Blair to follow in the steps of the Clintons, Obama and Musharraf as a guest on US satirical news programme The Daily Show

This is a wild claim, but I think it's true. If you've got More4, and you've never heard of Jon Stewart - I'm about to improve your life.

Watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. In the UK it's normally on every night, from Monday to Friday, at 8.30pm, after transmission in the US. Trust me. Just watch it. It really is superb.

And you should definitely tune in this Friday (or tomorrow, if you live in the US) because Tony Blair is going to be on and it could be a cracker.

If you know the programme, you'll probably understand why I'm raving like a lunatic. If you haven't seen it, I expect you're trying to work out why anyone could get so excited about a talk show.

But the point about the Daily Show is that it isn't just a comedy programme. It is gloriously funny – Stewart was praised in a Guardian leader earlier this month which concluded "no comedian alive offers quite the same joyful, cathartic dose of satire as does the 45-year-old New Yorker" - but the real reason why it's become cult viewing is because its analysis is so incisive.

The US journalist Thomas Friedman pointed this out last year, in a column in which he tried to imagine how an Iranian spy would report back to Tehran on life in the US.

We have to note that obtaining open-source intelligence in America has become more difficult, because traditional news shows have become more comedic and more comedic news shows more authoritative. For instance, CNN's nightly business report is hosted by a man named "Dobbs". Real journalists come on his show and present transparently propagandistic stories about immigration and trade and then he fulminates about them, much the way our ayatollahs used to do about "Satanic Americans" on late-night Iranian TV. So viewers have no real idea what's happening in the US economy. Meanwhile, at 11 pm, something called The Daily Show, which appears on Comedy Central, has fake journalists presenting what turns out to be the real news.

This helps to explain why the New York Times recently described Stewart as "the most trusted man in America". It also explains why guests like Barack Obama, John McCain, and Bill and Hillary Clinton are willing to appear, even at the risk of being mocked. Stewart's even had a head of state on the show, Pervez Musharraf when he was president of Pakistan.

Blair has never been on the show before and he's accepted the invitation because it coincides with the start of the faith and globalisation course he's teaching at Yale University.

Stewart is never overtly offensive to his guests. But he can expose their weaknesses brilliantly and he's obsessed with what went wrong in "Mess O'Potamia". Blair might have some explaining to do. As you can guess, I'll be glued to the screen.