OBAMARAMA

There are two possible explanations for the universal panning of FOX News Channel’s new comedy show, “The Half Hour News Hour,” over a week before it even airs. Explanation #1 is that the liberal media just can’t handle the idea of conservative humor.

Explanation #2 is that “conservative humor” is an oxymoron.

An op-ed in the Daily Illini argues for the latter:

[A]s the icy reception to Stephen Colbert’s brilliant performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner shows, conservatives are completely out of touch with what’s funny. At its core, conservative humor tends to be little more than childish name calling against liberal straw men or blatant appeals to bigotry and intolerance.

The same can be said of liberal comedy, of course. As former Wonkette editor Ana Marie Cox observes, “starting out with a political objective or message is pretty much death for the funny.” But while there is no doubt that conservatives can, on occasion, be humorous, “The Half Hour News Hour” is not such an occasion.

Right out of the gate, the show, which mimics SNL’s Weekend Update format of co-ed newscasters reporting ostensibly humorous takes on actual news stories, goes after Sen. Obama, demonstrating once again how threatened FOX News is of his political rise. They’ll do anything to stop it, apparently, including trying to make jokes.

Click through to see the train wreck for yourself.

(Video courtesy of Crooks and Liars.)

Slate takes a technical look at the punchlines and reports what we all know in our gut: they don’t make an impact. On the Marion Barry bit above:

It happens that there’s an actual joke in there, and The ½ Hour News Hour flubs it in eight or nine ways. On purely technical grounds, there’s the glitch of the control room flashing its graphic of Barry at least two beats before the host reads his name and also the plain fact that 99.9 is not a funny number. You can nearly feel the missed opportunities—for the line to get pleasurably offensive with drug lingo or to turn back on the teller—whizzing past.

…In any case, you couldn’t skewer a cube of tofu with material this dull. It will play to the base, maybe, especially if the base hands the remote control to its 12-year-old son.

Perhaps the most incisive review comes from “TV Guy” Hal Boedeker in the Orlando Sentinel:

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.

Which raises the point: What is a comedy show doing on a news channel?

A NEWS channel? Now that’s comedy.

UPDATE: The Examiner’s “Yeas & Nays” quotes CBS’s Brian Montopoli saying that while “it’s not impossible for conservatives to be funny…the two clips I’ve seen so far just frankly aren’t very funny. … They were so ideological that they almost cross over into unfunny and shrill.”

UPDATE 2: Here’s another example of high-brow conservative humor, clipped from this page at the rightwing site Townhall.com: