I was scouring the net for more insight into comedy, when i hit upon this excellent post by Allison Silverman. Allison Silverman is one of the Executive Producers of the “Colbert Report”, and was a former writer on “The Daily Show” and “Late Night with Conan O’Brien”.
Its got great insight into how jokes are written in the real world. Political power is an important part of who gets mocked. Financially strong coalitions that can sue are excluded in the mockery. This means that many things aren’t made fun of:
Everyday, a script of the show goes to our legal adviser to be OK’d before the taping. Decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, but we all know to avoid certain areas. For instance, the Church of Scientology is not the subject of jokes on The Daily Show. And The Daily Show does not put beloved children’s characters into adult situations. You get the idea.
Clearly, in the Philippines where skins are thinner than tissue paper, much political satire won’t work. This makes me respect “Bubble Gang” even more.
The last sentence is about “man on the street interviews”. TDS /CR can feature particularly mean man on the street interviews. And yet there are limits:
Also, when working off a sound bite, no matter how mean the man-on-the-street sounds, we can’t follow him up by saying something like, “This man then left to check on the body in his trunk.”
So, its ok to make someone look stupid or evil, but the show should never have to say so outright.
