1/2 Hour News Hour

UPDATED

Apparently, conservatives are perfectly willing to drop their opposition to affirmative action-style "norming" when it comes to unfunny comedy sketches. The laughter is so obviously canned in the comedy bits from Fox "News" Channel's new comedy show that it's embarrassing to listen to.

First, they use the laugh track to make body odor jokes about Barack Obama seem funny:



Just painful. It's like watching a parody of a conservative comedy show. In fact, when this train wreck was first announced, Sam Seder did an "interview" with somebody pretending to be one of the producers, and what they discussed was pretty much what you see in the clip above, and this one with Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter as, respectively, the newly-elected president and vice president:



Yeah, because that "invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity" line was so adorable the first time we heard it...

Don't quit your day jobs, folks.

Here is the actual producer, Joel Surnow, talking about his baby with TV Guide:

It's not a mean-spirited show — I think the one thing we target more than anything else is hysteria. The hysteria over global warming. The hysteria over Barack Obama. College kids' hysteria over Che Guevera T-shirts. This is funny. This is irrational behavior that has lodged itself in our culture, and no one stops to go, "Wait a minute this is kind of absurd."

Yeah, fun-nee. That must be why you couldn't get any actual humans to laugh at it.

Somehow, I don't think Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert will be losing any sleep.

UPDATE

Reuters reports that The 1/2 Hour News Hour was taped in front of an audience of actual humans!

If the ratings for "The Half-Hour News Hour" do well, then it could become a weekly offering. Two episodes of "The Daily Show"-like project were ordered last year for telecast in the winter after a 12-minute pilot was developed.

It's hosted by comedians Kurt Long and Jennifer Robertson, and both shows were filmed in front of a studio audience last month in Los Angeles. (Robertson replaces Susan Yeagley, who was the co-host in the pilot but who was about to have a child at the time of the taping.)

There were people watching these bits as they were being taped, and they still had to stick in a laugh track. I wonder it's because the audience was silent, or if they had to edit out the booing and hissing.