Fox News Admits It’s a Joke
The 1/2 Hour Daily Show wannabe.
Jesse Singal, University of Michigan
Thursday February 22, 2007
Most TV producers would kill for the sort of success Comedy Central has had with The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and its spin-off, The Colbert Report. Both follow Colbert’s maxim that “the truth has a well-known liberal bias,” and both have legions of adoring fans. It was only so long before someone tried to cash in with a similar concept, but one targeting a redder part of the political spectrum. That day is upon us. Those watching the end of Hannity’s America on Fox News Sunday night saw Hannity introduce The 1/2 Hour News Hour and explain that “whenever I’ve seen shows like this in the past, conservatives, they always take the brunt of the joke, so tonight we bring you some balance.”
1/2 Hour, which premiered at 10 p.m. on Sunday night and stars Kurt Long and Susan Yeagley as its anchors, is the brainchild of 24 co-creator Joel Surnow. Long opened with an impressively subtle joke: “Dispelling reports that she would staff her White House with longtime cronies and political appointees, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton vowed that if she becomes president, she will surround herself with a diverse, multi-ethnic, multigenerational group of angry lesbians.”
And in case that wasn’t was heavy-handed and unrestrained enough, the show became even more aggressive. This became painfully clear during a back-and-forth between Long and Yeagley dealing with And Tango Makes Three a controversial book based on two real-life gay penguins at the New York Aquarium who raised a chick together. Some other books, the anchors tell us, are also catching flack for presenting adult themes to children. A rapid-fire series of jokes follow, each presented in the form of a fake picture book and dealing with a different topic. Homosexuality: Harry Potter and the Alternative Lifestyle. The economy: The Lion, the Witch the Wardrobe and the Budget Deficit. Body image issues: Little Women with Junk in the Trunk. Healthcare: Charlie and the Cholesterol Factory, James and the Giant Melanoma, and Garfield Goes to the Free Clinic.
Laughing yet? Of course you’re not. It’s not funny to switch one word for another. If it were, I could say that another controversial children’s book is Cloudy with a Chance of Iraq, and it would be funny. But it’s not.
In an attempt to slaughter every liberal sacred cow, in one episode, they decided to go after Senator Barack Obama. Long explains that since admitting he used cocaine when he was younger, Obama’s popularity among Democrats “plummet[ed] to an all-time low of 99.9 percent.” He goes on: “But, in a related story, Senator Obama has just been endorsed for president by former Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry.” May as well riff on O.J. Simpson and Chappaquiddick while you’re at it. You can watch the whole plodding segment on Obama here.
Dated references aside, many of 1/2 Hour’s problems can be traced back to its reliance on straw men and caricatures. There was a long riff on how actor and environmentalist Ed Begley Jr. was supposed to be the guest Sunday night but he did not arrive because his electric car didn’t work. But there’s no factual basis to it.
When you watch Jon Stewart, on the other hand, you’re presented with a substantive basis for his critiques. Take a recent example: Stewart is discussing the non-binding congressional resolution to condemn Bush’s Iraq escalation, and how utterly ineffectual it is. He shows a couple of clips from the resolution, clips that say that members of House “support and protect the members of the United States Armed Forces,” but disapprove of “the decision of President George W. Bush.” Stewart makes a series of panicky noises. “Disapproves? Can we even say that on TV? Oh my God, I hope they didn’t bleep that.” The joke works because Stewart is pointing out how ridiculous it is for the House to have such a heated, interminable debate over a resolution that won’t actually do anything. In other words, it’s firmly rooted to something actually going on.
1/2 Hour refuses to make the effort to set up its jokes or consistently anchor them to real, specific references. The show is all punch lines—and poor punch lines, for the most part. A few of the jokes do work—I chuckled when Yeagley said that Dennis Kucinich had called for a return of the fairness doctrine, but “unfortunately, he said it on Air America radio so nobody heard it.” Even when 1/2 Hour is successful, however—and these instances are few and far between—it’s not living up to what it promises. The show is being marketed as a conservative alternative to The Daily Show, but would Stewart ever pause at the idea of making fun of Kucinich? Obviously he would not, because he has done so before.
This could be the ultimate undoing of 1/2 Hour: the idea that its role is to serve as the conservative counterpoint to Stewart. What Surnow and the show’s other handlers don’t seem to get is that Stewart really isn’t all that biased. The show has a liberal slant, yes, but Stewart is, above all else, a bullshit detector. He never refrains from pointing out when a liberal says or does something stupid. Stewart’s stance is that he is amused by the circus of U.S. politics, and he’s so sick of the way the country is run, that he’s not about to hand out any free passes for those who sit on one particular side of the aisle. Stewart can ridicule John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Kucinich, and the rest as effectively as anybody. This leaves 1/2 Hour without a niche. For it to get better, it will have to pay closer attention to specific examples of what real public figures are saying and doing, but it is unlikely to ever be as deft as The Daily Show.
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Comments
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This article is hilarious and awesome! Keep up the good work!
— Dan - Feb 22, 03:32 PM - #Love the article! No one could ever compare to Stewart or Colbert..
— Carrig - Feb 23, 12:01 PM - #this article was useless the daily show does not need someone to defend it
— jon - Feb 23, 12:04 PM - #This review is great! You showed how lame and pathetic FOX news (and I use that word lightly when referring to the FOX network) and the conservatives are. It’s not funny, at all, and the laugh track is archaic. Well, what do you expect from a bunch of Republicans, anyway?
— Rita - Feb 23, 12:10 PM - #Newsweek offers another review:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17228331/site/newsweek/
— kyle - Feb 23, 12:30 PM - #That FOX show is going to crash and burn. It will not be around next year for you to review. Some people just don’t know how to be funny.
— Robert Morrow - Feb 23, 12:44 PM - #Doesn’t the title alone indicate the show is written by a bunch of hacks? If this was sent as a pilot script, it would never have gotten a deal. For another dated comparison, Daily Show vs 1/2 News Hour doesn’t even merit a Mad vs. Cracked comparison. Cracked was way, way funnier.
— kayakgirl - Feb 23, 01:00 PM - #How can you tell the difference between the “news” shows and the 1/2 Hr. News Hr.?
Same stuff, different lips.
— RT - Feb 23, 01:27 PM - #FOX + Funny = Oxymoron. Oxymoron + Moron = FOX.
— David Childress - Feb 23, 01:32 PM - #The show might have been funny if it’d had actual comedy writers? Joel Surnow? I love 24, but it’s one of the least funny shows on TV right now. There are funny conservatives, but not these people.
— Zen - Feb 23, 02:48 PM - #Aw, c’mon, Zen of #10: we watch 24 for drinking games. Closest bet to when Kiefer screams downs a shot! :) always good for giggles
— kathy - Feb 23, 06:22 PM - #really well-written article. thanks, it came in handy. asi was trying to recover from just getting bludgeoned by a clip of the 1/2 hour..
— Sidd - Feb 23, 07:43 PM - #As a person who likes The Simpsons and Family Guy (and, oh yes, The Daily Show), and as a Canadian, I think The 1/2 Hour News Hour is not funny.
How is it that they get the guy who created 24 to create this drivel? The title somewhat reminds me of the name of a long-running CBC (my country’s equivalent of PBS and NPR) show, This Hour Has 22 Minutes (which used to star Rick Mercer, from my native Newfoundland).
The trailer is not very amusing. I mean, remember Ann Coulter (as Vice President) closes with a modification of one of her most infamous invectives?
How about when Rush Limbaugh gets to be President? I certainly don’t want that!
The part I think is the most hackneyed, however, is the attack on Barack (Obama), with that “BO” swipe.
I personally liked it better when The Daily Show commented on the coverage of Anna Nicole Smith’s death, which I myself expected to be somehow excessive, like that missing white woman in Aruba (Natalee Holloway).
— Matt Fisher - Feb 24, 09:09 PM - #I did not have great hopes for the program, because the trailer did seem…reachy. The delivery of a so-called comedic commentary program has, by the way, nothing to do with the overall news department, and conflating the two is as lame as the non-funny one-liners on the program. Fox offers a strong and important alternative to the unanimous voice of the mainscream media, though clearly the majority of the ‘reviewers’ herein inscribed disagree with the point of view evinced by Fox. What is sad is that news on all the stations, liberal toppling-over-to-left or right of center, are both embarrassingly tabloided, deficient in brainwave prodding, and regrettably limited to parochial concerns that matter not that very much. The Daily Show and the increasingly watchable Colbert Report serve their audiences, and avoid the insult of a laugh-track. But the msm do not have, as by right, a religious duty to nuke whatever they disagree with. It is merely another in the nails hammered into anything not critical of Bush that is seen in the crit above. The virulence of the hate-Bush and fox crowd is so sclerotic, we should tap it and use the resulting spark and fire to fuel our cars instead of feeding the Middle East money-suck monsters of oil.This particular show should gracefully bow out before it humiliates its participants any further, but a counterbalance may yet come onboard to provide amusement a la Daily/Colbert. Truth is, we don’t need such a foil. There are comics and comedic personnae who point out the many many foibles of the ‘other side’ with enough panache to satisfy the adult non-afflicted community.
— maya - Feb 26, 08:51 AM - #First, an excellent article. You share many of my same thoughts on this.
Second, in this kind of political climate, I’m afraid that conservatives are simply incapable of offering the comedic counterbalance that Maya ponders. The fact is that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert achieve success by both confronting the reality of the news (as the author of the article aptly details in the Daily Show Iraq resolution example), and totally eschewing it with irony. Stewart actually faces and analyzes the news, and ingratiates himself to us by throwing his hands in the air in disbelief. Colbert is a skewering satire of those who overshadow the analysis of news they are supposed to perform with their own self-righteous, bullying, bullshitting personality. It is the comedic boon of the conservatives that they cling to silly, almost antiquated rhetoric and jingoistic slogans that these wonks spew. In the information age, there’s no need to form your opinion around such simply spun spin—you’re just setting yourself up for mockery. Deal with the facts, like Stewart. It’s sad in more ways than one that these shows are invoked in contemplating the 1/2 Hour News Hour. The fact is, the latter is just a bad Weekend Update, focused on political targets. I see nothing of what Stewart or Colbert do in this atrocity. Most of the jokes (for example, the Hillary angry lesbian one or the childrens books one) are no more political than what you’d find on a Weekend Update. The joke itself is the joke, not its reflection of some small truth (which is what has always comprised the best comedy). A blogger on the Huffington Post pointed out that because the attitude of many conservatives (especially those on Fox News) is generally one of grievance (in regard to the mainstream media, Hollywood, the government, etc.), their humor is so focused on old, specific targets that the related jokes come off so blunt that they can’t achieve any scathing effect. The 1/2 Hour News Hour is “right-wing” just by default, meaning the sum of all these not-really-political jokes happens to reflect a determination to focus on leftist figures or issues, nothing else. So, the blogger points out, due to grievance, conservative humor is either dull and ineffectual or an attempt at shock humor by obliterating P.C. sacred cows. But this is not something you can achieve on a Weekend Update-like comedy show; your anchors (the “straight men” ) cannot be the voice of such shocking material. The voice must come from an evidently fictitious and already outrageous character—like Stephen Colbert’s, or the little foul-mouthed cartoon kids of South Park. South Park may be the closest one comes to finding conservative humor, although many have pointed out that their show reflects a libertarian perspective more than anything. The 1/2 Hour News Hour wisely never went for anything too offensive….the only thing that came close was when Anne Coulter quoted herself and threatened viewers to watch or else she and Rush (as Prez and VP) would “invade your country, kill your leaders, and convert everyone to Christianity.” This interested me because her use of her own words for comedy implies that she knows what Stewart has known all along: she’s playing a part on TV. Politics is theater. Theater is comedy. The Daily Show returns the favor by making comedy of politics. The Half Hour News Hour makes comedy of body odor and flatulence.
— Michael - Feb 26, 06:05 PM - #I think you are all very severely missing the point. Is the show funny? No, of course not. But it’s not actually designed as a Daily Show clone at all, and humor (as popularly defined) is entirely beside the point. It’s designed as a way to package numerous opinion-reinforcing cheapshots in short succession at a captive audience that already agrees with everything being said. It’s simply a more efficient packaging of the jingoistic, vitriolic product that Fox News was created to provide. Has anyone actually bothered to look at the ratings for the show?
— Midwest Product - Mar 1, 01:44 PM - #Although 1/2 Hour is clearly designed to reinforce the audience’s prejudices, it can’t do it if the audience won’t watch. And it won’t. To keep the audience, it has to be genuinely funny to the late-Boomer-skewed conservative audience, but it doesn’t come close.
Stewart and Colbert have very good products, but they tap into humor their audiences already enjoy. Educated, young, and urban, TDS’s audience never laughed harder than when Stewart, dead-serious, attacked Crossfire’s screamers, or when Colbert eviscerated the DC press corps to their face… Colbert was using the administration’s misadventures as a device to ridicule the incompetence of the press, and it was all the funnier that we got the joke when the press didn’t. But this isn’t much different than the jokes these this audience already enjoys and tells, material from Cho, Chapelle, and Neal Pollack, if not inspired by Monty Python. They make us laugh at the self-serious self-parody of the establishment.
What is genuine conservative humor? The question answers itself if you’ve ever hung out at a farm supply store or a golf course bar. Of course, this howling fare can’t be shown on TV because it’s orders of magnitude more blunt than Coulter’s us of the F-word, or Limbaugh’s ramblings on race.
If you took notes at the right sports bar, you’d have endless material that would make 1/2 Hour rating explode. Before it was forced off the air.
— Pacific John - Mar 5, 06:54 PM - #Reminds me of other conservative “humourists” like Jonah Goldberg. Unfortunately for him and the writers of 1/2 Hour, as a general rule in political comedy, you need to get the analysis at least partly right in order for the joke to be funny.
Also, you need to be funny.
Toeing the party line and insulting your audience just isn’t funny. I’m not sure how this kind of show could last.
— Andrew Garib - Mar 13, 02:59 PM - #