News Parodies

"Wishful thinker sucks in stomach when on scales"

"Writer of the Newsbar regrets his obeying of the advice of the grammar-checking tool which is contained within Microsoft Word"

"One network under God."

"Seafood restaurant owner admits he has crabs"

"It's a brave news world."

"Home of newstainment."

"Now with 20% more chimp stories."

"Patrick Marber - Peter O'Hanraha-hanrahan, Jacques-'Jacques' Liverot, Chapman Baxter, Guy of "The Bureau", other roles"

"Doon Mackichan - Collaterlie Sisters, Maria of "The Bureau", other roles"

"David Schneider - Sylvester Stewart, Brant, Alex of "The Bureau", other roles"

"Steve Coogan - Alan Partridge, Alvin Holler, Mr Hennety of "The Bureau", other roles"

"Chris Morris - Himself, Ted Maul, other roles"

"Rebecca Front - Barbara Wintergreen, Rosy May, Valerie Sinatra, Ange of "The Bureau", other roles"

"Michael Alexander St John - Voiceover"

"IOWA?! Iowa says banning gay marriage is unconstitutional? This was last year's Iowa Gay Pride parade. [Shows clip from "The Straight Story", with Alvin Straight riding a lawn mower on a country road] They are the aortic valve of the heartland of America. They are now officially more progressive than California."

"[quietly] I guess there's one more thing I want to say to him... uh, if you're heading out from uptown, take 42nd Street west to 9th Avenue, make a left, go down four blocks, Lincoln Tunnel's on your right, and you know what? [taking E-ZPass out of his pocket] Here's my E-ZPass, get the fuck out of here."

"The view... from my apartment... was the World Trade Center... And now it's gone. And they attacked it. This symbol of... of American ingenuity and strength... and labor and imagination and commerce and it's gone. But you know what the view is now? The Statue of Liberty. The view from the south of Manhattan is the Statue of Liberty. You can’t beat that."

"I am in no way saying Biden's gotta drop out, but can't we stress-test this candidacy? Can't we open up the conversation? Do you understand the opportunity here? Do you have any idea how thirsty Americans are for any hint of inspiration or leadership and a release from this choice of a megalomaniac and a suffocating gerontocracy. It is crushing our fucking spirits! Do you have any idea what could be ahead of you?! All we want is for someone to keep it 100. The percentage, not the age. That's all we want!"

"Authoritarianism and Donald Trump aren't the only threats our democracy faces -- an arthritic status quo, unable or unwilling to respond in any way to the concerns of voters who just received new and urgent information about their candidate also erodes confidence and faith in the system of government. […] Honestly, though, "Get on board or shut the fuck up" is not a particularly compelling pro-democracy bumper sticker."

"People always talk to me about, "Who are your influences? What makes you do what you do?" I can say, I draw a line—I do what I do because of Bruce Springsteen, and I'll tell you why: You introduced me to the concept of The Other Side. You introduced me to the concept of: you go through the tunnel and you take a chance, and you can work to get away from your circumstance. And by working to get away from your circumstance you can make something better of yourself, but there's no guarantee. [...] But you know what? The joy of it is chasing that dream, and that was my inspiration for leaving New Jersey and goin' to New York. And bless you, my friend. You're the Man. So I just wanted to thank you personally from the bottom of my heart for giving me something to put into the dashboard as I drove a U-Haul van through the Holland Tunnel."

"There are no participation trophies in end-game democracy! Oh yeah, I remember FDR saying "Well, if the Nazis take over Europe, at least both teams had fun.""

"Look, at some point in this trial, something important and revelatory is going to happen. But none of us are going to notice, because [of] the hours spent on his speculative facial tics -- if the media tries to make us feel like the most mundane bullshit is earth-shattering, we won't believe you when it's really interesting!"

"Wow! What a terrible fucking week. "Hey, Jon! Come back to The Daily Show, just for the election. It'll be fun! You'll do one day a week, it'll be a laurgh. What could go wrong?""

"Yes, apparently, Republicans are pro-worker now and pro-union! I hope somebody tells all the Republican governors who passed right-to-work anti-union laws in their states, and all the Republican-appointed judges who made it easier to break unions, and Donald Trump himself, who helped kill a bill that would have protected unions so they're gonna be so embarrassed at their hypocrisy!"

"How are you supposed to turn down the temperature of the rhetoric if you're not allowed to mention the rhetoric?!"

"[imitating Joe Biden] Let me-- Let me ask you something, Lester. Let me ask you this... Who's got two thumbs, Lester? An-- And is about to beat your ass?"

"It's nice to see that even in retirement Dick Cheney is still making the time to scare the shit out of people. So many people retire and just stop doing the thing they love. But not him. Yes, apparently less than two weeks after riding off into the sunset—which he has to do, because he's allergic to sun—Dick Cheney wanted to make clear that if anything happens now, it's the new guy's fault. [...] Ooh, I have a question. What if we're hit again by a guy who's really sad because his whole family was killed in Iraq—who's responsible for that? Or what if someone got pissed off at us because his brother was potato sacked and bound and kept in a cage without a lawyer for seven years on an island in the Caribbean—who's responsible for that? Or! If Al-Qaeda on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border had time to reconstitute and devise another attack because we pulled all our resources into invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11—who's responsible for that? I'm gonna go with, hold on... who's responsible for that? I'm gonna have to go with... Obama. Y'know, over the years we have tried very hard to make Dick Cheney look evil, but in kind of a cute way. Y'know, kinda funny, cartoonish, lot of Darth Vader jokes, funny pictures, man-sized safe, then we did that funny wheelchair mock-up. It was all really funny and we called the segment You Don't Know Dick; it was kinda light-hearted and all that, but you know what? Fuck it. He no longer deserves any satirical protection, any glib patina of sugar-coating. We are now officially changing the name of his segment. [New animated titles for Why Are You Such a Dick? play.]"

"Whatever barriers we put up are gone. Even if it's just momentary. We are judging people by not the color of their skin, but the content of their character. You know, all this talk about "These guys are criminal masterminds. They've gotten together and their extraordinary guile and their wit and their skill..." It's, it's—it's a lie. Any fool can blow something up. Any fool can destroy. But to see these guys, these firefighters and these policemen and people from all over the country, literally with buckets, rebuilding... that’s extraordinary. And that's why we have already won... they can't... it's light. It's democracy. They can't shut that down."

"Do you like things? Then come to a free taping of The Daily Show."

"Listen, I hope this doesn't sound patronizing, but when we in the West drew your region's borders and set you up with perfectly functioning dictatorships, um... we expected a little better."

"Kudos to the United States and to Israel! It shows just how effective a military defense system can be when you funnel American dollars away from healthcare and education."

"Jon Stewart: It's a new era, Gitmo. We, in America, are done sacrificing civil liberties to fight the War on Terror. President Obama said so. Gitmo: Yay! Gitmo love President Obama! Gitmo finally see Promise of America! It's a new beginning for all of us! Yay! [...] You know Gitmo and all of Gitmo's friends still want to kill you—you know that, right? We want to destroy your way of life. Jon Stewart: Yeah, we get it, Gitmo. But with these abuses we're doing that for you. Gitmo: You're not safe. Don't you want to be safe? Jon Stewart: Gitmo, there is no safe! No matter what we do, there is no guarantee of our safety. That is the price of a free society. So—finally—we're going to do what's right. Gitmo: I'm very scary. Jon Stewart: Gitmo, this has nothing to do with you! You can't define us. It's about not letting fear do that. [...] We can safeguard ourselves well using smart and legal tactics."

"Whether it's globalization or industrialization or now Artificial Intelligence, the way of life that you are accustomed to is no match for the promise of more profits and new markets, which sounds brutal! ...if you're a human."

"The fuck are we doing here? The subtext of all this is, America knows this is wrong. But it apparently doesn't have the courage to say it in a straightforward manner. America and Israel both know that you cannot bomb your way into safety. We learned that lesson in Iraq and Afghanistan. They learned it in Southern Lebanon. They laid seige there, occupied the southern area for 20 years, all it did was birth and strengthen Hezbollah. And they're about to do it all over again, and we are letting them. Real friends take the fucking keys, because friends don't let friends... bomb that much."

"If you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values—they're hobbies. You know, one of the genius moves of The Founders was not writing The Bill of Rights on the back window of a dusty van."

"The reason I don’t despair is that... this attack happened. It's not a dream. But the aftermath of it, the recovery, is a dream realized. And that is Martin Luther King's dream."

"Look, if you wanna love Trump, love him. Go to the rallies, buy the sneakers. You want to give him absolute power? You want him to be the leader über alles? You want him to have the right of kings? You do you. But stop framing it as patriotism."

"So this is the terrible cycle America is caught in: Democrats whose high-minded principles and values did not survive a contact-high with reality, and Republicans whose desire to solve the problem isn't nearly as strong as their desire to exploit it. And no one wins."

"I have great fondness and affection for John McCain, I would have voted for him, if he had made it, against Gore, quite frankly, in 2000. The guy that I see now, putting air quotes around women's health, and doing all the things that he does, I don't know what that is. And if that's a strategy that's disingenuous from how he really thinks, then my opinion of him is even lower."

"Yes, it turns out in the age-old battle between values and fear, values never had a fucking chance!"

"Your plan to eliminate Hamas by destroying all of Gaza... Uh... doesn’t that just make more Hamases? Is that the plural of Hamas? Hamassi? I mean, Palestinian liberation is an idea, unless you have a bomb that kills ideas — do you have a bomb that kills ideas? I mean, how long would it even take to bomb the shit out of an idea?"

"[in response to John McCain's use of air quotes with regards to women's health in the third presidential debate] Thank you, John McCain, for finally exposing the seedy underbelly of the women’s "health" scam… Let’s face it: women loooove abortions, and will do anything to get one – the later the better. "Hemorrhages," "severe uterine infections," "dying," blah blah blah blah. And while we’re at it, enough with the whining about “rape,” “incest,” and "incest rape." We’re on to you, ladies. Those aren’t the golden ticket to the Abortion Factory, okay? Listen, John McCain has finally put the concerns of women where they belong: in derisive air quotes! And this transcends politics, Jon. Reasonable people can disagree about abortion, but still agree on the unimportance of women's health. It's about equality. And I'm sure if John McCain was raped, and has a baby growing in his penis, he would want it publicly discussed in the same level of abstraction without concern for his specific "life." Or..."penis.""

"One of my first memories was of Martin Luther King being shot. I was five and if you wonder if this feeling will pass... [choked up]... When I was five and he was shot, here's what I remember about it: I was in school in Trenton and they turned the lights off and we got to sit under our desks... and we thought that was really cool. And they gave us cottage cheese, which was a cold lunch because there were riots, but we didn’t know that. We just thought, "My God! We get to sit under our desks and eat cottage cheese!" And that’s what I remember about it. And that was a tremendous test of this country's fabric and this country has had many tests before that and after that."

"Need a hug? Then call now for free tickets to a taping of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. And good luck with that hug."

"Ever wonder what 250 identical chairs look like? Then come to a free taping of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart."

"Jon: Professor! Tell me, what is step one in delivering world-class fealty to power? Tucker Carlson: [recording] Here's why we're doing it: First, because it's our job. We're in journalism. Jon: "Lie about what your job is." Tucker Carlson: [recording] Our duty is to inform people. Jon: "Lie about what your duty is." Tucker Carlson: [recording] Americans have a right to know all they can about a war they're implicated in; freedom of speech is our birthright -- we were born with the right to say what we believe. Jon: Oh, shit... Kudos, sensei! That was deep -- I have much to learn. "Disguise your deception and capitulation to power as noble and moral and based in freedom." Yes, master..."

"I've learned one thing over these last nine years, and I was glib at best and probably dismissive at worst about this -- the work of making this world resemble one that you would prefer to live in is a lunch pail fucking job, day in and day out, where thousands of committed, anonymous, smart, and dedicated people bang on closed doors and pick up those that are fallen and grind away on issues 'til they get a positive result, and even then, have to stay on to make sure that result holds. So the good news is, I'm not saying you don't have worry about who wins the election. I'm saying you have to worry about every day before it, and every day after it, forever. Although... on the plus side, I am told that, at some point, the sun will run out of hydrogen."

"I kinda had just read the statement that Sarah Palin had made about the Pro-America parts of the country and I think I might have said, in response to that, I think I might have said, uhh, FUCK YOU and uhh that's just my way of saying it's a profanity to say and I was answering with a profanity. But it's not really fair, and it makes it seem like I'm just addressing Governor Palin about this and I'm not. It's really this whole theme, that there is more American areas or some people love the country and some people don't. So I guess what I meant to say was Fuck all y'all!"

"The stakes of this election don't make Donald Trump's opponent less subject to less scrutiny; it actually makes him more subject to scrutiny. If the barbarians are at the gate, you want Conan standing on the ramparts, not chocolate chip cookie guy."

"The Confederate flag flies over South Carolina, and the roads are named for Confederate generals, and the white guy is the one who feels like his country is being taken away from him. We’re bringing it on ourselves. And that’s the thing, Al-Qaeda, all those guys, ISIS, they’re not shit compared to the damage that we can apparently do to ourselves on a regular basis."