Glenn Beck leaving FOX News to compete with Comedy Central?
[Apr. 21]
Glenn Beck says he’s not going to hold back against Jon Stewart of The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report, both comedians and commentators for the Comedy Central cable television network, once The Glenn Beck Show is discontinued by FOX later this year. Both Stewart and Colbert have repeatedly lampooned Glenn Beck for some of his outrageous commentary, including impersonating Beck’s end-of-the-world fatalism.
“I am going to make sure that Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart do not occupy the space of comedy alone,” Glenn Beck said, according to Death and Taxes magazine.
News commentator Glenn Beck has said he’ll be leaving his show later this year, but that he has no animosity toward FOX News. He has said he’s looking for opportunities to change media and says he will not be doing it in New York, even though his media company, Mercury Radio Arts, is set up in New York with no plans to move, according to Business Insider.
But can Glenn Beck even begin to make it in comedy? Some say maybe. A report from Time magazine says writer Joel Stein was tapped to help write material for Beck for a Common Sense Comedy Tour in 2009. Stein wasn’t exactly favorable to the FOX News personality, but he wasn’t completely terrible about it either. He noted Beck had a couple of cute jokes of his own, but said, “It turns out that coming up with jokes for members of a reactionary, religious, libertarian audience is not easy.”
Will we be looking for Glenn Beck to produce the conservative answer to The Daily Show? Not likely. But whatever he comes up with might wind up being ranked well among the unintentionally funny types of camera-hogging, in-your-face antics he’s already well known for. And we’re sure Jon Stewart will be poking fun at it in short order.