy was that there were some real ideas behind it.  But I loved him most of all because he made me laugh.  Hell, I liked PeeWee Herman too and nobody ever accused him of being particularly cerebral.

Well, guess what, you political pundits/reporters/flacks?  That rally on the Washington Mall Saturday probably meant a whole lot less than you said it did.  It starred two comedians and was put on by a cable television channel devoted to comedy.  You can look for all the significance you want, but the best thing you could do is get a laugh.