Writers! Come Back!

A really long night last night. I spent my evening with medical students out in Brooklyn, helping them learn the finer points of communicating with patients in a workshop that I run. Coming home to Manhattan on the nights I'm working out there is always a long journey because the express train that goes directly to my stop is no longer running in Brooklyn. So it always involves a transfer, and waiting for two trains instead of one after 9:00 can add an extra 20 minutes or more to the trip.

Last night was even longer due to the rain and bad luck. I decided to get off the train at 57th Street and take the bus that runs right in front of my apartment because I didn't want to do the ten minute walk from the subway in the rain. Unfortunately, when I came out of the subway next to Carnegie Hall a concert was just letting out. Which meant that instead of the usual kind of late night bus ride, with a mostly empty bus and short stops to let one person on or off at a time, I had to endure one that was more like rush hour. It took something like ten minutes to load the bus at the stop in front of Carnegie and the bus was crammed full by the time we pulled away. And it took forever to load and unload at every stop.

I did at least have the company of brand new Robyn Hitchcock and Billy Bragg shows, freshly downloaded the day before, to keep me company.

I finally got home and my wife went to bed, I made myself some food (nothing like eating dinner at 11:00) and settled in to watch The Daily Show and Colbert Report. Really, a nice way to end a long day. At least it usually is.

Both shows have been somewhat hit or miss since they went back on the air without their writers. But it has been nice to see new episodes the last few weeks and there have still been some great comic gems. Last night, though, really marked the low point since they came back.

Colbert has been doing this fake feud thing with Conan O'Brien with both claiming they gave Mike Huckabee a "bump" in the primaries. Kind of amusing, Colbert is usually pretty good at doing the mock dueling egos thing. And Jon Stewart got involved in the joke last week, again to mild amusement. But then they had to go and ruin it.

Last night they got Conan, the least funny man on TV besides Jay Leno, to actually come on both shows. The only reason the joke was still funny was that I didn't have to actually watch Conan to get it. I really have never understood how a guy who oversaw a really funny era of the Simpson's can have such a lame talk show.

On The Daily Show, Colbert and Conan showed up and they started to have a mock fight until they decided to wait for the show to be done taping. On Colbert, Stewart and Conan showed up and started a mock fight until they decided to wait for the show to be done taping. Both times I felt like I was watching some lame-ass skit done at the office Christmas party of the lame law firm I used to work at in Seattle. It really looked like fucking amateur hour on Comedy Central.

I was in this far so I decided to check out the continuation on Conan's show, hoping beyond hope that there would actually be a payoff joke to this high school talent show. There wasn't. It was just a bad fake fight with dumb pratfalls and sight gags that went on longer than a bad SNL sketch and ended with some stupid video from Huckabee, another unfunny person who thinks he's funny.

For the love of god, writers please come back and save Jon and Stephen. I know they crossed the picket line and have no reason to be forgiven for that. But they are allowing themselves to be sucked into the dark abyss of Conan O'Brien's unfunniness.

Don't do it for them, do it for the rest of us. It's now a humanitarian crisis.