Conan the Moron, the Queen of Snark, and The Misery Idiocy

In Knoxville, Tennessee, the Dish Network offers a package that includes Channel 139,  whose official name is TBS. I often watch this channel in the evening because it offers “The Big Bang Theory”.

But this means that I have to watch the promos, those announcements and previews of upcoming programs…..so although I strive to mute the promos, I am still exposed to some views and sometimes the sounds of “The Conan O’Brien Show”, Samantha Bee’s show “Full Frontal”, and “The Misery Index”.

I have seen only snippets of “Conan”, but it seems to me that he is a buffoon more than anything else and that his show is more horsing around than a straight talk show. The talk show hosts of yesteryear did some clowning around, but there was usually a high-quality topical initial monologue and mostly the talk was closely focussed on the guests: their activities, their opinions, and their families. Conan, on the other hand, seems to be focussed on getting his audience to guffaw. I think that is because despite his calendar age of 57, his target demographic seems to be teenaged and young adult males, i.e., those in their maximum goofoff years.

One reviewer quoted in a “Conan” promo stated that he is “our best international ambassador”. But The New Yorker had it right: as Ian Crouch wrote in March 2015 on the occasion of O’Brien’s trip to Cuba: “Nobody does the American idiot abroad better.”  O’Brien does not interact with people so much as he uses them as starting blocks for his antics and as props for his mugging. As Crouch remarked, “Fittingly, no one there [in Cuba] seemed to know who Conan was, or what to make of him.  During a Spanish-language class, he becomes upset when the teacher impugns his eighth-grade-level pronunciation; on a tour of the Havana Club rum distillery, he badgers the young guide to move things along to the tasting session at the bar; he commandeers a salsa band, singing gibberish….He badgers people on the street.” The drinking motif seems to run through everything he does, which may account for why he seems to have little sense of how other people are reacting to him.

Someone called his humor “awkward” and “self-deprecating”. “Awkward” seems right, but “self-aggrandizing” seems nearer the mark. He seems to want to push the envelope of the viewer’s tolerance further and further over the line of tastelessness. It is as if he were demanding that people love him no matter what dimwit thing he did. He himself called his show “very silly” when it was shortened, ostensibly to allow for more flexibility, in 2018; he may have meant to be ironic, or he may have been admitting that the nonsense was intentional. As an entertainer, he seems very lazy and of course doing “silly” is easier than doing just about anything else.

For his cluelessness and the insubstantiality of his show, I call him “Conan the Moron”. If I were his mother (who according to the Internet is still alive at  89), I would be so ashamed of him. It is hard to believe that he was the valedictorian of his high school class, that he went to Harvard and wrote a senior thesis on the symbolic use of children by William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Maybe this is just me being an old fogy set in my ways (and, of course, being a dumb girl), but to me Conan is not funny and his show is occupying time that could be given to a more talented and acute interviewer/comedian. (After this was written, it was announced that Conan was moving from TBS to a streaming service, HBO Max. I hope it was because of low ratings.)

On the other hand, there is a show called “Full Frontal” on TBS, featuring an actual comic and satirist, Samantha Bee. I disliked her when I first saw her promos, thinking that she was flighty and snide. But once she said something that seemed not only on point but clever in one promo, I started watching her show, a little bit at a time, and I changed my mind. During the 2020 election season, I made it a point of watching: I was so exasperated with Donald Trump that I welcomed any satirical commentary on his antics even when a barb missed its mark.

Unlike Conan O’Brien, Bee is actually witty at times. It is not just her often laser gibes that ring my chimes, but her organized, well-paced delivery and her intelligent choice of words. Also unlike O’Brien, her comments seem to be inspired by an actual sense of morality, propriety, and ethics. This is disguised by her reckless, feckless manner, but alert viewers are not fooled: this is serious stuff. There is no reason why political and sociological commentary has to be heavy and dead serious and Bee’s show illustrates that. I wouldn’t say that it is always delightful or a pleasure to watch, given the often disheartening subject matter, but if you are already shaking your head at, say, Mitch McConnell’s blindered intransigence, it is good to know that somebody intelligent agrees with you and makes you feel cheered up at the same time. I call Bee the Queen of Snark, but I mean it as a compliment.

Finally, there is “The Misery Index”, a game show hosted by Jameela Jamil. In one of the promos, for no apparent reason, Jamil makes a lewd gesture that I once saw a stripper make in a bar. (It’s a long story.) I think that that tells you all you need to know about this repellent show.

It also stars an alleged comedy troupe called the Tenderloins, composed of Brian Quinn, James Murray, Joe Gatto, and Sal Vulcano. The Tenderloins are also the “stars” of that disgusting show “Impractical Jokers”, where, according to one blurb, they “take dares to an outrageous level”. What that means in practice is that they play inane practical jokes on each other and involve innocent bystanders as well, sort of like Conan. As with Conan, they seem to be Peter Pan types, frozen in immaturity and incapable of recognizing what adult humor is; as with Conan, their target audience seems to be immature teens and adult males in their early twenties. As with Conan, I really feel for their mothers – I am sure that they did not think they were raising their boys to act like idiots.

“The Misery Index” setup provides an excuse to show film clips of the bizarre and the stomach-turning and to make fun of the people shown in the clips, who have reason to feel unhappy because of the painful or embarassing situations that they find themselves in. So the whole show seems to be about making mean-spirited jokes about other people’s misery. In each round, the contestants – one non-comedian and two Tenderloins on each team – rate the clips according to how miserable the people in them must find themselves to be. One Web site states that the team ratings are compared to ratings on the Misery Index (an actual quasi-scientific scale) as determined by a team of therapists, presumably working as consultants. The team coming closest to the nominal rating wins the round. It is alleged that Tenderloins provide comic relief, but clearly they are there only to add to the general yuk-yuk nature of the show. Because of all this nauseating fatuousness, I call the show “The Misery Idiocy”. Or maybe its alternative title should be “Jackassery ‘R’ Us”.

I don’t think a show like “The Misery Index” (or even like “Impractical Jokers”) should be against the law….freedom of speech and all that. But I do think that a responsible network would look for people with actual talent and try to come up with a show for them that is actually funny. Cheap shots in a show also cheapen the network that backs it.

For this viewer, Samantha Bee’s “Full Frontal” is adult comedy/commentary that mainly hits the mark, while “Conan” and “The Misery Index” are losers. Creativity and wit, that’s the ticket for the discerning older viewer, and I wish that the networks would have more of that for our demographic.