I’m Sick of Your Shit: The Daily Show

Posted by Dan March 21st, 2008 at 10:34am In Uncategorized

I have to admit, I made this post an “I’m Sick of Your Shit” primarily for the shock value. I love Jon Stewart endlessly, of course, but I have a bone to pick with The Daily Show and why not resurrect the series?

It’s a weird, unpleasant feeling — I must say — having to raise a beef with one of our favorites. But no show is perfect and even the teacher’s pet has to get a B+ every once in a while to keep him on his toes.

Here’s what has been on my mind for a while now…

I don’t watch The Daily Show consistently, but I watch it enough to notice that they have a certain kind of gag I find cheap and not constructive. Often when they are discussing media coverage, they’ll do segments where the splice together lots of anchors and reporters asking the same question in different ways. For instance, on a big primary night recently they had a montage of network anchors describing the colors they used on the different maps. There’s a shot of Wolf Blitzer calling a certain color code “cranberry” and then Chris Matthews calling something “umber.” Etc., etc., etc.

That’s a silly example, but they often tackle more substantive issues and you’re supposed to make inferences based on the clip compilations. Because everyone is asking whether Barack Obama’s speech on race did the job, then there must be something wrong with that.

What gets me about this phenomenon is this: it’s an easy trick that can fill up a good twenty to thirty seconds and you don’t have to write an actual joke. I’m not trying to say the media should be let off easy (far from it) or that the 24 hour news networks aren’t ridiculous much of the time (they are), but often these clip compilations don’t have a real point. Just because a lot of people are asking the same question and it seems silly in the reel, doesn’t mean it’s not valid. I feel like when you’re in the game of political satire, when you make fun of something there should be a lesson to glean from it.

Not that everything comes back to Project Runway (well, it kind of does in my world, but whatever), but they do the same thing on the Project Runway reunion shows. They often to montages of all the times a certain event happened on the past season — like Ricky crying, Christian saying “fierce,” Tim Gunn saying “make it work.”

When you take them all at once, it’s funny to see. But it doesn’t necessarily mean anything.