Political caricatures have been an American staple since the Colonial period. In the late nineteenth century, these sorts of illustrations tended to be scathing social critiques. In the twentieth century, though, news parodies were a bit more milquetoast. This was true even thirty-three years ago, when Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” kicked off the modern form of news parody. Back then, of course, real anchors exuded TV’s version of gravitas and solidity. The SNL Update was just milking anchors’ self-seriousness for laughs.

In the 1990s and 2000s, this satirical mode built up a head of laughing gas with The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Air America’s Al Franken. Comic news has become so popular that it even saved the career of a louche pothead named Bill Maher, who in a few short years went from comic outlier to éminence gris.

According to Bill Wolff, executive producer of The Rachel Maddow Show and vice president of msnbc’s primetime programming, nothing less than George W. Bush has paved the way for his programs, as well as the others. “The funnier side of the political spectrum is the one where your enemies are most ridiculous,” says Wolff.

Maybe, but I think it has more to do with a shift in how people like information conveyed. Bush perhaps accelerated the process. So many felt degraded by the Bush era that they wished to degrade him back, on television. And then there are liberals who are now recalling their long-forgotten weapon: wit. As Jackson Lears, a professor of American history at Rutgers University, says of Maddow and the rest, “After decades of being mocked for excessive earnestness, the Left is remembering what the [1960s] counterculture knew: flagrant lies demand absurdist responses; they deserve to be not merely refuted but laughed to scorn.”

Still, MSNBC’s Wolff admits his network has gone in this direction partly due to the success of its rival network, Fox. A decade ago, Fox was established and MSNBC was just starting to brand itself as a distinct network. After Olbermann’s show became a hit, one might hypothesize that msnbc thought it could go for broke by doubling down on Maddow.

Wolff ties the rise of Maddow and Olbermann to their ability to bring analysis to news audiences. “With information becoming cheap, the success of Rachel and Keith is because people want someone collating or commenting on information,” says Wolff.

A lot of Maddow’s success derives from her taste for the absurd. At one point during the night of my visit, I watched from the sidelines as she showed a Christmas ad made by the coal industry, starring pieces of coal with bulging eyes and green and red carol books. “Anthropomorphic lumps of carbon singing,” Maddow hooted. Three cameras swung around her, using the in-your-face-and-out-of-our-minds technique so beloved by Olbermann. She then went further into the comedy ether: “The earth’s rotation is slowing down . . . that’s fodder for your next existential crisis.”

Throughout her show, Maddow’s bookishness comes through her wit. Early in the fall, she had a field day with Sarah Palin’s penchant for falsehoods, but in a very particular way. On one show around the election, she called Palin “a prevaricating, mendacious truth-stretcher or whatever other thesaurus words we can come up with for lying, is just far less efficient than calling a lie a lie, and a liar a liar.” I realized that in order to find this fully funny, you had to like jokes about abusing the thesaurus.

In October, Maddow’s wit became the accidental subject of one of her shows: a tormented-looking David Frum complained on-air that her humor was juvenile. “Making jokes about it is part of the way that I am talking about it,” Maddow fired back. “I don’t necessarily agree with you on ‘grown up.’ I think there’s room for all sorts of different kinds of discourse, including satire, including teasing, including humor. There’s a lot of different ways to talk about stuff, and Americans absorb information in a lot of different ways.”

Alissa Quart is a CJR columnist and contributing editor. She is the author of two books, Branded and Hothouse Kids. Her third, about American outsiders, comes out in 2013. She is also senior editor of The Atavist and an adjunct professor at Columbia Journalism School.