There was an interesting, possibly pivotal moment on “The Daily Show” last week when Jon Stewart, in the midst of poking gentle fun at Senator Obama for his faux-presidential seal and his decision to opt out of the public finance system in the general election, reminded his studio audience that they were “allowed to laugh at” the man compared in this week’s edition of New York magazine to “Lincoln, Gandhi, Cicero, Jesus, and all our most cherished national acronyms (MLK, JFK, RFK, FDR).”

Mr. Stewart’s act of comic daring, which I suppose it was given the insularly partisan world of most television comedy, was also self-interested. After all, he needs to be able to make jokes. In a multicultural world, the Bush years have been a blessing to white, male comedians such as Mr. Stewart, Stephen Colbert, David Letterman, Bill Maher, et al. Here was a president you could mock endlessly and viciously — even to his face, as Mr. Colbert did during the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in 2006 — and it would always be a good career move.

But what if Mr. Obama becomes president, as may well happen? Comedians will be forced to take him on, of course, but few will relish the opportunity. In fact, those middle-aged satirists may be as reluctant to launch “personal” attacks on Mr. Obama as his elderly Republican challenger currently seems to be. They may even find themselves facing similar problems. In the London Spectator, Reihan Salam compared Mr. Obama’s candidacy to a high-end consumer brand. “The halo of progressive cool that surrounds, say, Apple or Google or the Prius is Obama’s greatest weapon. That is precisely why traditional attacks against Obama backfire. They seem somehow gauche, and thus they prove more damaging to the attacker than to Obama himself.”

When comedians have gone after Mr. Obama, they have already come under fire. A blogger on the Huffington Post wrote a long post sternly chastising Mr. Stewart for “regurgitating Republican talking points” during his skit. Jim Downey, a writer for “Saturday Night Live,” was invited to explain the rationale for some velvet-soft Obama send-ups to Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s “Hardball.” I doubt anyone would be required to justify Mr. Letterman’s old-man quips about Mr. McCain, such as the fact that a bandage on his forehead wasn’t due to a recurrence of skin cancer, but because he accidentally picked up the iron instead of the telephone.

As a joke, that’s easy, nasty, and funny, and there’s an endless supply of them. But should Mr. Obama prevail, comedians may find the jokes difficult, tame, and hard to come by. They may even find the joke’s on them. To quote a witty Internet poster responding to the Huffington Post critique of Mr. Stewart:

“As you said, ‘Jon Stewart and the Daily Show should be mindful whenever Obama is the target of their satire that they don’t end up regurgitating Republican talking points.’ By what methods should the Mindfulness Retraining be conducted? We have Mr. Stewart and the Offending Writers in our basement right now, so any guidance you could provide would be timely.”

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If I had to pick the television personalities of the last fortnight, I’d go with ESPN’s irrepressible gang of English, Irish, and Scottish soccer commentators, who, along with a few others, collectively made “Euro 2008,” the European version of the World Cup that ended on Sunday with Spain’s 1-0 victory over Germany, a resounding television success, not to mention a great excuse to hang out in a bar all afternoon. Thanks to the commentary, it was not just a pleasure to watch, but to listen to as well.

The best known of the ESPN gang in America is Tommy Smyth — he of “the bulge in the auld onion bag,” as he refers to the moment when a soccer ball hits the back of the net. As a “color commentator,” Mr. Smyth, a colorlessly bald, vowel-twisting Irishman, is corny but irresistible. It was worth tuning in just to hear him pronounce “Spain” as “Spay-in,” with the emphasis placed so violently on the first syllable that it made a great nation sound like a painful medical procedure. For several years a regular presence during ESPN2’s coverage of the UEFA Champions League, Mr. Smyth has done as much as anyone to make soccer an event on American television. And he’s done it by not sounding American at all.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s that in a globalized era, selling Americans on a foreign sport can only be helped by emphasizing its foreignness. Which is perhaps why another of ESPN’s soccer commentators for “Euro 2008” was the Scotsman, Andy Gray. Normally a commentator for Britain’s Sky News, Mr. Gray possesses an accent every bit as thick (and occasionally impenetrable) as Mr. Smyth’s. A characteristic example of his style came during the semifinal between Germany and Turkey, when a Turk (or “Tearque,” as Mr. Gray would pronounce it) had the skin on the top of his skull split open following a mid-air collision with a 7-foot German. Mr. Gray led us through the painful medical procedure that followed.

“There ye go,” he remarked phlegmatically as a doctor quickly stitched up the head of the 5-foot Turk, who was still on the field. “See the staple gun. Thaat’s a staaple gun. Yeah, they just pull the skin together, rhaattle a couple o’ staples into it, say, ‘C’mon, son, oop ye get, this is the semifinal!'”

And that was that. If soccer’s appeal in wealthy enclaves such as Manhattan has a whiff of metrosexual pseudo-sophistication about it, ESPN has been smart enough to fill the airwaves with no-nonsense purveyors of Irish brogues and Scottish burrs who relish the game’s physical aspect and thus flatter the metrosexual’s masculine and feminine sides simultaneously. As for American accents, except during brief half-time analysis, they were noticeable chiefly by their absence. And Americans, it seems, were more than happy about it.

bbernhard@nysun.com