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Emmy awards feature usual voting patterns, poor comedy


You would expect Sunday night's 55th Annual Emmy Awards to be funnier than usual because of its 11 hilarious co-hosts. But that's as fruitless an expectation as hoping that the awards would be given to the shows that deserve them.

Instead we get Tyne Daly winning for "Judging Amy."

I say that "24" and "Curb Your Enthusiasm" should have been Best Drama and Best Comedy Series, respectively. That's just me. You may be happy that "Everybody Loves Raymond" and "The West Wing" won their categories, upsetting shows like "Friends" and "The Sopranos."

Let's focus, instead, on the comedy, or lack thereof. Among the hosts were Conan O'Brien, Jon Stewart, Ellen DeGeneres, Darrell Hammond, Bernie Mac and Garry Shandling.

Stewart, who won two Emmys for "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," was unsurprisingly the funniest comic on stage. He gave fake awards for some extremely awful news clips including "Larry King Live," the Fox News Channel and Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, in his usual cynical yet likable manner. Dennis Miller, who took a look back at this year in television, was almost as funny but didn't get as much airtime.

Brad Garrett, who also won an Emmy last night, was pretty funny, spoofing the gift baskets that the Emmy losers receive after the awards ceremony.

But the problem lays with one of the Fox network's stars (Fox aired the ceremony). Wanda Sykes, who has her own sitcom on that network and appears on "Curb Your Enthusiasm," played the role of roving reporter and was incredibly unfunny. When you're forced to dance the Electric Slide with "Six Feet Under" nominee Peter Krause, you're reaching. The low point for Sykes was when Bill Cosby, who won a humanitarian award, was deadly cold toward Sykes, especially when he quietly made fun of her pattern of speech.

Hammond, who's usually a master of impersonations, fell flat with a wildly unsurprising impression of Arnold Schwarzenegger (there was, indeed, a plethora of Schwarzenegger jokes). The whole idea wasn't funny and neither was Hammond, who hit harder and funnier with a wicked impression of Donald Rumsfeld.

Also, Shandling was pretty much unfunny as the opening comedian, starting out bad and not getting any better. The other notable comedians were DeGeneres, Mac and George Lopez.

I wouldn't mind seeing Stewart or Miller taking the hosting reins in the following years or seeing the Emmy awards given to those who really do deserve it. Neither is likely to happen for a very long time, since the Emmy voters never, ever change. It's a sad, vicious cycle, but then again, so is the awards ceremony itself, filled with more than enough butt-kissing for a decade. 

Josh Spiegel is an entertainment reporter for the Web Devil. Reach him at joshua.spiegel@asu.edu.


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