The Daily Show - A Milestone
Jul. 23rd, 2006 12:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
howeirdJon Stewart announced the 10th anniversary of The Daily Show this week. It has been the one show I have had on TiVo since I first got the machine, and today I took the auto-record off for it. Because the show is has degenerated into in-jokes and dick jokes, and just isn't much fun anymore.
As a former journalist and humor columnist, it has always been my policy to let the stupidity of the interviewee speak for itself. The best news humor comes from hoisting the victim on his own pitard (or retard, if you will). The Daily Show started out doing this, but lately, instead of interviewing the hapless, the fake news reporters have become the hapless themselves, tossing in stupidities of their own, usually off-subject and always not-funny. Jon has never let a guest finish a sentence, not because he has stunning comic timing, but because he just won't shut up and listen to what the guest is saying. 90% of good comic interviewing is using the guest's own words against him, and you can't do that if you aren't listening to him.
And now there's the wasting of the final 5 minutes in non-witty banter with Colbert, as if the Colbert Report needs a plug every night of the week for the entire effing season. So instead of doing a real fake news story, John and Stevie exchange empty words.
But the final straw was the incessant commercials plugging for Nacho Libre, possibly the most inane, juvenile, stupid movie of the century. Even in fast forward, there is only so much Jack Black in tights that a person can take.
As a former journalist and humor columnist, it has always been my policy to let the stupidity of the interviewee speak for itself. The best news humor comes from hoisting the victim on his own pitard (or retard, if you will). The Daily Show started out doing this, but lately, instead of interviewing the hapless, the fake news reporters have become the hapless themselves, tossing in stupidities of their own, usually off-subject and always not-funny. Jon has never let a guest finish a sentence, not because he has stunning comic timing, but because he just won't shut up and listen to what the guest is saying. 90% of good comic interviewing is using the guest's own words against him, and you can't do that if you aren't listening to him.
And now there's the wasting of the final 5 minutes in non-witty banter with Colbert, as if the Colbert Report needs a plug every night of the week for the entire effing season. So instead of doing a real fake news story, John and Stevie exchange empty words.
But the final straw was the incessant commercials plugging for Nacho Libre, possibly the most inane, juvenile, stupid movie of the century. Even in fast forward, there is only so much Jack Black in tights that a person can take.
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