The Daily Show

Not having sufficiently debased itself by endorsing Joe Lieberman, The New Republic has now hired a new TV critic, Lee Siegel. His (her?) first target: Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show — a show that regular readers know I regularly cite:

To be honest, I was never a huge fan of Stewart’s humor, which he custom-crafts for a mostly college-age audience. “The Daily Show”‘s intention of showing clips from the news in order to mock the conventional coverage of the news and get to the bottom of what’s really going on in the world always seemed to me too dependent on the thing it derided–the comic equivalent of covering an old song. Stewart’s deflate-the-talking-heads shtick consists too much of sarcastic jibes at the Pompous or Deceitful Public Figure, at the Underlying Reality of Self-Interest; it’s more like throwing fruit than making jokes. [… commentary progressively degrades for another ten paragraphs]

Now, I had a brilliant take-down of Siegel at the ready, but Digby beat me to it:

Methinks that journalist, TV critic and all around pompous ass Lee Siegel just doesn’t get the joke. But that’s not surprising. He is, after all, the punch line.

AB