In 2007, Fox News launched what the station said would be the conservative answer to The Daily Show. The 1/2 Hour News Hour debuted in Ffebruary and was canceled by August, a victim of its own lack of wit and overheated commitment to ideology.
The critics noticed. Hal Boedeker, who writes the TV Guy column in The Orlando Sentinel, summed up the show’s failures rather succinctly:
Jon Stewart knows how to do slashing comical commentary. He weighs in on what’s happening, such as the media’s bizarre coverage of Anna Nicole Smith’s death.
David Letterman knows how to do slashing comical commentary. He takes President Bush’s awkward speeches and contrasts them with the lasting words of John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt.
Fox News Channel does not know how to do slashing comical commentary. The channel debuts “The 1/2 Hour News Hour” at 10 p.m. Sunday and repeats it at 10 p.m. Feb. 25. This show was meant to be a conservative version of “The Daily Show.” It is a botch.
“The 1/2 Hour News Hour” does not comment on what is happening; it simply takes swipes at people. These people include Howard Dean, Hillary Clinton, Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama and Ed Begley Jr. Other joke topics are the ACLU, Time magazine, children’s books and global warming.
Laughter, of an awfully canned variety, greets all the gags. Nothing happening on screen justifies these outbursts.
Hey, I’m all for a good dig at the high and the mighty. But these satirists fall short of hitting their targets with wit, timeliness or punch.
So, why am I writing about a show that disappeared into rightful obscurity 18 months ago? For an answer, I’ll quote a press release I received earlier today from Richard Viguerie, a pioneer of the conservative movement:
ConservativeHQ.com is launching a new daily comic strip that is the conservatives’ answer to political comics like “Doonesbury” and the strip-turned-animated-cartoon “The Boondocks.”
“Liberal comedians and cartoonists have expressed great anguish at the rise of Barack Obama to the presidency, because having a perfect president makes it impossible to make fun of Washington,” says Richard Viguerie, chairman of ConservativeHQ.com. “‘The Gentleman from Lickskillet’ is conservatives’ response.”
“The strip is for people who can’t help but laugh at the politicians in Washington,” says Viguerie.
“The Gentleman from Lickskillet” is the first conservative comic strip to interweave humor and satire with continuing storylines and a large cast of characters. The strip runs daily, Monday through Saturday. A Sunday version is set to launch next month.
The strip stars Randall Dill, a member of Congress; his family, including his wife (an assistant district attorney) and their young daughter; his congressional staff; his friends and constituents back home; and the politicians, bureaucrats, and politically correct people that they encounter in the course of their adventures.
The strip, which appears at ConservativeHQ.com, began unofficially three weeks ago with a sequence satirizing the inauguration of the new President. The current week, with a link to the complete archive, can be found at http://conservativehq.com/lickskillet/.
Seems fair. Except that the strip — like the 1/2 Hour News Hour — just isn’t funny.
Here is a sample from the conservativehq Web site, though I’d suggest giving the entire run a quick read to get the full flavor of Lickskillet and its awful aftertaste:
Given the evidence — and Dennis Miller’s steep descent into utterly humorless irrelevence — one has to wonder if conservatives lack the humor gene.
Hank Kalet 