"Intermittently amusing": a scene from The ½ Hour News Hour.
As anyone who gets their TV via Sky will know, should you want to get a flavour of live news as it is played out in the USA, you have but one option: Fox, Rupert Murdoch's avowedly "fair and balanced" outlet, whose brand values are embodied by its host-cum-in-house-demagogue Bill O'Reilly, and whose news delivery always comes with the none-too-subtle sound of a grinding axe - as with their recent decision to accompany footage of Barack Obama's declaration for the Presidency with a suspiciously lingering caption reminding viewers that his father was Kenyan. Sometimes - like when Katrina hit - it is just about watchable. Very occasionally, it delivers priceless TV moments, as when Bill Clinton flipped out about the "conservative hit job" done on him by Fox's Chris Wallace. Most of the time, however, it delivers the pretty-much unbearable spectacle of ideological hysteria failing to pass itself off as dispassionate journalism.
Forgive me, then, if I didn't catch Sunday night's premiere of The ½ Hour News Hour, Fox's attempt to wrest TV satire back from the liberal-left via a format cribbed from Jon Stewart's Daily Show. Just to recap: it is the invention of one Joel Surnow, the creator of the deservedly drooled-over 24, who apparently describes himself as a "right-wing nut job". It is time, in his estimation, for "satire that tilts right." He goes on: "The one thing we target more than anything else is hysteria. Hysteria over global warming. Hysteria over Barack Obama... This is irrational behaviour that has lodged in our culture, and no-one stops to go, 'This is kind of absurd.'"
In response, there has come the inevitable spurt of hostility. The people behind The Daily Show have reportedly characterized their new rightist rival as "a giant stinking turd of an excuse for political satire" - which they would say, wouldn't they? Elsewhere, it has been claimed that Conservative Comedy is a laughable oxymoron, that digging for laughs while defending the status quo is a stupidly futile enterprise, and that anyhow, the Daily Show is way less ideologically liberal than Fox's advance PR would suggest. "Right wing humour? What a joke," ran a headline in this Sunday's Observer.
Well, yes, but there again no. Excuse me for getting unnecessarily furrow-browed about all this, but at the heart of some of these arguments is a conceptual mistake. There is truth in the idea that, as the Observer piece puts it, "Comedy is inherently subversive, from the Lord Of Misrule to Saturday Night Live" (although where that leaves, say, Eric Morecambe, is an interesting question). The Oxford English Dictionary's definition of the S-word refers to anything likely to "overturn, overthrow upset (religion, government, the monarchy, morality etc.)". But here's the thing: at the end of those parentheses, you could easily add "liberal orthodoxy", not least of the pious, tokenistic, self-delusional kind. In other words, you can actually "tilt right" and be subversive, particularly if ideas from the left are either in the ascendant or defining the political centre. For proof, read the best work of PJ Rourke - but note also that he lost his way once his fellow Republican Party Reptiles avenged the Clinton years and he had very little to rail against.
In that context, one might cut the ½ Hour News Hour some slack. Certainly, I found one of the clips posted on YouTube - a skit on the current ubiquity of Barack Obama - intermittently amusing, not least when it flashed up a mock-campaign T-shirt with the legend "Don't tell Mama I'm for Obama" (it seemed funny at the time). Its big problem, however, lies in what most of the critiques haven't pointed out: that the death of comedy isn't which way it falls on the left/right fault-line, but even a slight whiff of ideological fervour. Thus, the sketch in which US radio gobshite Rush Limbaugh and Conservative polemicist-cum-harpy Anne Coulter played the President and Vice President was a dud, in the same way that that long-forgotten archetype the Left Wing Comedian (cf Ben Elton circa 1985) was a comic failure, wailing and gnashing about how horrid the Tories were, while their audiences felt they ought to be laughing, but were actually unamused.
So what hope for the ½ Hour News Hour? Given the motivation behind its creation, hard-bitten politics are probably built into its DNA. Even if the Democrats take the White House next time and liberal piety gets a shot in the arm, you wonder whether it'll hit the right notes. And anyway: should Obama - or Hillary Clinton, or John Edwards - take the Presidency, there will surely be one voice pin-pricking every outbreak of self-importance and piety: Jon Stewart, for whom iconoclasm usually takes precedence over political positioning, and who may have won this particular TV dust-up already.
