The wonderful humor on the new devolved Fox!

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2023

Jesse Watters' leaf blower shtick: Yesterday, we mentioned a type of devolution at the new, somewhat reinvented Fox News Channel. The placement of Jesse Watters in the 8 p.m. slot forms one key part of this movement. 

Last night, Watters burned away a chunk of time chatting with Charly Arnolt, "an American sports broadcaster and television personality for the multimedia platform OutKick." 

To watch their dimwitted chatter, you can just start here. As far as we know, Arnolt isn't a comedian, but she seems to be willing to play one on TV. 

At any rate, it was 8:45 p.m. on a primetime "news program" on one of our nation's alleged "news channels." But in the midst of a spate of dumb badinage, Arnolt surprised us this this:

ARNOLT (12/14/23): What's funny to me is, you just look at Seattle. As a stand-alone city, they had 71 homicides alone last month. That equals the amount they had in 1994 in total, which is the deadliest year in history in that city. Yet they're worried about people using leaf blowers and throwing them in jail.

Here's a quick bit of background:

A proposal in the Washington state legislature would ban the use of gas-powered outdoor equipment, including gas-powered leaf blowers. Watters had already offered some standard shtick about how stupid this proposal has to be.

From the point where we've left off, Arnolt and Watters offered some additional standard comedy shtick. They imagined someone locked up for using a gas-powered leaf blower and being forced to share a prison cell with someone convicted of murder.

We'll spare you the tired old dreck. Instead, we'll direct your attention to Arnolt's claim—her claim that Seattle experienced 71 homicides last month, equaling the number from that city's deadliest year.

That's what Fox viewers were told as Watters sat and smirked his standard smirk. The claim sounded highly unlikely to us, so we decided to check it out.

Inevitably, Google led us to a bungled news report at the Fox web site. Apparently, Arnolt had read the headlines, and had read nothing else. Incorrectly, those headlines said this:

Seattle homicides to surpass 3-decade high among nationwide crime spike 
Liberal city saw 71 homicides last month—same number recorded in 1994, Seattle's deadliest year

Apparently, Arnolt (or some dialogue writer) had read those inaccurate headlines. Apparently, her lines had been fashioned from that. 

For the record, those headlines actually seemed to jibe with what Arnolt said on the air. But as you can see at this link, the body of the news report actually starts like this:

Seattle is on pace to surpass a nearly 30-year homicide record as gun violence plagues the Emerald City.

It reached a total of 71 homicides this year on Nov. 30, tying the city's deadly record set in 1994. The Seattle Police Department said this week that no additional homicides have been recorded since then.

Oops! Seattle didn't experience 71 homicides last month. As of November 30, that was the total number of homicides for the entire year.

Sad! Apparently, some headline writer read that copy, then misstated what it said. Arnolt came along and read the headlines, then bruited them on the air.

Watters just sat around smirking and flirting. The pair then engaged in the standard shtick about having to share a prison cell with a guy who committed a murder.

(Back in the day, this shtick would have involved going to jail for tearing the tag off a pillow.)

As we noted yesterday, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity still do old-fashioned "cable news" hours of red tribe opinion dogma. (All too often, Ingraham's analyses may actually seem to make sense.)

Elsewhere, Fox News seems to have decided to go with dumb and dumber and dumber than that, with plenty of shtick thrown in. 

It's hard to get much dumber than the show Watters hosts. Greg Gutfeld will give it a try.