Last Word For A While On 1/2 Hour News Hour

Not knee-slappingly funny, but a decent premise, and the comic, who I'm sure I've seen dozens of times before, sells it pretty well:

I don't think this show is half as bad as I first did. I didn't see the whole show -- just the clips flying around -- but it looks... okay. Again, I started to wonder if I wasn't judging the show too harshly, given the facts that 1, comedy is hard, and 2, this is evident from the relatively few truly amusing comedies on TV. Also, I began to wonder if 3, I really was just lashing out at the show because Joel Surnow didn't invite me on to the show.

But now I think my main problem with the show is this: 4, conservatives have become very annoyed at the pandering, didactic clapper-rich political quasi-"comedy" coming from the left, so much so that we simply despise the pandering, didactic, clapper-rich nature of such "comedy," and we're still pretty annoyed even when such "comedy" is pandering to us.

This SNL clip is kind of obvious in the shots it takes at Nancy Pelosi:

...but it feels less like pandering because we know that SNL is a hotbed of leftism mixed in with some "rightwing" establishment liberalism. It's a surprise to see this sort of sketch on SNL these days, so it feels fresher. Plus, Kristin Wiig has a great delivery.

So, while I wouldn't agree with the Libertas blogger linked at Hot Air who calls this, ahem, “flat-out, gut-wrenchingly funny,” I've stopped seeing it as some horror. It's not as funny as I'd like -- but few shows are. Even the ones I really like aren't as funny as I'd like.

So that's my new theory-- many on the right are denigrating this show (including me, sometimes) beyond what it deserves just because we've become very hostile to pandering political humor, even when we're the ones being pandered to.

(And yeah, my humor tends to have a lot of clapper material and a good amount of pandering, too, but then, we're all kinda used to that, and further, blogs are read primarily for news and opinion and only secondarily for stuff like humor. On a comedy show, one expects the comedy to come first, so there's more resistance to the pander.)

Of course, the brain trust at Alicublog knows the real reason for my reversal:

In an update, Mr. Spades, maybe after a visit from The Boys, says the show isn't really that bad.

Yes, I got a visit from "The Boys." Surnow, FNC, the GOP, George Bush himself -- all are very, very concerned about what Ace of Spades might have to say about new comedy show on FoxNews.

They told me pretty firmly: Get back on board, Son, or you've seen your last quarter-million Halliburton check.

As you command, Darth Cheney.

posted by Ace at 03:40 PM

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