The Day The Laughter Lived

Fox News cancelled the Half Hour News Hour after several months of noxious comedy being pumped into the atmosphere. Fox is doing its part to fight global unfunniness. Thank you, Fox.

(oddly, the show wasn't doing terrible in the ratings. I think Fox simply became embarrassed having such horrendous content on their channel, particularly when it purports to be a news network while airing a one-sided "comedy" show. The whole fair and balanced thing is very important to Fox, which is why they whined incessantly about Democrats who wouldn't appear on the network. The Half Hour News Hour was damaging an already damaged brand.)

Comedy Matters

You can check me out talking about inequality and global poverty, making the funny and making a point, on the best comedy/current affairs show ever to happen in a living room, The Free Speech Show. Bill Bronner has put together an interesting show formed around a general topic (in this case, wealth and inequality). Four comics do a set and then we all talk about it. My set is here and the panel discussion with Bronner, Lori Buckley (Lord Buckley's daughter!), Steve Smith and Chokai is here. Fun stuff. This is the only comedy I want to do anymore, the kind of comedy that's really a political speech. For the lazy, here are the embeds.

Set (5 minutes, nice and bite-size):



Panel discussion (1/2 hour and a little meandering):



In addition, I do want to call attention to one of my advertisers, The Comedy Jesus Show. I've worked with Comedy Jesus on several occasions, and he's pretty hilariously funny without being all that blasphemous, aside from the, er, wearing the Jesus outfit. There's a bunch of video on his site as well. And the more you click through, the more it helps me, so come on, give a brudda some support.

And if you want info about things that aren't related to comedy in any way, you can always read about the 1/2 Hour News Hour.

A Lot of People Are Watching Bad Comedy

The 1/2 Hour News Hour is getting numbers comparable to The Daily Show in its first two shows, about 1.4 million viewers, and increasing above its lead-in. That's better than both Colbert and Olbermann. They're going to pick it up for 13 episodes as a once-weekly show.

Well, nobody ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American public, right?

Of course, we'll see if they can make it last beyond the curiosity-seeking. At some point, you have to be entertaining. I do hear that they're actually going to hire a writing staff, which could, you know, help.

Lights are On, No One's Home

What a breathtaking day yesterday was, so much going on. But there was one thing I forgot to mention. In the wake of Ann Coulter's comments at CPAC (which are losting her advertisers), you would think it would register a mention that she appeared prominently at the beginning of Fox' 1/2 Hour News Hour show just two days later.

Of course, somebody would have had to have NOTICED that it was on.

And this is a fairly pathetic attempt at justification by my old friend Kurt Long, who clearly is so embarrassed by his performance that he changed his name for the show.

Dighton homey-gone-Hollywood Kurt Long doesn’t think his anchor gig on Fox News Channel’s “The 1/2 Hour News Hour” will torpedo his career.

“If Robert Downey Jr. can get busted for heroin, be found sleeping in a stranger’s bed and still be on the Academy Awards last week, how much could this hurt me,” laughed the co-anchor of FNC’s new right-wing news spoof.

So, ah, why hide behind the name “Kurt McNally” on the show????

“Is Kiefer Sutherland ‘hiding’ behind Jack Bauer on ‘24?’ ” said Long. “Being behind the desk on the show is just another acting gig for me. I’m not playing me (a la the left-leaning ‘Daily Show’ host Jon Stewart), I’m playing an anchorman who is oblivious to the jokes around him.”

Dude, friend, you're hiding. You're transparently hiding. There's no "mystery" to the vomitorium of comedy that is that show, no character to be projecting. You're not oblivious to the jokes, you're telling the jokes, and they're not funny. You're doing the devil's bidding, spitting out talking points that Republican operatives want in their audience's brain. You're mostly hiding from yourself.

And when the lede of a story is you claiming that your latest gig WON'T destroy your career, uh, it's destroyed your career.

Bad Comedy Liveblogging

As a stand-up who's spent a lot of time in open mikes, I have developed a high tolerance for pathetically bad comedy. So who better to shepherd us through the utter waste of 30 minutes of all of our lives than yours truly?

...Joe Klein gets the Enemy of the Week from Hannity! Incidentally, Hannity's going with the Ahmadinejad jacket-and-no-tie look. He must love Iran.

...here we go... starts with the awful Rush Limbaugh sketch and the Hee-Haw laugh track. Which I've already seen. What's hilarious about this is that it starts as a Presidential address and then when Coulter walks in it suddenly becomes a sketch of them working.

...I should mention that "Kurt McNally" isn't named Kurt McNally. The anchors are apparently so confident of the show's success that they changed their names for it. Maybe they want to work in this town again and need some plausible deniability.

...Hillary will hire a group of angry lesbians? Ha!

Here's the most obvious joke of the year award... Iran denying that the Holocaust conference happened 4 months ago.

The fairness doctrine/Kucinich/Air America line is at least a joke.

gay penguins... here comes the funny children's book titles! Get it, they added "the budget deficit" to The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe! Get it?

Wow, that ACLU parody ad was completely offensive. Blaming the ACLU for allowing hate groups to speak in public... mainly right-wing hate groups, mind you, like the KKK and neo-Nazis and white supremacists. The upisdown going on there is almost enough to stop the space-time continuum.

And we're back...

joke about Saddam Hussein's daughter, and Suzanne Somers. Man this is depressing. Weekend Update only lasts 5 minutes.

Here's the Barack Obama sequence. So now I can tune out... yay, fart jokes and BO humor! Woo-hoo!

Even the production value on this thing is pathetic. And the "Don't Tell Mama I Voted For Obama" line is actually from the Obama campaign, as I remember.

Dom Irrera makes an appearance as the Che Guevara T-shirt salesman. Wow, they're reading. This is hilarious from the group of people that brought us the "Ayatollah Assahola" shirt.

One thing about this show. The jokes don't even really exist. They're simply placeholders to get out information about the enemies of Fox News. For example, the Obama segment, which boils down to "Obama snorted coke, Obama's middle name is Hussein."

Now we've got a celebrity charity sketch that I think I wrote a version of when I was 12 years old. The other funny thing about this show bashing Hollywood is that it comes out of Hollywood.


The Ed Begley running gag is particularly absurd. First of all, it's about Ed Begley. I'm trying to think if there's a more obscure celebrity/activist they could use. Mike Farrell?

Now there's a fake global warming evangelist guy on trying to link every problem in the world to global warming. For instance, how was the blizzard in Colorado caused by global warming?

This ACLU thing is a talking point masquerading as a "joke". Actually it's not a joke at all. It's a live-action Mallard Fillmore, just reading off a Federalist Society fax and adding a laugh track.

Wow, this is almost done. Merciful march of time!

Another Ed Begley shot to end the show. They said "we'll be back next week," and we can all have a good laugh at that. But get this. They're actually REPEATING this episode next week. They can't even manage 21 fresh minutes of shitty comedy a week.