Behind the scenes of a Daily Show interview | Hacker News Reader

Behind the scenes of a Daily Show interview

joelcomm.com

25 pointsBigZaphod6 comments

This isn't really surprising, but it is a little disappointing (I always hoped these guys were just ridiculously witty with their comebacks). Seems like it's par for the course though.

Back when the election season was in full swing I had the opportunity to appear in a taped segment for Real Time With Bill Maher. I'll probably write a longer blog post about the experience at some point, but long story short, most of his really biting jokes are pretty set up. For our segment they got members of the UCLA Democrat and Republican clubs, as well as a few "indies" who they had found at bars the night before (I was one of these).

It basically felt like the point of the Dem/GOP club members was to provide predictable responses. Bill would lob a highly controversial statement to a member of the Republican club, they'd respond with the same arguments everyone had heard a million times before, and he'd smack them down with a wisecrack. There was still some decent debate, but it was a bit of a let down. I don't get HBO, but my friends have told me they never saw the segment air, so apparently the producers weren't too fond of it either :)

I was a little surprised to learn that they blatantly shoot the stuff they're going to use in out-of-context edits. (Like the reaction shots, sitting there while Wyatt just reads off answers in different tones and styles, etc.) I always thought they just asked a ton of questions - some of them odd on purpose to get reactions - and then cut together stuff from that, but it seems they're even more direct.

seems to me it would be a little dishonest to do it any other way. At least this way the interviewee can't come back and claim they didn't know they were going to be made as ass of.

Then again I can see some of the characters they are interviewing just doing whatever simply to "be on tv".

I'm not so sure it'd be dishonest unless they lied about who they were when they interviewed someone and purposely misled someone who had never seen the show during an interview.

That said, though, it does make sense to me (in hindsight.. :P) that they'd rather script and control the process than rely on luck/talent in getting a good set of shots to use - after all, it's a big business and sending a film crew + on-air talent all over the country (or world) to film could get rather expensive if they couldn't be assured of being able to make the required joke(s) afterward.

I'm a bit disappointed that anyone who has seen a few of The Daily Show's interviews is at all surprised by any of this.

They quite clearly do it for laughs. It's not supposed to be journalism. As Jon Stewart famously put it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE#t=7m15s

Well that explains why I always found the daily show/colbert report taped interviews so awkward.

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