Finally caught up with The 1/2 Hour News Hour, Fox News’ experiment in conservative political comedy produced by Joel Surnow, executive producer of laff riot 24. And while I wasn’t surprised to see that the show was as limp as the YouTube leaked clips suggested, I was surprised that it was as dated as most of it was. I mean, jokes about the Skokie Nazi rally? An extended gag about Che Guevara T-shirts? How many years had the writers been waiting to unleash those gems on the world? I don’t know if there’s a Monica Lewinsky cigar joke that has not been made, but if there is, these guys will time-travel back to 1998 and find it.
Much of the criticism of this show has made the argument that good topical humor can’t come out of an ideological agenda. I don’t believe that’s true–if the humorist is funny. The real problem is that laughter can’t come out of an ideological agenda: even the truest of true believers could only force themselves to laugh so hard, out of sheer political loyalty, at the warmed-over Suzanne Somers and prison-bitch jokes 1/2 Hour served up. A laugh in the end is an involuntary reaction, not a forced contribution to the greater public good, as Aaron Sorkin has discovered over the course of a painful season. It comes from the gut, which is neither on the right nor the left of the body but dead in the center.