Virtually everyone thinks they’re funny — and the ones who think they’re the funniest are the ones who aren’t funny at all. Into that latter category, I would have to put the new “media satire” site 23/6 (which is apparently a play on the term 24/7 — but like the site itself, the name isn’t funny either). As Chris Albrecht points out at NewTeeVee, the unfunnyness of the site is more than a little sad, considering that News Corp. and HuffingtonPost have apparently been working on this thing for more than a year now.
For some reason, everyone thinks that satire — particularly political or news-driven satire — is really easy to do. After all, that guy Jon Stewart just sits there and reads the headlines and makes faces, and people think it’s hilarious, right? And The Onion gets away with murder too, just by writing takeoffs of popular news stories. How hard could that be?
Well, guess what. It’s really hard. It’s not that hard to do — it’s just really hard to do it well. After all, even The Onion misses from time to time. Maybe 23/6 can get into the swing eventually, but you have to wonder why they even bothered. It’s not like the political or news-driven satire game doesn’t already have a bunch of players. Portfolio’s media blogger doesn’t think much of it either.