Fair and balanced comedy

February 15, 2007

About two weeks ago, after months of rumors, we finally got a look at Fox News’ attempts to break into comedy. Apparently, with the success of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, the right decided that conservative humor was missing from the discourse, and Rupert Murdoch would fill the void.

The first glimpse wasn’t encouraging. A video clip of “Red Eye,” a late-night talk show hosted by Former UK Maxim editor Greg Gutfeld, leaked online. It was train-wreck bad — responding to Joe Biden’s remark about Barack Obama being “clean,” the Red Eye panel joked, “Well, I think Oprah’s clean…. She does douche.”

As it happens, Reye is but one of two new comedies on Fox News, the other being “The Half-Hour News Hour,” which is intended to be a conservative version of The Daily Show. As luck would have it, FNC conveniently leaked a clip of this cringe-worthy show. How bad is it? I think Bob Cesca summarizes the situation nicely.

They’ve forced me to do it again. Fox News Channel has “leaked” something on the internets that’s so awful it’s forcing me to actually promote it. As with avoiding mentions of Ann Coulter’s books, I try not to give promotion — even negative promotion — to certain things which are both ridiculous and meaningless.

That is, unless such items really, really deserve to be mocked at length.

And that brings us to FNC’s new Daily Show knockoff titled The Half Hour Comedy Hour. Oh wait. That was a show on Comedy Central, like, 20 years ago. The new FNC show is actually called The 1/2 Hour News Hour and there’s a reason why the “comedy” part was left out of the hackish and oh-so-clever title (half-hour + an hour show = knee slapping awesomeness). Obviously because, well, you know. There’s no comedy.

Bob isn’t exaggerating; it’s that bad. In fact, it’s worse.

Here’s the Orlando Sentinel’s take:

Jon Stewart knows how to do slashing comical commentary. He weighs in on what’s happening, such as the media’s bizarre coverage of Anna Nicole Smith’s death.

Fox News Channel does not know how to do slashing comical commentary. This show was meant to be a conservative version of “The Daily Show.” It is a botch.

“The 1/2 Hour News Hour” does not comment on what is happening; it simply takes swipes at people. These people include Howard Dean, Hillary Clinton, Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama and Ed Begley Jr. Other joke topics are the ACLU, Time magazine, children’s books and global warming.

Laughter, of an awfully canned variety, greets all the gags. Nothing happening on screen justifies these outbursts.

Fox News Channel will offer a second episode at 10 p.m. March 4. If we’re lucky, we’ll never hear of this dreadful show again.

Don’t take my word for it; watch this clip. The main “joke” seems to be that Barack Obama’s initials are “B.O.,” which leads to all kinds of laugh-track hilarity. (Apparently the show was written by elementary school children for fans of Sean Hannity. Not a good combination.)

Wait, you say, maybe this was just a two-minute dud in an otherwise clever program? It’s possible, but remember, these are the two minutes Fox decided to leak in order to generate buzz for the program. They presumably picked the best two minutes of the half-hour show. This is what they came up with.

Let’s put it this way: Fox News is apparently as good at comedy as it is in reporting the news.

What’s strange about it is that while Fox News may not know (or care) about journalistic integrity), they do know about production values, pacing, eye candy, and creating a compelling presentation. Adding va-voom to their product was how they built much of their audience.

The jokes here are stupid, puerile and racist, but at least you might expect they’d be put over with some panache. You’d be wrong.

  • Another example of the right-wing doing what they do best, food fights. I wouldn’t be surprised if Laura Ingraham was one of the writers.

  • sounds like the smarmy humor in “Mallard Filmore”, the comic strip my local newspaper runs to “balance” Doonesbury.”
    Bruce

  • If ever you needed proof that Fox is a parody of itself…

    Strangely, this clip reminded me of Natural Born Killers, and the famous “sitcom” scene when Mickey sees Mallory being taunted by her father and the canned laughter is opened up after every pointedly unfunny remark.

    But whilst Stone offered some pointed and deliberate commentary about society’s attitude to abuse and violence, Fox unintentionally offer some insight into the childish shallowness of the wingnut mind.

  • Keep in mind that shows like the daily show work because they skewer the absurd crap spouted by all, not just the right. These guys have set out their agenda to skewer the left. Politics trumps comedy, just as politics trumps news. They will appeal to a solid but small minority, just as FNC does with it’s “news”. The people watching are the same ones who thought Rush was hilarious when he made fun of Michael J Fox.

  • The lieutenant from “good morning Vietnam” springs to mind.

    Will the title and credit music be a polka?

  • #5 has it right.

    The Daily Show is funny because it goes after everyone. the goal, as Jon Stewart repeatedly says, is to be funny. It will make fun of Democrats in pwoer as well.

    It just happens the Republicans are easier due to the absurdity of their positions and the blatant lieing.

    Conservatives think it is Liberal, becasue, unlike the MSM, they actually show that Bush, Cheney at al, lie by showing the contradicting clips.

  • You all misunderstand these shows. The point is not to laugh or to swing those who are not already true believers. The point is to pander to the base. That’s what the GOP has been about since George HW Bush went down. Why would you expect it to be anything different for comedy?

  • I cannot watch those FOX segments, even if they’re not on direct-FOX links. I gave FOX up for Lent. Three years ago. And I’m not even Catholic….

  • So what’s FNC’s parody of Colbert going to be? A host who’s a God-hating lesbian vegetarian communist Greenpeacer who fawns over Hillary Clinton, considers al Qaeda “freedom fighters”, and blames all of the world’s problems on rich white male Americans?

    Or how about a parody of Borat called “What A Country!”? Tag along with Yakov Smirnoff as he shows the greatness of Bush’s America, looks fondly back at Reagan’s America, and exposes the stupidity and ignorance of those pointy-headed liberals as they try to turn the US into the new Soviet Union.

  • Spend three minutes watching this clip of Jon Stewart on Larry King that gets to the heart of what drives Stewart and makes the Daiily Show work. Watch Stewart skewer Republicans, Democrats, and not so subtly King himself, who laughs nervously as Stewart disembowels him.

    That piece of shit FOX show is just taking the latest crap from Rush putting it in front of a blue screen and adding the worst laugh track I’ve heard since “Bewitched”.

  • A number of my conservative friends hated Borat because they felt that it didn’t make fun of enough liberals and that it protrayed Cons as humorless idiots. I think they hated Borat because it showed their inner assholes to world and we (as in the rest of the world) found it delightfully funny. I have to admit that I enjoyed Borat tweaking the militant feminists because I loathe “I or my group is infallable” hardcore ideologues as a general rule.

    Getting back to the post…

    Unfortunately, the past six years haven’t exactly been a golden age of new age Ronnie Raygun Conservative unless you’re in the humor biz. Libs can and have and will do stupid things, but not this consistently bad for this long. Aside from brief moments, when has a conservative Repub shown anything that wasn’t mockable?

    2Manchu writes:
    “A host who’s a God-hating lesbian vegetarian communist Greenpeacer who fawns over Hillary Clinton, considers al Qaeda “freedom fighters”, and blames all of the world’s problems on rich white male Americans?”

    SC already has one, Russ Leiber who is played by the great David Cross formerly of the great Fox comedy Arrested Development (which I suspect was canceled in due part to its unflattering portrayal of the upper class, ya know, Bush’s base.) Another reason to hate Fox.

  • I think daniel is correct in saying that true comedy is not the real goal here. Pandering to the base is the first goal. Moving/voicing new childish memes and sound bites would be another goal. Particularly as the crowd they are trying to reach likely has a very limited view or understanding of what comedy actually is. In many ways they are like 6 year olds–calling names and taking swipes is comedy to them. They aren’t watching for any type of analysis or social commentary using humor to make a point–in fact, they would not understand such things. To anyone with any experience in life whatsoever, this junk is not funny. But to these folks, who have limited experience outside their immediate communities, and/or who see the world through strict religious constructionism, its the shizzle mah nizzle.

  • Thank you, Fox “News” for a little lighthearted break.
    It is so good to read about some Wrong-Wing idiocy that does not include tax breaks for the obscenely wealthy, theft from the public coffers, elections being stolen, good people getting screwed for trying to do good, people getting molested, maimed or killed.
    It is too bad that that the left-wing views can’t get onto the airwaves (or that they get frozen out by the corporations if they do) and crap like this can. But it’s a funny demonstration of how propaganda and humor don’t mix well, except for belittlement.I hope that this stays onthe air (and loses money & credibility) for years.
    Remember, some people think think that Ann Coulter is funny. Any many think that she’s a woman, too. I’ll bet that most of the readers here think otherwise.

  • Conservatives don’t care if it’s funny in the sense of really being funny. It’s just one more opportunity to pick up their own feces, look at it, scream “THIS IS THE DEMOCRAT PARTY!! HA-HA-HA… and then throw it at the camera.

    It is at that level, it is of that quality and the base will laugh at it just because poop and Democrat can be brought together at the same place and the same time. That is the essence of conservative humor. They are quite satisfied with that and require no more.

  • It was about what I expected. It is basically a republican internet campaign ad turned into a half-hour program. Hannity fans will love it.

  • All humor involves a disconnect, but not all disconnection is humorous. This struck me as a load of Nazi meanness — brilliantly summarized in the “Cabaret” dance number featuring the gorilla in a tutu, ending with the line “But if you could see her through my eyes, / She isn’t a meeskite at all!” — without the frightening depth of that work. It is clearly designed to appeal to yuck-yuck knuckle-dragging tooth-gapped fatsos sucking up STP cocktails and burping pork rind dinners. The laugh tracks, though intended to be mean, were so lacking in credibility that it makes you wonder what sort of skinflint is funding all this. If this is the new measure of the Reich wing’s propaganda ability, I’m happy to hear/see it. Murdock is rapidly becoming a paper tiger.

  • Bubba #14 gets to the heart of the show. By calling their schtick comedy, they’ll just blatantly spew hateful crap about anyone they don’t like under the guise that it’s all a joke, and if you’re not laughing then you just don’t get the joke. Why have to masquerade as the news when it’s so much easier to be openly insulting and call yourself a comic. The 1/2 hour news hour is just a free pass to be jerk.

  • Further proof that stopped clocks are indeed right twice a day – this from Joe Klein at the swampland blog:

    As a newcomer to this blogging business, I’ve been interested in the Edwards dust-up. As readers know, I’ve been critical of the tone of the left-wing blogosphere in the past. But I think that Yglesias raises an important point here and anyone reading the comments section of any Swampland post knows that troglyditic right-wing cavedwellers fester there, in a vomitously vile manner, too. And I’d add this: Radio. I was driving into Springfield, Ill last night for the Obama festivities and caught the ever-vile Sean Hannity “interviewing” the even-more-vile Dick Morris about Hillary. Just disgraceful…and they were mild compared to the crap I’ve heard from Rush and others over the years.

    It’s obvious that the current level of vitriol on the left is a reaction to nearly twenty years of sewage emanating from Rush et al. …The intemperance on the left has three other sources (1) justifiable fury over the Bush adminstration (2) justifiable fury over the way the media treated Clinton and, to a certain extent, Bush and (3) ideologues of any sort tend to be obnoxious.

  • Let’s make a deal: they can keep the talk radio angry call in shows if we can keep the comedy shows.

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