“Those two do their best work exactly we’re they’re doing it, [on television],” Robert Thompson, the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University told POLITICO. (One need only recall Colbert’s performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner and his recent testimony on Capitol Hill to raise the question about the effectiveness of taking satire out into the world.)

Andy Cobb, a comedian and political editor of Chicago-based comedy troupe The Second City, agreed that the setting presents significant challenges and that Stewart and Colbert will have to tweak their delivery if they want to get laughs…

Yet beyond the free-wheeling format, the biggest obstacle for the famously droll duo may be the very essence of the comedians’ schtick. “Rallies are not about irony,” said Thompson. “They’re about something you believe in, like the ‘I have a dream’ rally on the Mall….Irony, when you put that into the mode of the idiom of a rally, I’m not sure how that’s going to play.”