Last week, Jon Stewart, Jim Gaffigan, Louis C.K., Jerry Seinfeld, and Bruce Springsteen performed at the tenth annual Bob Woodruff Foundation benefit “Stand Up for Heroes,” presented by the New York Comedy Festival, at the Theatre at Madison Square Garden. Woodruff, the ABC News journalist who was severely wounded by a roadside bomb in Iraq, in 2006, started the foundation with his wife, Lee Woodruff, to aid veterans wounded in combat; this event has taken place every year since. The theatre was packed with service members—some marines yelped when Woodruff mentioned the U.S. Marine Corps, and Woodruff said, “I knew you would do that”—as well as civilians; some attendees were wealthy enough to bid when an auctioneer asked for a hundred thousand dollars. Wounded veterans introduced each performer. In its wealth, poverty, injury, health, fortitude, tears, devastating short films set to inspiring music, deep unarticulated questions about the wars that led to these injuries, dirty jokes, acoustic guitar, talk of hamburgers and hot dogs and old Cadillacs, the combination of big bucks and just-folks, it was a powerfully American event.

“There’s some sad news tonight,” Woodruff said. “Marine Sergeant Shurvon Phillip passed away just two nights ago. Our hearts are with his mother, Gail.” Phillip had been living with a traumatic brain injury. “They came to ‘Stand Up for Heroes’ almost every single year,” Woodruff said. “I always loved looking out at the audience and seeing Shurvon with a huge smile on his face. . . . He loved Bruce beyond belief, and he loved the comedians, and especially Jon Stewart.”

Stewart wore a suit—all the comedians did. “Tonight is especially poignant for me,” he said. “Not just the ten-year anniversary of this amazing organization, but to be here tonight with you guys—my heroes—on the eve of the last American election,” he said. This went over big. “Two hundred and forty years: we gave it a shot!” he said. “I’m not in the game anymore, I’m not as much of a political analyst . . . but if I could ask you a question—and this is something that I’ve been saying to my television for the past three weeks—What the fuck is going on?” he yelled.

It was a huge relief to be back with Jon Stewart, marvelling at the insanity of American politics. He did a few minutes on pussy-grabbing, and delivered a good line about the limits of locker-room talk: “I played soccer! We’d say terrible things! But when people crossed a certain line. . . . You’re like, ‘Wait. We’re all just being disgusting. I’m pretty sure that’s a crime.’ ” He agonized about more recent disasters—“and then it goes back to Anthony Weiner?!”—and went into a reverie about the election ending in a tie, and cameras cutting to a white Bronco, and O.J., and JonBenét Ramsey.

“This is in-fucking-sane!” Stewart cried. “We were a beautiful, great country, and now—and as a writer, it’s just, honestly. The first woman running for President. And she’s taken down by Bush and Weiner? Like, that’s just bad writing. . . . To put up with that shit she took from her husband, to have another guy’s dick keep her from being President? Hillary Clinton is literally being cock-blocked!” The crowd roared. It had been a very bad week, a dispiriting week, during which the Democratic mood had shifted from outraged glee to enraged depression. We miss Jon Stewart, but he doesn’t miss us in quite the same way. When people ask him if he wishes he were on TV this year, he said, his response is no: “I was a turd miner for sixteen years, and right now a shit asteroid just hit the Earth.” That may be true, but we still long to hear him scream.

He concluded with a masterly reading of the Fuckface Von Clownstick tweets—Trump vs. Stewart, circa 2013. Trump had tweeted Stewart’s given name, Jonathan Leibowitz, and said, “He should be proud of his heritage!”; Stewart had responded that Trump’s real name was Fuckface Von Clownstick; Twitter had had a field day; Trump had been flummoxed. Stewart read, “ ‘Amazing how the haters & losers keep tweeting the name ‘Fuckface von Clownstick’ like they are so original & like no one else is doing it.’ ” Stewart, laughing at this, still sounded incredulous. He read his reply: “We seem to have hit a Fuckface Von Nervestick.” Days later, Trump, at one-thirty in the morning, had tweeted, ‘Little Jon Stewart is a pussy.’ ” Stewart doubled over in disbelief and laughter. “Vote wisely this November,” he said.

Jim Gaffigan thanked the veterans, then talked about being fat. “I have a new belt, because my old belt looked like it was tortured on ‘Game of Thrones,’ ” he said. He riffed on Santa’s belt, insultingly—“That’s right, I’m going after Santa”—and on Jesus multiplying bread. (Pretzel bread, garlic knots.) “That’s why he had all those followers!” he said.

It’s not every day that you find yourself at an event featuring not just four titans of comedy but also Bruce Springsteen. All five were great—it felt good to laugh—but Stewart and Louis C.K. communicated a particular kind of wise, tortured intensity that was especially suited to our anxious national moment. They seemed to be talking to us as old friends would—aggravated, trusting, unafraid.

Louis C.K. talked about parenting, swearing, sex, conception, 9/11 deniers, public school. It wasn’t directly political, but it was communicated with a low-boil societal rage that occasionally rolled into a full boil. “There’s no greater contribution you could make than to be a public-school teacher,” he said, and people clapped. “Please don’t, because you’re not going to like the way this ends,” he said. He delivered a hilarious aria about why public-school teachers are “fucking losers,” making his case convincingly, in a way that indicted the system, not the teachers. “ ‘What we need you to do is make children know math.’ ‘Wow. Do they want to know math?’ ‘They don’t want to know it. You make them know it against their will.’ ‘Who are these children?’ ‘Just whatever kids live near the building.’ ‘Hmm. Are they smart?’ ‘No. They’re aggressively stupid. . . . But they all need to know math equally or you get fired, and they’re beating the shit out of each other and erupting sexually.’ ‘How much do I get paid?’ ‘About ten dollars a year.’ ‘What if I get really good at it? Nothing, you just get fired.’ ‘O.K., I’ll try it for twenty-five years.’ That’s who those people are!” He finished up with a great riff on Achilles and his mother—a stinging indictment of the thanklessness of children.

Jerry Seinfeld’s vast success, and his willingness to reference it, gives his comedic persona a smugness that read differently when he was a lovable young guy with big hair and white sneakers. Now you’re watching a zillionaire show off. Here, he did his bit about going out—“We gotta go out!,” and “We gotta get back!”— articulating these desires like a staccato ringmaster. His stylized verbal bits and bobs were near-Rumsfeldian at times; doing a joke about how life isn’t too short, it’s too long, struck me as a daring choice at a benefit for wounded veterans. But he delivered a beautiful tirade mocking the post office, and he achieved a kind of comedic ecstasy, for all of us, with his material about marriage and parenting, which felt closest to his heart. “When we were kids, our parents didn’t give a damn about us,” he said. “Didn’t even know our names! We were born to these people, we lived in their house. The day we moved out, we turned around and went, ‘That was insane. I did not understand ninety per cent of the last eighteen years. But I appreciate it and will be back to visit the minimum of acceptable number of times.’ ” What came next, in which he elaborately compared his children’s bedtime ritual to a “royal-coronation silver-jubilee centennial,” was thrilling. “You know what my bedtime story was?” he yelled. “Darkness! My favorite character was the complete absence of light!”