Tim Blair

I'm probably biased, having done school/uni debating with the CNNN guys, but I'm a fan of the show. That's probably from reading The Chaser for a while, so their style works for me. Preferring satirical, pun-based, out-there humour helps as well.
Sure, sometimes they sound like boring lefties chasing the right, but it's actually quite balanced - they've taken the piss out of enoguh left-aligned people for me to call them fairly balanced.
Particular fave was last year's car-chase sketch, within 30 secs the runaway driver was reported to have links to al qaeda, etc, good send up of media obsession.
Besides, the new show has ex Fantastic Leslie musos on it - it can't be bad.

He's got a point though, FoxNews is comedy gold! CNNN just looks slightly more serious and almost boring by comparison.

Are they the same guys who did the piss takes on David Hicks on MMM in Sydney. That was classic stuff.

Reucassel says he heard CNN considered taking them to court but decided against it. He doesn't believe they'd have a case.

Is that right you sad, strange little man? In my opinion CNN have an open and shut case re the trademark and a very strong case in copyright. I am so confident that I offer my services to CNN on a no win/no charge basis.

Surely ANYTHING that gives Mark Latham the shits can't be all bad.

All attempts by the ABC at organised humour should be banned, not merely for budgetting reasons. The ABC is inherently a joke, so the test pattern is enough to get most people laughing.

I went to Sydney Uni. at the same time as the Chaser people (I was actually in a play with Anna Skellern, on CNNNN). So I've been following them for a while. They're funny, but not very. And they got things seriously wrong about the Iraq war. The headline on one issue read:

Mission Accomplished: US successfully disarms Iraqis

This was above a picture of a young Iraqi boy who had lost his arms in a bomb blast. Okay, so this sort of thing happens in wars, and it's awful. But not once, as far as I remember, did they talk about the consequences, for the Iraqi civilians, or the rest of the world, of leaving Saddam Hussein in power.
I do like CNNNN, though. Sometimes (okay, a lot of the time) the jokes fall flat. But they keep on coming at you, very fast, so it keeps you on your toes.
So yeah, I'll be watching...

As a right-wing-pro-free-trade-pro-globalisation-white-anglo-saxon-ex-military-financial-services-heterosexual-happily-married-male I probably don't fit in the target demographic but I think they are reasonably funny. Especially when they hook into the Democrats. And the Mark Latham with the refo and bat thing was a cracker.

"Cheese eating surrender monkeys" was originally uttered by Groundskeeper Willie in The Simpsons, a show ever on the bleeding edge of contempt for political correctness.

Al Bundy was also tres perceptive with "It is good to hate the French."

But me fave was when the homicidal maniac Sideshow Bob, being arrested and led away after having failed to murder Selma, cries out "I'll be back. You can't keep the Democrats out of the White House forever. And when they get in, I'm back on the streets, with all my criminal buddies!"

Sometimes a train of thought is very hard to derail...

Each to their own, I suppose. I think CNNNN is quite a funny show, though I'm not sure if they can repeat the formula without rehashing a bit. They attack all sides without mercy. Their ambush of Democrats post-election party, and mocking Mark Latham, were gold.

Fave bit from last series: "The terrorists sheltered in Afghanistan, were funded by Saudia Arabia, travelled through Germany, trained in the USA. There can be only one solution: attack Iraq!"

I'm not a CNNNN fan - there's just too many "uh-huh" moments where there would have been laughs in a "BackBerner" episode. Even the one-off Kim Gingell for BackBerner episode last week was better than CNNNN could hope to be.

Laughs discovered in Backberner?

Very personal thing, humour.

You guys actually watch TV? hahaha!!

Could be worse. At least they didn't name the new series FoXXX. Now that would be fairly unbalanced.

You want funny? Go watch the Daily Show. :)

rosecoe.p.coltrane:

Glass houses, my friend, glass houses....

Me? I wouldn't have had the gall to mock people for watching TV if I had chosen the nom de plume of Roscoe.P.Coltrane.

So did you watch CNNNN anyway, Tim?

The faux "4 Corners" promo at the end was beaut: "We talk to ... someone... about investigating ... someone else... for doing ... something vaguely suspicious ... and call for .... some sort of action ... to be taken".

It wasn't as funny as previous episodes, I thought, but then those episodes were of a pretty high standard, IMHO.

Y'mean they have television in Austria? Good christ! How did that happen? I thought y'all just sat around swilling beer and taking pot-shots at wallabies...

Ja, ja, Herr Mojo, ve haff very good television over here in Austria ... only, ve do not shoot roos round here, and ve haf given up shooting jews for about half a century... but ve still svill a lot of beer, especially in Oktober..

What's that? Oh, you meant AUSTRALIA! Ha! Silly me, thinking you'd got your national stereotypes mixed up...

CNNNN - don't watch it much. The basic concept of the show is good, and some of the lines are too, but the delivery is often poor. Best bet would be too replace the cast with genuine comic performance ability, but keep The Chaser guys writing it.