Joel Surnow, the creator of “24″ as well as the new and extraordinarily bad “1/2 Hour News Hour” (deep satire that) says the following in an interview in TV Guide:
…I think the one thing we target more than anything else is hysteria. The hysteria over global warming. The hysteria over Barack Obama. College kids’ hysteria over Che Guevera T-shirts. This is funny. This is irrational behavior that has lodged itself in our culture, and no one stops to go, “Wait a minute this is kind of absurd.” (emahasis added)
Sure they do. It’s called The Daily Show. It’s called The Colbert Report. It’s called Jesus General. It’s called Sadly No! It’s called The Poor Man.
Of course, the absurdities the above satirists skewer on a regular basis are obvious and really absurd and above all obviously so to the audience. That’s what makes it funny. The Onion plays the same comedy territory.
Surnow is violating a central tenet of comedy and of drama: he has an agenda. And, an audience can smell an agenda a mile away. Surnow is producing propaganda comedy. Problem is, it’s bad comedy. Because it’s not ironic. It’s not satire. The satirists I list above are funny and have something in common: they point out the ironic and make fun of it. That’s satire. That’s what makes people laugh. Surnow’s show is unfunny because it isn’t pointing out absurd ironic moments that are universal. It’s making fun of deeply partisan ideas. It’s simply bashing and trying to make fun. It’s the very definition of sophomoric humor.
Just because you perceive that there is “hysteria” over things you don’t like, doesn’t mean that such a reaction doesn’t have deep roots in real and honest concern and truth as many people see it. What Surnow is really saying is that when people spend so much time focusing upon things he and other Conservatives don’t want them to spend time upon, then it’s hysteria.
But, of course, obsessing on things that Conservatives consider important isn’t hysteria at all, is it? Take the GWOT for example. Calling for a US Senator to be hung isn’t hysteria? Calling an entire portion of a society “unhinged” and using distinctly Nazi like tactics such as focusing upon “Liberals” who fall on the wrong side of the law and using them to generalize that they represent all Liberals, isn’t hysteria?
Shorter Surnow: Conservative hysteria good. Liberal hysteria bad.
Which is the essential mantra of a propagandist, not a comedy creator.
Surnow should stick to torture propaganda. He’s actually okay at it, even if he gets it wrong.
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