Oy.

Fox is considering airing "a 'Daily Show'-like program" for conservatives. Good luck to them. Conservative satire is, traditionally, much harder than it might at first appear. Mark Evanier compared it to

writing a Marx Brothers movie and trying to make Margaret Dumont the funny one.

Comedy, after all, usually involves a knee-jerk attack on the Establishment. Even today [Mark was writing in 1996], you won't get a lot of laughs mocking the underprivileged and disadvantaged

Of course, guys like Rush Limbaugh and, back in the day, Andrew Dice Clay do just that, so it may be safe to assume, as American Street does, that this is the level of humor we can expect from this undertaking.

I'm also reminded of something in the interview Playboy did with the cast & crew of "West Wing" in October 2001 (See? I told you I buy it for the articles). To quote Bradley Whitford, the actor who played Josh, the closest thing that series had to a lead (and now of "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip"):

"If we were a bunch of Republicans, the show would end with swelling music and we'd be jumping up and down and saying 'Hurrah! We have managed to unprotect the land!' 'The tax break came through for the dot-com guys!"

Besides, "a Daily Show for conservatives" suggests that the "Daily Show" itself is a lot more progressive and liberal than it really is. You know I think they hit the heights almost every night, but they don't do it by trying to move the US in one direction or another.

A study a couple of years ago found that (if memory serves), in the months leading up to the 2004 election, the "Daily Show's" shots were almost equally distributed between George Bush and John Kerry.

They do it by seeing what's funny about reality. But then of course, as Stephen Colbert famously pointed out, reality has a well-known liberal bias. Which may be more what the Fox guys want to counter.

BTW, the mooted show is reportedly to be executive produced by "24's" Joel Surnow and Manny Cota. Well, "24" is a great show, but I don't know if they'd be my go-to guys for comedy, even if Surnow can spit George Bush's dick out of his mouth.