Perhaps it was too early for laughs?

Making his first Sunday-morning-show appearance on Fox News, comedian Jon Stewart engaged in a serious back-and-forth with the cable news network's Christopher Wallace.

The tense dialog was punctuated with Wallace taking aim at Stewart's coverage of Fox News.

Wallace's point: Aren't you, as well as the rest of the "mainstream media," as you accuse us, ideologically biased?

Drinking from a coffee cup that had the term "fair and balanced" silk-screened onto it, Stewart threw it back at the anchor: 

"I’m not an activist, I’m a comedian," he said combatively. "What I do is much harder than what you do. I put the material through a comedic process."

He added: "Are you suggesting that you and I are the same?"

Wallace: "I think you want to be a political player."

Stewart: "You are wrong. Dead wrong... You can't understand, because of the world you live in, that there is not a designed ideological agenda on my part to affect ideological change, because that is the soup you swim in. Ideological regimes can't understand that there is a free media somewhere, because they take marching orders."

Here's the video: