The Joke’s on Who?

‘When news breaks, we fix it” is the catch phrase on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” and when the news broke recently that a former White House intern was on audiotape detailing a year-and-a-half-long affair with President Clinton, “The Daily Show” was there with the quick fix.

“A year and a half?” host Craig Kilborn quoted Clinton as saying in denial. “I would have become bored and cheated on her after six months.”

Taken on its own, the joke is no big deal--just a garden-variety comedic spin of a headline from a show that could be seen as a descendant of the “Weekend Update” segment on “Saturday Night Live.”

But seen in the context of today’s climate of smirking talk show hosts, sports anchors and pop culture satirists, Kilborn’s irreverence seems less a spot of comic relief than part of a growing malaise of knee-jerk sarcasm coming from television, what essayist David Foster Wallace calls “a shift from oversincerity to a kind of bad-boy irreverence in the Big Face that TV shows us.”

You could call them the smirky guys--a male-dominated subset of TV personalities giving satire a bad name. In winking and smirking their way through a given broadcast, they reassure us that nothing need be taken seriously--and, by extension, understood.

Disciples of David Letterman, who gave indifference and self-mockery a hip sheen when he got into late-night television, the smirky guys aspire to the level of not caring that Letterman turned into an empire of his own. In Dave’s world, the host hasn’t heard of the movie the celebrity guest is plugging and openly scoffs at bits that fail. You get the feeling he can barely stand the sorry sight of himself as a talk show host.

This pose has been analyzed ad nauseam as an extension of Letterman’s own self-hatred, but that seems like so much pop psychology, failing to take into account Letterman’s talents as a showman and master of his own self-styled rhetoric.

It also explains why those who have sought to copy him fall short: Where Letterman can fall back on a well-honed point of view, the smirky guys can only fall back on their smirks.

“With the smirky guys, it doesn’t matter whether they’re smirking about cars or sports or news, it’s just the smirky bit,” says Harry Shearer, the comedian and writer who hosts the weekly satirical radio program “Le Show” on KCRW-FM (89.9). While his TV brethren do sound-bite satire, Shearer goes way beyond that, using his talent for voices to create biting theater that presumes his audience has a working knowlege of issues beyond names and allegations.

“Everyone’s a smartass, so what?” he says. “It makes faux irony as tiresome as faux sincerity.”

Indeed, it seems quaint today to remember the days when Johnny Carson opened “The Tonight Show” with a political crack or “Saturday Night Live” parodied the latest in news and pop culture.

Today, by the time “SNL” weighs in each week, the show has already been ironically outdistanced by Keith Olbermann (of MSNBC’s “The Big Show”), “Update” alum Dennis Miller (of HBO’s “Dennis Miller Live”), Kilborn, the gang at Fox’s “Mad TV,” John Henson (of E! Entertainment Television’s “Talk Soup”), the cheeky morning news personalities on both KTLA-TV Channel 5’s “Morning News” and KTTV Channel 11’s “Good Day L.A.,” not to mention the bevy of late-night talk show hosts (Dave, Jay, Conan, Keenen and Sinbad) and even radio’s Stephanie Miller and Howard Stern, who do daily comedic riffs on the news.

“These guys are just standing on the sidewalk, commenting on the parade going by,” says Bill Maher, who opens his show “Politically Incorrect” on ABC each night with a “Tonight Show”-like monologue and would qualify as one of the smirky guys were it not for the fact that he spends most of his show being thoughtful and sincere on issues.

“Irony is OK,” he says, “but only as part of your diet.”

More recently, sports has jumped into the act. On “Fox Sports News” and ESPN’s “SportsCenter,” for example, anchors narrate highlights with barely contained disdain or mockery for the games themselves, coining witticisms and cutting remarks as they go.

Foisting their shtick on viewers night after night, the sports guys are now clearly under the assumption that the viewer is as bored with tonight’s highlights of, say, the Utah Jazz-Portland Trail Blazers NBA game as they are. And so, the sports guy has come out from behind his highlight, using disingenuousness to sell something stale as though it were fresh.

In a recent telling commercial for “SportsCenter” that was itself a parody of “SportsCenter,” anchor Kenny Mayne was shown obsessively rewinding a clip of a Ken Griffey Jr. home run, trying to come up with an even better quip to describe the blast.

“At heart, an hourlong sportscast is one of the most boring things imaginable,” says Olbermann, who left ESPN in October to host the semi-serious “The Big Show,” which mixes “Nightline”-like discussions with humorous asides in covering the day’s top stories.

“There is so much sports news on TV now that you can’t possibly take it all seriously,” Olbermann says. “By definition, it engenders a satirization of itself.”

It should be said that the ironic pose is hardly new. More than 10 years ago, media critics were noticing how TV ads were leading the way in using self-mockery to sell product.

Contemporary television “no longer solicits our rapt absorption or hearty agreement, but--like the ads that subsidize it--actually flatters us for the very boredom and distrust it inspires in us,” wrote critic Mark Crispin Miller in a 1986 essay “Deride and Conquer” that appeared in the book “Watching Television,” an anthology of TV criticism edited by Todd Gitlin.

In the essay, Miller pointed out that commercials were using irony to convince viewers they were far too cool and smart to fall for the very pitches they were then encouraged to fall for. Sincerity and wish-fulfillment were out, irony was in.

As recently as last fall, for example, ABC promoted its new television season with an ad campaign based on the glibly lampooning tag “TV Is Good,” with such TV-promoting ads as “Our laziness and stupidity are good news for Japan” and “Don’t worry, you’ve got billions of brain cells.”

“The overheated style of the TV announcers of yesteryear has given way to a self-mocking overheatedness,” Miller, a professor of media studies at New York University, says today. “But it’s a fake ironic distance, a way to keep you addicted. David Letterman made his career out of this stance. . . . You sit back and let the TV do the deriding for you. People really are a little bit embarrassed about watching all this TV, and they want to feel superior to it. So this style is an attempt to exploit that uneasiness.”

Thus it comes as no surprise that ABC’s “TV Is Good” campaign evolved after participants in a focus group said they watch a lot of television but feel kind of bad about it afterward. Enter faux-irony: ads that sought simultaneously to tempt guilt-ridden viewers into watching more TV while cheekily flattering them for their intellectual savvy.

“The irony here is that most people, when they think of the 1950s and ‘60s and ‘70s, they immediately presume themselves to be sharper and more sophisticated than people were then,” Miller says. “But people’s absorption in contemporary television indicates no advance on people’s viewing habits of 20 years ago.”

But, hey, the smirky guys at least make us feel more sophisticated. Affecting an above-it-all insouciance, these personalities seek to hide the fact that we’re all still watching, as lemming-like as ever.

Take E! Entertainment Television’s “Talk Soup,” a daily highlight show featuring the best visual bites from the wacky world of tabloid TV, hosted by John Henson, who inherited the show from original smirky guy Greg Kinnear.

If viewers are guilty about watching lots of television, tabloid TV could very well be the most guilt-inspiring. On the other hand, you sure feel less pathetic watching a clip of the latest slap fight on the “Jerry Springer” show when Henson gives you his smirky afterthought, which is apparently meant to make the viewer feel less bad about his fascination with the clip in the first place.

In news, meanwhile, laziness is passed off as ultra-cool irony. The smirky guys reassure us that any actual examination of issues like a balanced budget amendment is a huge waste of time. Better to belittle Congress as a pack of no-good, money-grubbing politicians; that way, you don’t have to think about anything and can still feel on top of the issue--a kind of “have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too” approach to political and cultural awareness.

“It’s a way not to commit to an issue, a way to not stand up for something,” Maher says.

Says Lizz Winstead, the former head writer of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show”: “You have to ask yourself, ‘How much of the irony is there because [the personality] lacks a working knowledge of the information, and how much is it the presentation of real information?’ ”

While sometimes sharply written, “The Daily Show” can nevertheless feel so self-satisfied that it’s hard for some of us to participate in the fun. Winstead left the show a month ago after a publicized feud with Kilborn, who perhaps took the glib pose to an extreme when he told an Esquire magazine reporter that Winstead found him so attractive she would gladly give him oral sex.

Not surprisingly, Winstead is now given to wonder why there are so many “cigar bar frat-guy” types delivering the news.

“To find another way to invite people in is the challenge for humor writers,” she says. “Because I don’t know how many more ways there are to be the smart-alecky guy.”

How about the smirky-guy-as-sports-anchor?

Once the exclusive province of the five-minute sportscast on the local news, sports highlights now fuel extended programming on three cable networks: ESPN, Fox Sports Net and CNN-SI.

Since everyone has the same access to information and video, “personality” has become the preferred way to stand out from the crowd--and many anchors are adopting an Olbermann-style attitude toward their job.

Although he came into his own as an anchor on ESPN’s “SportsCenter,” Olbermann was satirizing the overblown sports anchor guy before it was hip to do so; he has since given way to any number of imitators. He came to Los Angeles in the mid-1980s, working first at KTLA and then at KCBS-TV Channel 2, when sports anchoring “was a matter of who was yelling the loudest and who had the most live spots,” he says.

On “SportsCenter,” which gave him considerably more freedom to exercise his wit, Olbermann came up with such terms as “premature jocularity,” for a team that celebrates a victory before actually winning.

And yet, Olbermann says, not a day passed when he didn’t wonder if he was sacrificing his credibility in the name of smartass comedy.

By way of example, he describes the night he wanted to use a video bite of Woody Allen and his then-girlfriend, Soon-Yi Previn, sitting court-side at a New York Knicks game. Surely, Olbermann thought, there was some joke to be found in this celebrity cutaway, some glib line to impose over the image.

“I looked and looked for the joke, but I just couldn’t find it, so I didn’t use it,” he says. “And that should be the rule: If you can’t make yourself laugh, leave it alone. . . . It was a battle I waged with myself every day. Because sometimes less is more. But to be able to recognize when your humor is working and when it isn’t, that’s the toughest thing in the world. I’m like a recovering alcoholic when I deal with this issue.”

But if Olbermann’s in recovery, others still appear to be in denial. Increasingly rare is the sportscaster who doesn’t put him- or herself in front of the highlights. Which raises the question: Do viewers want a highlight of a three-point basket told straight or with the anchor screaming, “Can I get a witness from the congregation!” (as “SportsCenter” anchor Stuart Scott likes to say)?

At least one longtime local sports anchor, Stu Nahan, believes in the old school.

“I’m just a broken-down ex-hockey goalie who tells you what happened today,” says Nahan, most recently of KTLA and now semiretired. “I don’t agree that in order to get viewers you’ve got to do shtick. The guy who tunes in doesn’t want comedy. If he wants comedy, let him go to the Comedy Store.”

But Nahan speaks from the world of the five-minute sportscast, where there’s only time to show a few highlights from the local team’s game and flash scores from around the country. The hourlong sports show, on the other hand, can easily degenerate into a numbing blur of dunks, touchdowns and breakaway goals.

“It’s not good enough for a highlight to be the winning hit or the winning goal,” says John Terenzio, senior vice president and executive producer of the hourlong “Fox Sports News.” “By giving you a strong personality, I’m giving you added value to what you get.”

With an ad campaign that trumpets “Fox attitude,” “Fox Sports News” has emerged to try to take a bite out of ESPN’s nightly “SportsCenter” audience. Although there are distinct differences between the two shows, one constant is the cheeky attitude of the hosts, chief among them Van Earl Wright of “Fox Sports News” and Dan Patrick of “SportsCenter.”

“In a Van Earl Wright highlight you may show a few goals,” says Terenzio, “but there’s almost always an added ingredient. And that’s the cutaway of a coach who’s P.O.’d or a fan who’s got a funny hat on. That makes the highlight.”

In other words, comedy makes the highlight.

Is it just coincidence, then, that both Olbermann and Kilborn graduated from the sports anchor desk to the comedy pundit’s desk, and no one questioned the logic of such a career move?

“I don’t think we’re going to turn into a company that spits out a lot of stand-up comedians,” says Vince Doria, news director and assistant managing editor at ESPN.

“The most important thing is our news and information product. If we can’t convince our viewers that we have up-to-the-minute information, then we’re not doing the basics of our job. To some degree we have to realize we’re in the entertainment business, so we try to make the presentation fun. It’s a fine line.”

Satirist Shearer looks at the field of smirky guys and draws a different line--the bottom line.

“Television has an unerring instinct for the cheap, and most of those shows are cheap to produce,” he says. “There need be no other raison d’e^tre than that. . . . If you haven’t got the budget to do anything else, you can always smirk.

“I mean, what’s ‘Fox attitude’?” he continues, referring to the network’s new ad slogan. “I watched the Laker games before they were on Fox and after, and I don’t sense any ‘Fox attitude’ in [Laker broadcaster] Chick Hearn. It’s a pure marketing construct, from start to finish. Everyone else has glommed onto the idea that attitude is the way to go. But the first person who grabs an audience with what looks like sincerity will start it all over in the other direction.”

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Smart-Aleck Hall of Fame

David Letterman

Age 50, “The Late Show With David Letterman” on CBS.

Formerly of: “Late Night With David Letterman” on NBC.

Format: Talk show with monologue, Top 10 Lists, Stupid Pet Tricks, guests--in that order of importance.

What he does: The Godfather of Smirky Guys. He spawned the current crop since “Late Night” premiered in 1982.

Dennis Miller

Age 44, host of “Dennis Miller Live” on HBO.

Formerly of: “Weekend Update” segment on “Saturday Night Live.”

Format: Highbrow rants (sometimes he does care), guests and segments satirizing the news.

What he does: Punch lines with literary references. Described the Internet as “a wide Sargasso Sea with many kelp beds that can hang you up.”

John Henson

Age 30, host of “Talk Soup” on E! Entertainment Television.

Formerly of: Stand-up comedy; won a search to replace original “Talk Soup” host Greg Kinnear in 1995.

Format: Weeknight lampoon of the worst of that day’s talk shows.

What he does: Called his show “a Kafka nightmare with a laugh track.”

Keith Olbermann

Age 39: “The Big Show With Keith Olbermann” on MSNBC.

Formerly of: ESPN’s “SportsCenter” by way of KCBS and KTLA sportscasts in Los Angeles.

Format: Headlines, newsmaker guests, smirky take on the news.

What he does: “If we do news seriously for 10 minutes and then go off into the cloning clinic in Chicago . . . the audience in large part will stay.”

Craig Kilborn

Age 33: “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central.

Formerly of: “SportsCenter” on ESPN.

Format: Smirky headlines, taped segments that lampoon investigative journalism, one guest.

What he does: Skewering the self-importance of news anchors. Calls his show “TV’s half-hour of warmth.”

Kenny Mayne

Age 38, anchor of “SportsCenter” on ESPN.

Formerly of: KSTW-TV in Seattle/Tacoma.

Format: Nightly scores and highlights.

What he does: From the Olbermann school of sports anchoring--same subversive mocking of highlights.