Who is Hotter? GustavRatzenhofer or Hugh Jackman?

So you're saying you prefer a dead man?

Don't all the Aussie men look like Hugh?

You're all bloody wrong!

The sexiest man alive...

And so, without further ado, the winner of our First Annual Sexiest Man Living Award is ...

No. 1 Sexpot!

Who: Stephen Colbert
Age: 42
Know him as: Star of the "The Colbert Report" (Comedy Central)

It sneaks up on you, the idea that this geeky guy in glasses and overgelled hair mocking Bill O'Reilly and other TV blowhards every night is, well, hot. When it hits you, you're sure you're the only one who feels it. In fact, you start to believe you're the only one he's talking to, night after night. So many of his crazy jokes are just for you. Who else laughed till they cried when he took the E Street Band off his "On Notice" list, and then had Steve Van Zandt explain how the band members phone-treed one another to make sure everyone got the good news, Clarence phoning Patti, and Patti phoning Bruce, and so on, while the geeky guy in glasses kept insisting the big tough "Sopranos" star, known as "Little Steven," call him "Big Stephen" (and he did).

Then you tell a couple of people about your crush, and you're crushed by the reaction: Lots of women think Stephen Colbert is sexy, and more than a few men do too.

So I don't have him to myself. So what. As a matter of fact, he's married, and as a good Catholic girl who recognizes the good Catholic boy in Colbert (he's a composite of several of my grade-school crushes, in fact), I'm going to keep this appreciation chaste, the way he'd like it. No lurid loofah fantasies here. But even that nod to the real Stephen Colbert triggers another frisson of confusion and dizzy doubt: Exactly who do I think is sexy? The crazy guy who calls me a "hero" every night? (I love that!) The sweet, old-fashioned family-man comic who plays him? The slender, willowy alpha male who stood up to the bullies of the Bush administration and their Stockholm syndrome victims in the press corps last May? Or all three? Ah, romance unravels if you think about it too much ... whatever the magic is, bring it on.

Colbert's allure comes from the physical comedy that's always threatening to take over his body. From the prankish, mismatched ears to the cowlick that stands up no matter how much he gels his hair, he looks like he just can't contain himself. That slightly feminine face in perpetual motion -- eyebrows up, lips curled, eyes alight with a crazy joy that every once in a while seems to break character, for a split-second of intimacy, to say (only to me?): Yes, I know how hilarious this is! Plus, those large but graceful ever-moving hands! Also: He can dance! And tumble!

Only a few guests over the last year have made me jealous: Sure, people made fun of Connie Chung when she asked him to take off his glasses, but ... thanks, Connie! Now I live for the moments when he takes off those rimless specs and shows us his eyes. And Eleanor Holmes Norton can claim she wasn't attracted to a "plain, vanilla man," but c'mon, she was undressing him with her eyes. Maybe hardest to watch was the recent show in which Ron Reagan got to do Colbert's hair, mussing it up and re-gelling it and combing it into a Ronald Reagan-style pompadour. The sexiest part of all? It wouldn't stay that way. But if I could have gotten my hands in all that hair, I know it would have done my bidding, or I'd have worn myself out trying...

In the end, what makes Colbert sexy and not merely altar boy-adorable (OK, he is that, too) is the ever-present sense of comic danger he conveys, the threat that, really, he just might do anything to make you laugh. Who wouldn't want to come home to that? The great thing is, I do, Mondays through Thursdays anyway. And Nation, I'm willing to share him, because deep down I still feel like it's just him and me late at night, and if you understand anything about his liberating doctrine of truthiness, that means I'm right!

-- Joan Walsh