“A comedy in error”

I’ve refrained from posting most of the reviews of Fox News’ The 1/2 Hour News Hour — although I should note that they were overwhelmingly negative — but this one from The Guardian (some external links omitted) is unusually worthwhile. The article’s author wonders why Joel Surnow chose to model his show after the “Weekend Update” segment of Saturday Night Live, citing The Daily Show as the model Fox News should have followed had it truly been aiming for laughs, and critiques The 1/2 Hour News Hour accordingly. Naturally, the outstanding work turned in by our friend Stephen Colbert (from his tenure with The Daily Show) gets its share of praise, as well.

A comedy in error
Robert Mackey
February 27, 2007 8:15 PM

The strangest thing about the Half Hour News Hour, the Fox News Channel’s first attempt at intentional satire, described by its creator Joel Surnow as “the Daily Show for conservatives,” is not the fact that it has been panned by what Fox calls “the liberal media”.

And panned it certainly was. “Radiation sickness is funnier” raved Charlie Brooker in the Guardian. “The audience for this show is someone who doesn’t like comedy. It is stupendously not funny” chortled Lisa de Moraes on Washingtonpost.com. No, what’s unusual is that the right’s antidote to the Daily Show appears to have been made by people who’ve never actually watched the Daily Show.

While there does seem to be some confusion in the upper echelons of Fox News over just how the Daily Show’s satire works – last August Geraldo Rivera told Bill O’Reilly that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert “make a living putting on video of old ladies slipping on ice, and people laughing” – you would think that Surnow, the conservative producer of 24, would have more insight into what makes the Daily Show so successful. But instead of following the format of one of the most popular shows in America, Surnow has chosen to imitate a very different kind of spoof news program, namely Saturday Night Live’s long-running, and long unfunny, “Weekend Update.”

. . .

While the Daily Show is not entirely reality-based, and does occasionally use fake voice-overs and fictional exaggerations in its comedy, one of the main reasons it is so popular is that it can be – and is – used as an alternative way of keeping up on the real news. While viewers of Fox’s Half Hour are only being educated on developments in the world invented for the show, the Daily Show’s fans are served a steady diet of clips of politicians and celebrities culled from the news channels and presented, with annotation, in all their actual inadvertent hilarity. Perhaps the best example of this method was the awe-inspiring, Stephen Colbert-narrated campaign film in apparent support of Bush’s election in 2004, which used Bush’s actual words to make his whole presidency seem like a farce.

. . .

Read full text of article

I should note here that the premiere of The 1/2 Hour News Hour did very well in the ratings, pulling in approximately 1.5 million viewers. By comparison, The Daily Show averages 1.6 million viewers per night, and The Colbert Report averages 1.2 million. Hot Air cautions that viewers should keep in mind, however, that these comparisons are of limited value given the shows’ respective air times, novelty/longevity and lead-in programming.

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