Ace hammers the new half-cour conservative comedy show and then has second thoughts:
Second Thoughts: Watching it again, it’s not as bad as I first thought. It’s bad — but John Steward pretty much sucks too, I think, and the average Leno or Letterman monlogue is not exactly bursting with comedic brilliance. SNL’s Weekend Update has about three decent jokes per ten minute installment.
So maybe I was too hard on the show. Maybe it is jealousy and all that, and knowing I, along with about one tenth of the American population, could do better. It’s not a show I’d watch, ever, but then, there are a lot of shows I won’t watch, ever.
Go with your first instincts on this, Ace. It is terrible.
Zifnab
John Stewart sucks!
/Darrell
Andrew
I’m just going to pretend that this thread is about Arrested Development. You know, something funny.
Andrew
In case you guys were wondering where the idea for Tobias’ jean shorts came from…
demimondian
Never mind that the show was doomed from the get go. You don’t respond to comedy by “creating a funny show with the opposite bias”; the didacticism that Ace sees in the older Weekend Update slots shines through and kills teh FVNNY. You find someone who’s (intentionally) funny and has the right political beliefs, and let him or her run with the gags.
Now, you know, there are a lot of funny people on the right in America. The problem is the shortage of intentionally funny ones.
jg
The title of the article in BO magazine ‘A Life In Politics: My 18 Month Journey’, was funny.
tBone
Funny, funny stuff. I mean, how can you go wrong with hilarious material like “Barack Obama’s initials are BO!”? Why, our very own EEEL was killing with that joke just a couple of days ago. Take a bow, Mac – you’re just as funny as the 1/2 Hour Comedy Hour.
Andrew
In other news, it turns out that Tim Hardaway has been writing the Darrell character for a few years now.
Pb
Wow, that’s impressively pathetic. Now, I know it’s possible to make actual, funny jokes about Barack Obama, because I’ve heard it before–to quote someone else quoting W. Kamau Bell:
However, I guess that wouldn’t fit into their particular brand of spiteful slander masquerading as unfunnitude, so they’re stuck coming up with dreck–and as long as they keep using oppo researchers instead of comedians, it’ll probably stay that way.
Dave
I think The America Show is funnier.
Nikki
I saw that clip and I must say that that show both sucks and blows.
DougJ
This belongs in another thread, but it’s a good thing that Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell have no influence on the GOP primary.
Michael
…John Steward?
Perry Como
So, when the laugh track fails, is that a sign? Or is that just the liberal bias of prerecorded voices?
bago
About this “If you don’t support the war you don’t support the troops” nonsense.
You know what I would do if I hated the troops? I’d pack them up and send them across the world to a stinking hot desert, make them wear 100 lbs of gear in the mid-day sun and choking dust, and wander around through the middle of an inslamic civil war without the appropriate body armor or vehicle armor. Then I’d really rile up the locals by torturing them in Saddam’s tortue prison, while firing the translators who might be able smooth things over. I’d top it off by keeping them there for years on end while stealing the few billions of dollars they had left.
And for the “let them eat cake” moment, I’d comment about how peacefully I slept at night while cutting the VA funding.
That’s how you hate the troops.
Bruce Moomaw
Ace: “The new FoxNews’ show is, because it is playing on an ostensibly all-news network, is thus compelled to follow Tina Fey’s mistake, albeit with even weaker material. Material so weak, in fact, that one suspects the writers are all liberals deliberately sabotaging the show, or so horribly out of touch with conservative opinion as to have no real idea what a conservative might find funny, or — likeliest of all — convinced conservatives are abject morons who will not get a joke unless it’s seltzer-down-the-pants woca-woca-woca sledgehammer obvious.”
Well, damn. The first time I ever heard of this thing was only two days ago, in Jane Mayer’s “New Yorker” portrait of “24’s” screechily right-wing (and enthusiastically pro-torture) producer Joel Surnow — who, it turns out, collaborated with his close friend Rush Limbaugh to create this show. Who’da guessed that both Surnow and Limbaugh are really secret liberal moles who are convinced that conservatives are all abject morons?
lard lad
God, what a painfully unfunny spectacle… almost as awful as Julia Gorin, whose show I rank a notch above a Drano eye scrub.
These nimrods really don’t get it — the objective of The Daily Show isn’t to make fun of conservatives… it’s a dissection of current events that assaults the mainstream media itself more than any one political philosophy. It’s just that the creators and cast of the show hail more from the left end of the political spectrum, like most comics and humorists do.
Whereas the 1/2 Hour Comedy Hour is like a lame Jay Leno monologue of smack talk about celebrities… only this show pares down the celebrity pool to the dozen of so approved targets of the far right, dutifully serving up tired Limbaugh-tested insults to the accompaniment of the worst canned laughter imaginable.
Hey, I’m no PC maven. I can laugh at a good conservative joke (like the one occupying the Oval Office)… but this show is dead in the water. It is an ex-parrot.
stew
Did you see the Rush as President bit? He makes a joke about Howard Dean!! That’s SO 2004! This is truly unfunny!
chas
I can’t believe anyone would think “the america show” is funnier than ANYTHING.
this show is bad, but “The America Show” could genuinely have been created by 12 year olds.
i recommend everyone go to youtube and watch it. It really is the unintentionally funniest thing you will ever see.
RSA
It’s a clever bit of wordplay tying Jon Stewart to (a) men who frequent prostitutes and (b) male flight attendants. Who says conservatives have no sense of humor?
ThymeZone
That’s a fine post, bago.
Catsy
Lard Lad nails it. Jon Stewart is a liberal, yes–but if you actually, y’know, watch the Daily Show, he spends a fair amount of time hammering the absurdities in politics and the media, regardless of their source. Bush and the Republicans have been the primary butt of his jokes because they’ve been the ones in power for the last six years.
This clip is a fairly good one to get a sense for what drives his jokes, as is the infamous Crossfire interview.
Fox’s new show is a failure in the same way that Redstate is a failure–it’s trying to create a right-wing counterpart to something else while completely failing to understand what makes its counterpart a success.
grandpa john
The daily show follows the will rogers philosophy for it humor rather than trying to manufacture humor.
I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.
Will Rogers, quoted in Saturday Review, Aug. 25, 1962
cleek
look who fancies himself a member of the top decile. what an elitist.
Steve
The wingnuts I know would be happy to watch a completely unfunny program as long as they sensed that somewhere, the existence of this program is pissing off a liberal. I wouldn’t write it off just yet.
Zifnab
Hey, maybe when Hillary Clinton shoots a 78-year-old man in the face, the right will have something to work with.
Maybe that’s the real probably with conservative humor. There’s such a vast disperity in material.
Gatchaman
Lard Lad nails it. Jon Stewart is a liberal, yes—but if you actually, y’know, watch the Daily Show, he spends a fair amount of time hammering the absurdities in politics and the media
Stewart was also pretty rough on Kerry’s complete lack of charisma and personality during that campaign.
There are no sacred cows on the Daily Show, which may come as a shock to some fans when there are more Dems to take aim at.
Crza
I was hoping like all hell that Fox News would take this route with their “comedy” show: you have P. J. O’Rourke sitting at a desk that is empty except for a huge bottle of the finest whiskey one can find. The next thirty minutes is nothing but clips of him sitting there ranting about how great things were during the Reagan years, and with each passing segment you’ll notice that the bottle has become increasingly empty.
For realz! If I were determined to produce a conservatively-bent comedy show, P. J. O’Rourke would be the first person I turned to. Hell, he might be the ONLY person I turned to.
ThymeZone
Pretty much a metaphor for the whole right wing/GOP thing, isn’t it?
They saw Dems winning in Congress all those years, and figured, yeah we want that. So they called in Carl Rove, basically a political trickster. So for six years you had a country being governed by tricksters who have no idea how to govern. They have no idea what it really takes. And they brought in a guy who had no idea, GWB, who was not just willing but eager to go along with their nonsense.
They sold their soul to the devil.
Now they want to turn that into a comedy show?
The joke, as they say, is on them.
Walker
I have been watching this show since Craig Kilborn started it. Jon made an awful lot of fun of Clinton when he was in power.
Zifnab
No crap. Maybe the conservative party completely missed Stewart poking fun at Nancy Pelosi or Obamarama. The real reason the Republican-American minority objects to Stewart has nothing to do with “making fun of liberals” and everything to do with his refusal to fawn over conservatives. John Stewart won’t fluff Bill Kristol and Dick Cheney, so he’s an evil comedian.
The Other Steve
Thank you for someone finally pointing that out.
Sheesh.
They only think it’s attacking consertives, because modern conservatives are nothing more than butt lickers.
Mr Furious
Spend three minutes watching the clip of Jon Stewart on Larry King that Catsy links to upthread and watch him 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”.
Gatchaman
hey — i just had a thought — isn’t “Fox and Friends” meant as comedy? Please tell me that is not supposed to be serious.
Pb
Yes.
Zifnab
I thought you were going to point to this.
Gatchaman
Thanks PB and Zifnab, those clips are priceless. Those dingbats on Fox and Friends make the Today show look like a Mensa meeting.
jg
I know a lot of conservatives whoi used to like the Daily Show. They say it used to be funny. When pressed they admit it stopped being funny once Bush was elected, it was a hysterically funny show when Clinton was president.
Remfin
The promo/commercial in the last update of the linked article is hysterical…as in hysterically bad. It says it’s “an equal opportunity offender”. Jesus Christ they can’t even stop saying “fair and balanced” when the show was expressly created to be biased. What are they putting in the water over there?
Newsflash to FoxNews: 1984 was not an instruction manual
Nicholas Weaver
Anyway, there is a counter to the liberal bias of the Daily Show already. The Colbert Report is all about balancing out the evil liberal bias of the rest of the media (except for fox news, of course).
Pb
Zifnab,
Why go with the obvious, though–Fox and Friends is just so amazingly ridiculous, all the time. Then again, aren’t most morning shows?
dreggas
Setting aside for a moment that Fox News itself is so completely idiotic as to be funny in a morbid sense. You have to have real material in order to be funny. The only funny part of the whole rush limpdick and Mann Coulter skit was the fact that the laugh track was completely canned and if anything they made complete and total idiots of themselves. The genius part…neither has to try because they are idiots.
I mean if SNL, Mad TV, the Daily show, and Colbert ever need more material that will be REALLY funny they have a never ending font just in Fox’s new show. I mean I like good, twisted and even tasteless humor as much as anyone but none of what I saw even got a chuckle.
My dog could write better comedy and is more amusing than the clips of that show.
Bubblegum Tate
Oh man, they were killing Kerry on the campaign trail, totally ripping on his horrible speaking style and his ham-fisted pandering. It was hilarious–as was the entire “Race From the White House” coverage of the Democratic primaries (does anybody else remember the Creepy Smile-Off? That bit had me laughing for days).
As for this piece of crap…you know it’s horrible when even the Malkintents are trashing it.
grumpy realist
“Malkintents”?
POTD
dslak
Bill Donahue’s about to get medieval on John Cole’s ass!
dslak
Oops! Wrong thread. That’s what I get for reading the blog in multiple windows.