Jon Stewart at the Guggenheim

Anyone planning a trip to NYC might be surprised to learn that a portrait of Comedy Central star Jon Stewart is hanging in the Guggenheim's current "Russia" exhibit.

OK, so I used Photoshop to add him to the current subway poster publicizing the event - but you have to admit, the resemblance with the portrait to his left is uncanny. (The original poster is below in my Flickr box)

And since Stewart is Jewish and probably has some Eastern European ancestry, it's not too far-fetched to assume that this guy's a distant relative.

As a New Yorker, I'm used to spotting celebrities at restaurants, in the lingerie department at Macy's (caught Al Roker lurking there about 15 years ago) and on the streets, but I actually had dinner with Jon Stewart once, way back when he was just starting out at HBO in the early 1990s.

A friend of mine worked at HBO and somehow I got invited to dinner at an upper East Side coffee shop with her and Stewart, and then we went to watch his act at a local comedy club.

During the meal, I learned that Jon and I had another quasi-celebrity in common, City Councilman (now Congressman) Anthony Wiener. I knew Wiener when I worked as a reporter in Brooklyn and he was an ambitious aide to then-Congressman, now-Senator Chuck Schumer. Turns out both of them worked as pages on Capitol Hill back in college.

Two things I remember from that dinner - that his humor already had an intellectual, political edge (one joke alluded to the fact that in some Third World countries citizens braved gunfire to go out and vote, while New Yorkers avoided the polls if there was a 10 percent chance of rain). And he said that if women had a choice between a funny guy and a handsome guy, they'd choose funny every time.