This is perhaps the wrong time of year to suggest that everyone should watch television instead of writing those papers, but I must insist that setting aside the hour from 11 to midnight is absolutely necessary.

Since October, The Daily Show on Comedy Central has been followed by its spinoff, The Colbert Report, essentially making The Daily Show an hour-long program. Marked by the personalities of their hosts, the shows differ in character but possess the same mocking, exaggerated, sometimes silly humor.

Jon Stewart gets to be his own charming self on his show, but on The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert plays a distinct character: a send-up of pundits, most obviously Bill O’Reilly. Colbert assumes the direct gaze, deliberate over-enunciation and dismissive arrogance of the Bill O’Reilly type, which can be a little off-putting, but makes for terrific parody.

Pundits have long been a target of The Daily Show, even before the spinoff, and bad journalism is a particular interest of Stewart’s. One of the best segments on The Daily Show is “Great Moments in Punditry As Read By Children” — a bit where young kids stumble through the childish lines and come-backs actually spoken by the likes of O’Reilly, Hannity and Colmes.

One of Stewart’s most famous moments — and most bandied about on the internet — was not from The Daily Show, but from his appearance on Crossfire, where he refused to play the funny man. Instead, he attacked Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala for being fake journalists like himself, instead of the real journalists they profess to be.

Stewart frequently has writers and journalists as guests on his own show, and while he is still generally jokey with them, he is unafraid to ask serious questions. Despite being a comedian, Stewart is clearly willing to engage in the debate about what journalism really is today, and what it should be.

Colbert, more subtly on his own show, is also engaging in that debate. On the very first segment of “The Word” — probably the funniest part of his show, where he goes on an opinionated rant, and a few phrases appear in a box as contradiction or exaggeration — he reinvented the obsolete word “truthiness,” redefining it technically as “the quality by which a person purports to know something emotionally or instinctively, without regard to evidence or to what the person might conclude from intellectual examination.” Or, as Colbert said in an interview with The Onion, “Truthiness is ‘What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.’”

It was just a joke, until the American Dialect Society picked “truthiness” as the 2005 Word of the Year, and The New York Times hailed it as one of the words that defined 2005. “Truthiness” is more than a joke — it is a very pointed criticism of what our political and journalistic discourse has become.

This is the problem with The Daily Show and The Colbert Report — they are both extremely funny shows, but at some point during each program, you reach the sobering realization that the government Stewart mocks is our government and the pundits Colbert parodies are real pundits. “Truthiness,” probably more so than any other word, defines our culture, in which personal opinions are treated as fact, Bill O’Reilly has a job and a White House spokesperson can actually say, “We create our own reality.”

The invasion of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report into our collective consciousness does not end with “truthiness.” Some of the more amusing parts of The Colbert Report have mutated on the internet — now, on snubster.com, you can create your very own “on notice” and “dead to me” lists, just like Stephen Colbert. Finally, a vehicle to express just how and why ResEd is “dead to me” because they refuse to let seniors off campus.

Also, Comedy Central recently announced yet another spinoff of The Daily Show: Red State Diaries, hosted by Lewis Black. The show is scheduled to debut sometime this year, and is expected to be another effort in the same vein as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report: a “fake” news show that explores and uncovers more of the truth than the “real” shows do.