Jon Stewart took off his comedian hat yesterday when he appeared on Fox News Channel Sunday, and verbally sparred — to the point of visible outrage — with host Chris Wallace. The Comedy Central star’s face turned especially red when Wallace argued that there was little difference between The Daily Show‘s liberal-leaning satire and the Fox’s positioning as a serious news source.

“You can’t understand,” Stewart said during the most heated exchange of the morning, “because of the world that you live in, that there is not a designed ideological agenda on my part to affect partisan change because that’s the soup you swim in. And I appreciate that, I understand it. It reminds me of ideological regimes, where they can’t understand that there is free media in other places.”

Wallace charged Stewart with wanting “to be a political player” and later argued that Fox News viewers liked the network because they believe “they’re getting somebody who tells the other side of the story.”

That really ticked off Stewart. “Who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers?” he shot back, his tone getting much more aggressive. “The most consistently misinformed? Fox, Fox viewers, consistently, every poll.” (See this December 2010 study, for example.)

Here’s the video of the whole interview: