Jon Stewart performs at the Borgata

People forget that before he was the mock anchor of Comedy Central's

The Daily Show

, Jon Stewart was a conventional comedian.

Over the weekend, the man who has become America's best-known political gadfly returned to his roots with four shows at the Borgata in Atlantic City.

This was old-school stand-up: a bare stage, a microphone, and a stool with two bottles of Fiji water on top.

At one point, after a piercing punch line that combined dark irony and profanity, he said in a mewling cartoonish voice, "You're not the nice man from the television show. He wears a suit, and he's taller."

Actually, Stewart's humor at the early show on Saturday was very much in line with his Daily Show persona (except on TV, the expletives get bleeped). Only the topics were broader.

Politics was on the agenda early. He opened with a diatribe about the Democrats' bafflingly ineffectual governing style, then expressed dismay that the whole country seems locked in a tug-of-war over the same old tired topics.

"I can imagine gay marriage being an issue in America," he said, then paused. "If Congress made it mandatory."

Pacing the stage, his voice rough, almost hoarse, Stewart used a delivery a good deal slower than his often manic on-air apoplexy.

After opening the bomb-bay doors on Dick Cheney, he moved on to more mundane matters: religion, pets, and kids. It was surprising to see the Will Rogers of his generation graphically imitating first a cat in heat and then a dog with "explosive diarrhea."

Of his home life, Stewart joked, "I'm Jewish. My wife is Catholic. We've decided to raise [our children] to be sad."

Opening the show, Rory Albanese, a Daily Show producer, devoted much of his act to jokes about the Jersey Shore.

Stewart has a connection to the Garden State, having grown up in Lawrenceville. In fact the evening, to his delight, turned into an unplanned mini-reunion as two audience members identified themselves as his classmates at Lawrence High.

He reminisced about his postcollege days, working at a dive bar on Route 1, using the Boss as his bard.

"When you listened to Springsteen, you weren't a loser," he noted. "You were a character in an epic poem . . . about losers."

It was fitting to hear Stewart muse on his pre-fame days. His brand of intelligent absurdism made him come off as the honor student who is also the class clown, the guy who leads the debate team and still keeps the kids at the lunch table in stitches.