New US channel launches

A stand-up show featuring only right-wing comedians is being made for a new conservative-biased channel in America.

Kelsey Grammer is fronting the new RightNetwork, which proclaims itself ‘pro-America, pro-business and pro-military sensibilities’.

The channel, which is starting life on the internet this summer in the hope of securing a broadcast slot later, currently boasts just three shows, including the comedy show, Right 2 Laugh.

The trailer for the show – below – includes satirical jibes against Barack Obama, anti-abortion routines and veteran stand-up Evan Sayet joking that a compromise on the debate about whether illegal immigrants should be given driving licences is that it should be ‘illegal for them to drive north – perfectly legal if they are driving south’.

Sayet, who used to write for Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect, is producing the show. He told America’s NPR: ‘ could look anywhere and find humorists from the left side, but there are very few — Dennis Miller being the one and perhaps only — who are identified as, and speak to, the hypocrisy and things that are humorous about the left.’

Not all the jokes in Right 2 Laugh are political, however, with a black comic talking about the difference between black and white people, with another act making puns about being picked up by a cougar.

The new network is seen as a way of emulating the success of Fox News, whose own attempts at a right-wing comedy show, the 1/2 Hour News Hour, was cancelled soon after its 2007 launch. However, with a Democrat in the White House, and struggling politically, the landscape in which a right-wing satire operates is now markedly different.

Published: 9 Jul 2010