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[jfb]

Eytan Mirsky, who my sources assure me is the coolest, had a letter in the Times this weekend calling The Daily Show "formulaic and intermittently amusing," and recommending instead Colin Quinn's Tough Crowd.

My impression is that Tough Crowd consists mostly of remarks that are bigoted, ignorant, and, yes, intermittently amusing. I guess de gustibus etc.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I love the Daily Show, but I'm going to have to defend Tough Crowd too. It's a mistake to compare it to Politically Incorrect, which I did at first also; it's more like a Friar's club roast or something, where everyone's just trying to be wittily vulgar and mostly end up being laughably pathetic. I find Colin Quinn's incompetent delivery trainwreck-fascinating to watch, especially in the third act skits that always go horribly awry. I guess part of the appeal (and what differentiates it from all those SNL skits that go nowhere) is his self-awareness: he just doesn't care much about being comprehensible. His semi-regular rotation of cronies, mostly low-rent stand-up comedians, occasionally come up with a real zinger or an insightful comment, but mainly they're just so not funny that they're funny.

Or maybe I'm just still stuck in the ironic '90s...

--Doug