No one will ever accuse me of being a marketing genius, but I do have a piece of advice for Joel Surnow, chief of the torture-cons: when writing an appeal to conservatives to watch your fake news comedy show, do not begin with the line, “Hello, I’m Joel Surnow, co-creator and executive producer of the TV show 24.”  The 24 reference will garner some interest, but starting an article with “Hello, I’m…” makes you sound like a telemarketer.  No one likes telemarketers.  I don’t even pick up the phone when I see a toll-free number come up on the caller ID, except for the two seconds it takes me to lift the receiver and slam it back down again.  That is much the same impulse I had when reading your self-promotional article, but I pressed on in the interest of my readers, who may be curious why a producer of good, successful television shows would decide to stop producing those sorts of shows and do something so radically different.

Oh, and one more thing–when you start telling jokes in the article about your fake news comedy show, make sure that the jokes are funny.  That will encourage people to think that your show will also be funny, which is pretty much what most observers have concluded that your show isn’t.  For example, under no circumstances should you tell jokes in your article in a Q&A format.  You may as well tell knock-knock jokes if this is the best way you can find to present your material.  Furthermore, you should not then use that Q&A format to tell jokes this worn-out:

What is the show like?

It’s a “Weekend Update”/Daily Show/The McLaughlin Group hybrid, which makes The Half Hour News Hour the first hybrid ever endorsed by the FOX News Channel, its management, or its parent company, Halliburton.

Oh, you slay me, Joel.  Not quite as effectively as Jack Bauer would with a Glock 9mm, of course, but I certainly do feel a kind of shooting pain after having read that one.  A pun on hybrid!  And that Halliburton bit at the end, well…it was pretty forced actually.  The last line at the expense of Limbaugh and Coulter is, however, slightly funny, but there has so far seemed to be no indication of any of that sense of irony making its way into the show.