Is This Thing On?

NewsBusted, the hi-larious stand-up conservo-comedy podcast, actually made me physically cringe. Now, I know rhetorically, the notion of "cringe-inducing" material is thrown around a lot, but I'm telling you, I shuddered in fear at the mathematically-impossible depths to which this doofus in an ill-fitting suit sinks attempting to squeeze a laugh out of hardcore right-wing nutballery.



Conan O'Brien's mongoloid, malnourished cousin, Mark Ellis, doesn't get a single line off that's not excruciatingly hacktastic. It would have been less painful to just give him an anaesthesia-free root canal on YouTube than encourage him to do his best five minutes on clueless libruls. He clearly learned all he knows about comedy by watching, and then rewatching, all six weeks' worth of Chevy Chase Shows. But how are you going to recreate that phenomenon? Like lightning in a bottle, that Chevy Chase charisma...

Half of Ellis' statements don't even come off as jokes. More like "desperate cries for help." When he blatantly calls Sean Penn a traitor...that's I think when the clips shifts from irritating to pathetic.

And is that canned laughter? It looked like he had a studio audience in the beginning, but the laughs themselves sound really tinny and fake. Plus, there's no way actual humans were laughing at jokes about Michael Moore enjoying ice cream and Barack Obama liking Starbucks. You could give Robin Quivers 8 massive bong rips and she still wouldn't laugh at a joke about Michael Moore's weight problem. It's played...Sooooooo plaaaaaaaayed...

A while back, I discussed Jay Leno's preferred joke-writing technique, which is extremely simple:

(1) Pick a popular news story
(2) Pick a famous person who is not directly or obviously connected with the popular news story
(3) Connect the two

Ellis won't even put in this amount of effort. He's simplified the Leno style into an even more basic, and even less funny (which I wasn't even sure was possible) 2-step formula:

(1) Pick a stupid librul
(2) Insult them

Here's some free advice for anyone attempting to write sharp political humor. If you're writing a joke about how Bill Clinton loves pussy and it's no longer 1997, you suck ass. Thank me later.

[Hat Tip, Mr. Willis]