Good Lord, That’s Bad
Here’s a video clip from Fox’s new show, The 1/2 Hour News Hour. Intended to be the right wing’s answer to The Daily Show, you can see that they ripped off the studio design, camera moves, music style, and even the feel of the graphics directly from the Comedy Central show. Unfortunately, they couldn’t rip off a good sense of humor or a talented host.
The clip is almost painful to watch. The best gag they have is the name of a magazine for Barack Obama: “BO.” That’s about as good as it gets. But the bad jokes are not what’s painful–it’s the laugh track. During the in-studio news desk bits, the laughter comes from a live audience, but it is clearly forced, and sounds angry; for example, when Obama is stuck with a barb, the laughter seems to come mostly from three or four conspicuously loud men in the audience, one of whom shouts, “Yeah!!”
But during the video piece, the laughter is clearly canned. Aside from being very different in quality than the live-audience laughter a few moments before, each burst of laughter sounds nearly identical, and artificially timed. There is also too much effort to shove each joke in your face: in the piece, the “BO” magazine has five gag headlines; if The Daily Show makes such a mock-up, they might mention one or two and then comment on how people taping the show will be able to view the rest. On The 1/2 Hour News Hour, they painfully zoom in on every last one to make sure you don’t miss their cleverness, with the canned laughter punctuating each one, turning neatly to applause at the end.
The anchors themselves look like SNL “Weekend Update” rejects, reading their cue-card-driven conversation with less skill than an Academy Awards show presenter. The Daily Show became popular because Jon Stewart has real talent; this show is based rather on sheer political will in the absence of comic talent. And Stewart is not only clever, he also clearly enjoys himself and is open about the gags; the Fox hosts are rigid and posing, taking themselves as seriously as Colbert ironically pretends to. They lack the ability to project that we’re all having a good time, and come across more like amateurs reading cue cards with jokes they don’t quite get themselves.
As so many are pointing out, this show is not really a comedy show, it is a right-wing political attack show disguised as comedy. The Daily Show combs the news for anything that’s funny, and runs with that. They’ll go after anything stupid, a key strategy. If the Democrats can bolster their control of Congress and elect a president in 2008, you know that The Daily Show will shift focus onto them, simply because they’ll be in the news doing the most stupid stuff–and their liberal-leaning audience will still love the show. This new Fox show simply throws vicious barbs at Democrats; were the Republicans to take over Congress again and get a Republican in the White House in 2008, the show would just scrape deeper and deeper into the crap barrel for something angry to throw at what little there was to say about Democrats. They’re not going after anything stupid, they’re going after anything liberal. If Jon Stewart took the same strategy in the other direction, he’d fall flat and people would stop watching.
The question now is, will the show were to last for more than a few months. It’ll certainly gain the hardcore crowd that loves Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, but it will never gain the much broader audience that Stewart and Colbert enjoy. If it stays on the air for more than just the short time it’ll take for people to figure out it sucks, it’ll be because Murdoch and Fox are subsidizing it in the hope that one day it’ll catch on–like Bill Gates is doing with the Zune.
But just in case you want to see more really bad comedy, here you go.
That’s pretty bad. It’s also pretty tone-deaf; in the initial video where they’re talking about how great Obama is, there’s a crowd shot of a big bunch of black people jumping around waving their hands in the air… but it’s obviously shot elsewhere, almost certainly Africa.
That, of course, is how tight-assed narrow-minded Republicans see blacks, so to them it’s “funny”.
Pretty bad. The laughter does sound canned and doing a sendup of comedy is often not really comedy (as the new show Studio 60 has been struggling with a bit).
Luis, you should be posting your political stuff to DailyKos every day if you aren’t already- a good portion of it is far better than many of diaries that get recced.
Paul
Seattle, WA
First, it reminds me of the importance of comedy. Remember, Roosevelt, running for his fourth term of office, almost from his death bed, practically one the election with his “dog Falla minds” comment.
The republicans attacked his dog, if you recall, and Roosevelt skillfully made fun of the attack. America remembered why it loved Rosevelt and couldn’t let go and so voted him back in.
The thing about humor, especially in politics, is to remember its has to be used in a jujitsu style. Inherently defensive in nature, you use the opponents weight, momentum and strength against them.
Roosevelt’s comments did just that. I think the democrats, especially Kerry, failed to take advantage of the humor opportunities the Republicans provided him.
When you mock your opponent, if people laugh, they mock with you, and in that mocking moment, the end up on your side – as clearly was the case of Roosevelt. After that, people had a good laugh, and realized that they were on his side.
In regard to Rush and Ann Coulter, actually I think they are both discusting – Limbaugh commenting on Deans need for Medical attention while he’s under medical attention for addiction to drugs – they are both hilariously funny – especially Coulter’s part abour invading your country and converting you to christianity. She’s obviously mocking herself, – but commedy is where these guys belong. It puts their politics in the proper pespective. Their politics shouldn’t be taken seriously, but works okay as good comedy is they mock themselves – which is the only thing its good for.
While they are at it, they could put all the neoocons on that show. I see a sort of remake of the honeymooners with Limbaugh and Coulter as the main couple and Crystal could be married to Katheryn Harris or something of that sort.
By the way how long will it be before Limbaugh dies from cancer of the throat from smoking cigars, or HIV he got from whore houses in the Dominican Republic.