The Daily Show and The Colbert Report returned last night, and like any member of the media I’m biased toward finding myself to be right, so I have to say they were as I expected: different, funny, not nearly as hobbled as people had speculated these writing-intense shows would be. I’m on deadline, so I’ll just give you the hail of bullets:
Jon Stewart:
* Last week, I’d complained that, for all David Letterman’s solidarity with his writers, they were doing a lousy job of actually explaining the issues in the strike. (With, I worry, the unanticipated result of making the writers seem like whiny axe-grinders.) Being funny while actually imparting information is what The Daily Show is about, and Stewart did not disappoint here. His faux rationalization of why the corporations don’t want to pay the writers for Internet downloads was the funniest strike routine I’ve heard yet: the iTunes fee, he said, is not for content; it’s a shipping and handling charge. “That $1.99 goes to fuel for tiny trucks.”
* Likewise, he used his interview with a labor-relations professor to dig at his bosses for poormouthing themselves about the Internet while boasting of new-media money to shareholders. “I guess the phrase Sumner [Redstone] used at the Viacom meeting was, ‘You’ll all be dipping your balls in gold.'”
* Interesting to see that, while he lined up on the writers’ side, Stewart was willing to criticize their tactics–in particular, choosing not to make a side deal with his show even though he said he had persuaded his bosses to make one. On the other hand, making the picket outside his own show The Moment of Zen was classy.
Stephen Colbert:
* Both more and less vulnerable to the strike. On the one hand, The Colbert Report is a language-besotted show, and The Word (sorry, I’m not up on my diacritical marks) was noticable by its absence. On the other hand, Colbert’s putting on a jacket and arching his eyebrows is an act of writing in itself, and from the second Stewart threw to him–catching his rabbinical “strike beard” in a paper shredder–he was up to the improv challenge.
* Immediately proved how much these shows were missed during the election, from the silly (“HuckColbert-ry ’08. Think about it, Ben and Jerry. That’d be a hell of a flavor”) to the incisive (the best one-liner about Hillary on stage in Iowa with a sea of old Clinton Administration hands: “Look at that haunted mansion behind her!”).
* The Colbert Report had become increasingly worth watching for the interviews, so I’m glad he–by necessity–did two of them, and I hope he keeps this up until the strike’s over.
Bottom line, I didn’t enjoy either show as much as I do with writers. But I laughed, and that’s the big goal here. When it comes down to it, there are worse ways of making TV than training a camera on two funny guys and challenging them to be funny for a half-hour apiece. As with the other late-night shows, it’ll take a couple more nights past their strike-joke-heavy returns to really assess them (Conan really sold me by last Friday). But for now, fake news is back, and my joy is real.