So long, Half-Hour News Hour

August 15, 2007

It seemed like such a good idea. Take The Daily Show, eliminate the quality writing, make it bitterly right-wing, add a laugh track to let the audience know when the content is supposed to be funny, put it on late at night on Fox News, and wait for the viewers to come rolling in. What could possibly go wrong?

Apparently, quite a bit. FNC’s widely-panned and stunningly unfunny “Half-Hour News Hour” is finished.

First on TVNewser: In a memo to senior producers this afternoon, FNC’s SVP of programming, Bill Shine announced the network “will not continue the Half Hour News Hour beyond its current 15 episode run.” Shine did leave the door open, however: “we are considering ways to retool the show for future scheduling needs.”

Shine added praise for Joel Surnow, a co-creator of the program best known for his work on “24,” who Shine described as “a visionary” who “created a contrarian program that fulfilled an untapped niche in the comedy genre.” (By “contrarian,” Shine apparently meant, “a right-wing comedy show on a Republican network in the midst of a GOP freefall.”)

ThinkProgress noted that the show seemed to be lacking a certain something: namely, quality.

The reviews for the program were consistently dismal. Its very first review, from the Orlando Sentinel, decried the “[l]aughter, of an awfully canned variety, greets all the gags. Nothing happening on screen justifies these outbursts…. If we’re lucky, we’ll never hear of this dreadful show again.” “Sometimes the humor is so heavy-handed that it seems almost like self-parody,” said the New York Times. “The 1/2 Hour News Hour is slow torture all by itself,” said the Philadelphia Inquirer.

What the right-wing failed to grasp is Jon Stewart is funny not because he spins falsehoods but because he tells the truth.

That’s true, but I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised. The right has consistently had trouble grasping the whole notion of “comedy.”

Update: Where’s the Outrage has a video clip of the kind of “humor and wit” viewers of the show got to see.

Psychology sees humor as the release of tension caused by cognative dissonance. So clearly, humor is something the conservative mind is incapable of.

Conservative yucks are less about irony, and more about laughing at the retarded kid in the wheelchair your friends are poking with a stick.

  • “The right has consistently had trouble grasping the whole notion of “comedy.”

    Isn’t that the truth! It’s always been that way. Why is that? Is it hard to laugh when you’re angry and scared? Not necessarily. I’m mad as hell at the Republicans, and scared of the consequences of their malfeasance for our country, but I still get good belly laughs from Stewart, Colbert, and some of the comments on this blog.

    Maybe it’s a chicken-and-egg question. Does right-wing politics make a person humorless, or does it attract people who are already humorless?

  • I read about this over at Digby’s digs, and commenter Lab Partner had a great take:
    Start
    It’s funny what is assumed about the Fox News Network. Consider that when the word got out that Fox was going to run a partisan comedy show to counter The Daily Show it was understood that that was “fair” because it was “balancing” out some percieved partisan inbalance on TV. No one was particularly surprised that Fox would run another partisan broadcast. But what wasn’t discussed so much was a supposed News Network running a comedy show. Let’s suppose for a moment – let’s say, for the sake of balance and fairness – if CNN announced that it was going to run a comedy show. Conservatives would, of course, holler and whine about how assumedly Liberal it would be well before the first broadcast. Most everyone else would be asking “Why would CNN run a comedy show? They’re a News Network”

    The Half Hour News Hour was intended to be a partisan “balance” to The Daily Show. But what was it doing on a News Network? Why didn’t more people complain that it didn’t belong on a News Network? Perhaps because it is just assumed by most people that Fox News really isn’t a legitimate News Network.
    End
    “Comedy” on a “news” channel? Both fake adjectives.

  • The biggest joke of all is the word “News” in “Fox News Network” and any liberal watching what Fox puts out as “news” never needed a separate Fox-sponsored “comedy” show to induce laughter.

  • “we are considering ways to retool the show for future scheduling needs.”

    The operative word being Tool.

    Conservatives need to learn they are only funny when they are trying to be serious. They don’t need to work at it, they just need to keep on doing what they do best. I mean, every time a neo-con calls someone dishonest or unAmerican I laugh my head off.

    Oh wait. They’ were trying to make other cons laugh?

    Not gonna happen unless, as memekiller says, they go straight to the vicious stuff.

  • I’ve been posting this all over the Intratubes the past few days, and figure why not post it here as well?

    Name me one, seriously laugh-out-loud funny Republican. Just. One.

    Oh … and I mean funny “Ha ha!”

    Not funny “Uh oh.”

    (Super-duper double bonus points for whomever gets the reference.)

  • Isn’t the running of a prewritten and canned comedy on a “News”, as in it just happened, program an admission that the “News” program isn’t a “News” program, at all but a script that runs on and on?

    Refreshingly Fox, did admit by running the show, that their news is a Joke.

    I for one find that wonderfully funny.

  • Shine added praise for Joel Surnow, a co-creator of the program best known for his work on “24,” who Shine described as “a visionary” who “created a contrarian program that fulfilled an untapped niche in the comedy genre.”

    Uh, “fulfilled”? What do you think he meant by that one, CB?

    What the right-wing failed to grasp is Jon Stewart is funny not because he spins falsehoods but because he tells the truth.

    Jon Stewart isn’t even especially funny. A lot of people could do the job he does, and he’s a hero just because he tries. He doesn’t have to try to hard with the material the GOP gives him.

  • What they are selling here is the fact that only “sexy” women are woth listening to.
    I think she only had two good points in the discussion.

    Please GOD, send back Gilda Radner and smite this drivel.

  • (By “contrarian,” Shine apparently meant, “a right-wing comedy show on a Republican network in the midst of a GOP freefall.”)

    Actually I took the “contrarian” quote a different way. If you’re going to take a contrarian position to The Daily Show, which is funny, then you would come up with something that is stunningly unfunny. In that respect, Surnow can claim full credit.

  • I think what Fox News people didn’t get is that Stewart/Colbert ultimately want to make people laugh and simply find partisan politics a good way to accomplish that goal. The Half Hour News Hour ultimately wanted to be partisan and thought comedy was a good way to accomplish that goal. They will never be funny if they don’t set out with that as their ultimate goal.

  • Am I the only one that’s wondering why these pod-lemmings from FraudNews always—ALWAYS—use the word “visionary” to describe a clusterf*** failure so spectacular as to make the Ford Pinto look like a marshmallow-roast?

  • Also proof (but I’m sure every single person who read the post thought of this already) that liberals have better senses of humor.

  • Although I never saw the show (we don’t get Fox), just the description of it reminds me of that Simpsons episode where Homer is a comedian during some kind of comedy benefit for the boss. Seconds before he takes the stage, Smithers makes a public service announcement that a car has just run over somebody’s puppy in the parking lot. Then Homer leaps out and shouts, “Are you ready to LAUGH??”

  • -The right has consistently had trouble grasping the whole notion of “comedy.”-

    The right has consistently had trouble grasping the whole notion of “telling the truth.”

  • Does anyone really care what the left thinks of the show? It’s not for them..but what’s funny is that they don’t get it..That makes it even more hilarious..

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