Still, I was not impressed. I was invited to this party because I had just performed in the comedy festival, standing onstage, on only two feet, and speaking words using the power of human speech. Plus, I am able to sweat through my skin, not just through panting. And these guys, sorry, these dogs, Linus and Chompers, were invited to the same party, simply because they are DOGS ON THE INTERNET. That was when I realized that, though at this time I had spent the last decade of my life on television, as the “resident expert” and “deranged millionaire” on “The Daily Show” — plus a variety of mustachioed creeps in several dramas and comedies — I didn’t know what entertainment was anymore.

A few months earlier, I went to the Emmys with “The Daily Show.” It was 2015, the last year the show would be nominated with Jon Stewart as host. It was fun. There were no dogs there. I had been invited to go with “The Daily Show” to the Emmys for several years, starting in 2008. The hosts that year were Tom Bergeron, Heidi Klum, Howie Mandel, Jeff Probst and Ryan Seacrest. All of them, onstage, talking over one another. It was the first year the Television Academy offered an award for hosting a reality show, and all five hosts were nominated. Reality television had been dominating traditional scripted television in the ratings for a decade, and scripted television had been trying to pretend it wasn’t happening. But this year the academy wanted to show that it was taking reality television seriously, and it did so by treating each of reality television’s biggest stars as one-fifth of a human being.

When I first started going to the Emmys, before you were born, there were only about 100 television shows, and all of them were on traditional television. When a show won an award, the whole house erupted in applause, because even if it wasn’t the show the audience wanted to win, they had at least heard the name of that show once in their lives. But this year, my last year, it was clear how much had changed. Now there was an almost overwhelming number of television shows. To illustrate this point, an acquaintance would ask, “If I told you that Patrick Stewart was currently starring in a brand-new TV show that is airing on cable right now, would you even be able to name it?” In fact I could name it — but mostly because I had been on two episodes of it.

There is no television anymore, but also there is only television. And now at the Emmys, there weren’t huge applause moments anymore. Just isolated pockets of clapping, like small fireworks cracking over distant hills, far on the other side of the valley, briefly illuminating neighboring towns you were never going to visit. Here is a nomination for Coach Friday Night Lights for his work on a streaming show that is about a family sitting on a Florida dock with their feet in the water, I guess? the announcer might say, and then: clap, clap over there in the mezzanine. Here is a nomination for the star of the prison show we called a comedy last year, but this year is a drama because categories are meaningless now and we don’t know what TV is anymore! Clap, clap somewhere behind me. Clap, clap. Here is a win for Tilda Swinton’s secret talk show filmed in the International Space Station and shown exclusively on the seat backs of Japanese bullet trains! (That’s not a thing, but it will be.) Clap. Clap.

It was like listening to the culture fragment in real time. There were only three moments I recall when the house really exploded with applause. One was when Jon Hamm finally won the Lead Actor Emmy for “Mad Men” after eight nominations. The second moment wasn’t even an award. It was when Taraji P. Henson and Terrence Howard were introduced as presenters. This was at the very beginning of “Empire,” and the bomb cyclone of cheers in the room reminded us that, at least for now, there was still a thing called broadcast television, and it reached a lot of people. And the third was Jon Stewart. Jon had already handed the show over to Trevor Noah at this point, but “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” was still eligible for the work of the previous year. This was the last time he would be in this room for this job, and it was not a surprise that he won.