For me, it’s Seth Meyers’s by-play with his cue card guy Wally, or anything really to do with his staff. Half of his “Closer Look” time is taken up with in-jokes that probably amuse his writing team, or maybe his mom, but do nothing for me. It’s like a nightly admission, “Yeah, I got nothin’ tonight.”
Which bits do you hate?
I like Colbert, but hate his aviation glasses Biden.
Cue-card Wally is obviously an audience favorite, in the same way that Letterman made cue-card guy Tony Mendez a running bit, along with probably dozens of others, most of which involved his brand of not-humor humor. I wasn’t a fan of them, as you can tell. I’d rather watch Wally than the characters John Lutz plays in running bits, though.
I do like aviation glasses Biden: I think that’s one of the best takes on him, capturing his essence in a flash. The worst Biden is the guy on SNL that everybody else seems to love.
For worst running gags, though, you can’t leave out Jimmy Fallon. I will only mention one: trying to make Roots keyboardist James Poyser try to smile at the beginning of Thank You Notes. Beaten into the ground years ago.
Conan playing with his nipples.
From Youtube: The “Mr. Plinkett” reviews that RedLetterMedia does. The Star Wars prequel movie reviews were praised for the content and presentation but as time went on and there were more reviews in this style they leaned more into the creepy serial killer persona of the (fictional) reviewer to the detriment of the reviews themselves.
I guess in a similar vein, basically everything Cinema Sins does, both in the dumb recurring bits they do and the way they present their joke videos as a legitimate way to critique art.
Staying with late night hosts: Trevor Noah’s asides have made me stop watching The Daily Show, which I faithfully watched since the Craig Kilbourne days. Don’t they realize that stunts like that (like Fallon’s taking with his sidekick) interrupt the flow and just waste time.
I know this one is going back a bit, but I’ve always detested Tim Allen’s “Tim the Tool Man”'s grunting schtick. There was never a time when I found it the least bit amusing.
Ugh, ugh, ugh indeed.
mmm
I firmly believe David Letterman gave up many years before he actually retired and many of his gags became tiresome to say the least.
At one point, he used to read “letters from the fans”. A nice enough bit that went back to his NBC days.
On CBS, he began at one point saying, “Letter number 1.” Then Paul had to say, “Letter number 1” and finally, Alan Kalter had to say, “Letter number 1.” And then the same thing with Letter #2, #3, and so on.
If Paul and Alan didn’t do it exactly the right way, Dave made them re-do it. He clearly thought all of this was very funny, but it felt more like a mental breakdown happening.
I gave up on David around this time. I don’t know why he stayed doing the show past around 2003 or so. He stopped every going out to do remotes, never left his desk, and became insufferable. I still think Dave is one of the funniest people out there and watching his old bits kills me, but he definitely stayed YEARS past his prime.
He needs his audience back. But he’s been doing good stuff on Ukraine.
Ok, this doesn’t exactly fit, but I’ve been itching to complain about a schtick that Jonathan Lemire does on Way Too Early every morning and this is as close a fit as I’m ever likely to find.
When he reads a headline and then says “The question is” blah blah blah. He does this with his top three headlines every day and it makes me twitchy.
Headline: The fire started in the basement before burning to the ground!
“The question is, Did anyone survive?”
Not an exact quote, but you get the gist.
:twitch:
Yeah, it fits.
All these newsreading idiots have to make up catchphrases, whether they’re appropriate, witty, clever, or make a shred of sense. If you can’t say something worth saying, shut up, I always say. (That’s my catchphrase.)
This is an obscure one - there is a guy that shows up on my Instagram feed who does food prep/recipes. It all very quick cut, like he’s trying to fit it all into 6 seconds, which is annoying enough. But he also does this jumping toward the camera, and that weird rapper back-of-the-hand-with-the-thumb-and-first-two-fingers-extended-quasi-gang-sign pushed at the camera to look hip thing.
just
stop
Going even further back I could never understand the whole Gallager watermelon smashing routine. I’m not saying he was a great comedian but he was fairly decent even without that schtick.
Which one? There have been several people who did Biden on SNL over the years. Currently it’s new cast member James Austin Johnson, who is fine, but I’d never heard that “everybody else seems to love” him.
He sure did stop doing the Smitty bits quick.
I can’t think of the specific guy’s name that I’m thinking of.
But just in general, YouTubers who do Let’s Plays of video games and their faces take up half of the screen or more. Sometimes the entire screen. I’m not watching the video to stare at your ugly mug.
Almost every single podcast I listen to makes this exact same joke, which is bad because it gets old VERY quickly and yet they constantly do it.
Host A - The car was sold for $800 in 1993.
Host B - How much would that be now?
Host A - Oh, about ten million dollars in 2022
I don’t detest it, but I can’t figure out if Jeff Dunham’s aviation glasses puppet is supposed to be Biden or Walter playing Biden.
It was beyond tiresome when David Letterman had that side-piece girlfriend Stephanie Birkitt doing long unfunny bits with the audience members. She seemed to have more air time on the show second only to Dave, might as well have made her a co-host. “MONTY”. He kept calling her ‘Monty’, like an inside joke between the two of them, hee-hee.
The Onion cartoon. I get its meant to be a parody of a bad right wing cartoon. But good humour about bad humour is a really hard trick to pull off and even the Onion writers aren’t able to do it IMO.