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Tallying Buzz for Stewart and Colbert's "Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear"

By Catharine Taylor

Updated on: October 29, 2010 / 4:12 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

Let everyone else wring their hands about whether Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and Steve Colbert should be dancing across the line that in the past has separated comedy and politics. It's time to read the tea leaves concerning how the "Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear" is shaping up as an event, based on already-existing online and offline data about interest. So, here it is: the momentum for the rally by the numbers:

Google results returned for the phrase: "Rally to Restore Sanity": 18.4 million.
On Facebook: 228,000 attending; 111,000 may be attending. (Note: this figure has fluctuated wildly today, from a low of 10,000 to this number. News reports, however, suggest the 200,000 and up figure is more accurate. Not that all those people will actually show up. There's a big difference between clicking on "yes" and trekking to DC.)
On Twitter: 87,349 followers.
On Foursquare: over 2500 friends.
Meetups: 1,212, in a total of 86 countries, totaling almost 6,000 people.
Sharing activity of bit.ly links to rallytorestoresanity.com: 90 Tweets, 35,057 Facebook Shares; 29,836 Facebook Likes.
Most views of a YouTube clip related to the rally: More than 44,000 -- for a video from the world's favorite Taiwanese animators, naturally.
Number of people who watched Wednesday night's Daily Show featuring a walk-up interview to the rally (and election) with President Obama: 2.8 million. (That's roughly 900,000 more than usual.)

The strange thing about all these stats is that the arena of ratings numbers for the actual show remains completely uncharted territory. I can't think of a time -- if ever -- that Comedy Central has done a live event on a Saturday afternoon. (Fortunately, the rally does not conflict with the World Series, which starts at 6:57 p.m. ET.)

Thus, the real measure of the event's success -- besides whether Stewart and Colbert can prove that comedy and political rallies mix -- will be in its attendance, and the man to beat, of course, is Fox News' Glenn Beck. Estimates for attendance to his "Restoring Honor" rally in August ranged from a low of 78,000 to a high of 500,000. Since part of restoring sanity to the political process seems to be about dealing in facts, we can only hope that this rally's estimates are more accurate. But don't count on it.

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