Kind of interesting observation at the end of this article on … the “Jon Stewart”, or whatever, edging of political humor for a Thailand political humor show.

“Shallow News in Depth”.

Irony is in plentiful supply in Thailand today: A billionaire tycoon is praised as the champion of the poor. A scandal-tainted politician leads a mass movement against corruption. Protesters declare that they need to block elections to save democracy.

The show has drawn inevitable comparisons to “The Daily Show,” the satirical American news show anchored by Jon Stewart.

“Shallow News in Depth” follows a similar format of celebrity interviews, commentary on news and humorous dispatches by reporters on the streets of Bangkok.

But with its ultrafast, chaotic pacing and its silly antics, “Shallow News in Depth” is “Jon Stewart on crack,” in the words of The Bangkok Post, an English-language newspaper.

And you get the message from there.

In terms of the Jon Stewart comparison… where some of the humor is just sighing…

“There’s a conflict of interest? No way!” Mr. Winyu said, with mock horror and disbelief.

And the inevitable…

The political crisis has been comedic gold, she says, but some Thais are so weary of the crisis that they are eager to disengage from politics altogether.

“How many times can you feature people saying these ridiculous things?” she said.

“Nobody is shocked anymore.”

Irony fatigue.  The problem with shows like Jon Stewart… watch tonight’s episode, watch a new episode in a few months, and wonder if you haven’t already seen it.

Such is a universal problem for these types of programs, in any nation on Earth.

Meantime in Russia… interesting “inspiration” for a tv station that we’d in the “West” be inclined to sympathize with as it battles it out with Putin and the government…

Mr. Vinokurov, 43 and dressed in a button-down shirt, jeans and thick-rimmed glasses, looks like the audience he targets — young, successful, upwardly-mobile Russians, many of whom poured onto the streets of Moscow in 2011 to urge Mr. Putin to exit politics. He modeled the channel, which began broadcasting in 2010, on Fox News, a strategy that he says usually elicits gasps from Western interviewers, who do not realize that he means the Fox News business model of politically charged news, and not the station’s politics.

Fox News’ theatrics are as much the problem as the politics, but… I guess we have to take it from a different perspective of context.  As opposed to the great “Russia TV” which broadcasts… um… Legoobama.

But they all reject that the reason was a poll on a Sunday evening talk show late last month that asked whether the former Soviet leaders should have surrendered Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, to the Nazis “in order to save hundreds of thousands of lives” from a crippling, 900-day siege during World War II.

Some interpreted the survey as an attempt to question the country’s immense sacrifice during the war, a conflict that killed an estimated 27 million citizens of the Soviet Union and touched almost every family in this country, including Mr. Putin’s.

I don’t know what to make of that question.  Is this suggesting this idea would be Military Strategy, or Appeasement?  But, sometimes in the states we get pissed over narrow questions which seem to suggest something not great about “American Greatness”.  Pretexts are pretexts are pretexts.

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