The new "Conservative version of The Daily Show," The Half-Hour News Hour, debuted last night on Fox News to killer reviews and not just from Liberals, either. There are enough articles online telling you how lousy it was so I thought I'd focus on (a) why it was destined to stink, at least at first, and (b) why it might still be a big hit for Fox.
Why it was destined to stink: Well, for one thing, when someone else has an acclaimed hit and you come along and say, "We're going to do our version of that," you're setting yourself up for failure. People are not going to just expect a good show from you. They're going to, not unreasonably, expect something as wonderful as the hit upon which you're basing and selling yourself. It's like being Frank Sinatra, Jr. No matter how good he is on stage — and actually, he's pretty good — all audiences seem to do is mutter, "Not as wonderful as his father." An impossible standard.
You're also starting from scratch but likening yourself to something that's long since gotten its act together. The Daily Show wasn't all that terrific when it started, either. But The Half-Hour News Hour isn't being compared to Jon Stewart's first weeks or even to Craig Kilborne's break-in period.
More importantly, comedy does not arise from nowhere. You can't just go from zero to sixty. If someone came to me waving large sums of cash and said, "Put together a Conservative comedy show for us," my first action would be to scour the country for existing troupes and comedians…people who've been doing it for a while and who've refined their acts in smaller venues. When Lorne Michaels started Saturday Night Live, he signed performers like Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner and Chevy Chase and John Belushi who'd already been working together at Second City or in the National Lampoon shows…and a lot of what they did on SNL the first year was material (or variations on material) they'd perfected in stage appearances.
I don't know where they got the folks who write and appear on The Half-Hour News Hour. They may all be very talented on an individual basis. But as we've learned from a lot of failed SNL imitations and even from a lot of SNL seasons when new cast members from different walks were thrown together without breaking in as "featured players," it's hard to just all start all being hilarious together. You can't even find a tone or an attitude that way. The only SNL imitation that had any real critical or ratings success was SCTV, which starred a long-established troupe that had been working together for years and already had polished routines and characters.
So I'd look for, say, a comedy troupe out there already doing Right-Wing Comedy. I'd hire them and use them as the core of my new show. And if I couldn't find such a troupe already in existence…well, that would tell me something.
All of this is above and beyond the fact that Conservative comedy is, almost by definition, difficult. It's like (I've said this before) making a Marx Brothers movie and trying to make Margaret Dumont the funny one. There's plenty of phoniness and arrogance to puncture on the Left but it's tough to structure a joke which is the rich making fun of the poor, or those in power picking on those who aren't. It's not impossible but it's tough, just as it's tough to fill even a half-hour of political humor if you restrict yourself to one side of the aisle. The Executive Producer of The Half-Hour News Hour has been quoted as saying he looked around and didn't see anyone making fun of Hillary or John Kerry. Which only tells us he's never seen Jon Stewart's show, the program he's supposedly replicating.
Nor has he apparently seen Leno or Letterman or Conan or SNL or any of those shows. They all routinely rip into Liberals and Democrats and, yes, they do more about George W. Bush but that's not bias. That's because he's in power and giving them so much to work with. When it was Bill Clinton in power and Monica came to light, the jokes flowed freely in that direction.
So why do I think The Half-Hour News Hour might still be a hit? That is, assuming Fox doesn't yank it off, ratings be hanged, out of sheer embarrassment? Because it doesn't have to be funny. It only has to be mean.
There's a market out there for mean. There are people out there who'll pay good money to hear someone say Hillary Clinton is an ugly cow or Ted Kennedy is a pathetic drunk. No joke necessary. If you don't believe that, listen to some Talk Radio shows or, better still, check out what Dennis Miller now does on stage. Someone sent me a bootleg MP3 of a recent Miller live performance and I was so disappointed. The man was once so witty, not necessarily about politics. But at some point — I forget which of the many Dennis Miller Shows was on the air at the time — he adopted a kind of "I'm too hip to be entertaining you people" attitude. He goes out and just says Hillary's evil, Bill's a horny bastard, Al Gore is a fat liar, et cetera. And oh, yeah. Bush is a real man and why don't all these midgets get off his back? Some people love it.
I suspect Miller had a rocky period there before audiences knew what to expect when they paid to see the new him. But around the time he became the first professional topical comedian in history to announce he would not do jokes about the President of the United States, he found his audience…or rather, they found him. Those people may find The Half-Hour News Hour. They aren't the majority in America. They're a shrinking minority, which seems to be making them madder and madder and more likely to turn to whoever tells them what they want to hear. But there are enough of them to sell out all the Dennis Miller concerts and there may be enough of them to keep The Half-Hour News Hour afloat until its makers figure out what the show is.