Entry tags:

amysedaris, andersoncooper, jonstewart, keitholbermann, pg, robriggle, stephencolbert

Six Times The Pundits Used Their Abilities

Title: Six Times The Pundits Used Their Abilities
Author: Missstewart
Rating: PG
Characters: Stephen Colbert, Anderson Cooper, Keith Olbermann, Rob Riggle, Amy Sedaris, Jon Stewart
Summary: This set of drabbles (and one double drabble) is based on the key abilities in Dungeons and Dragons (and other pencil-and-paper games based on the same system) – CHArisma, CONstitution, DEXterity, INTelligence, STRength and WISdom.
One ability has been matched to each character.
Thanks to my beta, sarken
Disclaimer: Any similarity between the fictional version of the person portrayed here and the actual persons is purely coincidental. This is a work of fiction. This is not an attempt to defame the character of said person on the basis of libel, as the work is FICTIONAL (and NOT an intently false statement created with the express purpose of misleading others about the actual character of said person).


Any mention of 'Anderson Cooper 360', 'CNN', 'The Daily Show with Jon Stewart', 'The Colbert Report', 'Comedy Central', 'Viacom', 'MSNBC', 'Countdown with Keith Olbermann', any associated entities, or any copyrighted material pertaining therein is reasonably protected by the Fair Use Rule of the United States Copyright Act of 1976 and is not intended to infringe upon any copyrighted material.

As a presidential candidate - a successful one, at least - you need to give lots of speeches, even if you’re just a comedian running to fuck with people. You need to charm the media, shake hands with hundreds of people a day, and be photographed with babies. You have a staff to motivate. You need to look nice on camera, even if you’ve been working for 12 hours straight.

To host a TV show, you need to give speeches, give interviews, shake hands with fans, motivate staff, and look good on camera. The two vocations are not all that different.

To make an environmental special like Planet in Peril, you need to first get to the out-of-the-way place that you want it to be filmed in. This usually requires a 20 hour flight, sometimes followed by a truck ride through a swamp or a hike to your cabin.

Once you've reached your cabin, you don't get time off to relax. "You've had lots of time to rest on the plane!" they say, so you get right back out there and to film some footage of you walking through the forest looking at the animal tracks that your guide is pointing out.

If you're lucky, you won't get poison ivy on the aforementioned walk. If you're really lucky, nobody on your crew will catch tuberculosis or dysentery or any of the many awful diseases that are common in the third world.

After the day of filming, everybody else goes back to their cabin and sleeps for the night. You aren't allowed to do that, though - Jeff Corwin wants to go for a hike, since he didn't get enough of that during the day while the cameras were running.

When all's said and done, combat reporting might be easier.

You wouldn't think that making cakes look "the way they want to look", rather than "the way they're supposed to look", as Martha Stewart put it, requires much in the way of skill with your hands. That might be true. (It still isn't easy to make things taste just right, and promoting said items requires a whole different set of skills, and Martha Stewart is a snob anyway.)

But you have to be really skilled in order to make googly-eyed clams suitable for showing to an audience of over a million people when your friend's writers are on strike.

Certain types of critical thinking are not appreciated in the world of sportscasting. The correct response to “He scores! We have ourselves a game!”, for example, is “Right you are, we have a game”, not “Well, it's been a game all along, just not a very close one.”

Political punditry is not all that different. When somebody tells you that the gloves are going to come off in the next debate, you don't remind them that they said that about the last debate. But a snarky comment about how nobody wears gloves in California in February might amuse the viewers.

Despite the fact that there are a few women there, a United States military base in Iraq is a man’s world. Arm-wrestling is a major source of both entertainment and – for the winners – prestige. Having big muscles from the gym for show is good for impressing viewers, but every ex-marine knows that it takes a lot more to impress an American soldier.

Even comedians in Iraq need some brawn. It’s expensive to fly a full crew to the Middle East, so the aforementioned muscles that are usually just for show end up getting used to carry cables and lift cameras.

There's more to running a couple TV shows than meets the eye. When your writers go on strike, you need to know when it's best to go back on the air without them. When your senior British correspondent needs to choose between deportation and what he thinks is scabbing, you need to provide useful suggestions about what he should do. You need to know when the suits at Viacom are trying to fuck over the aforementioned writers and know how to head them off.

And on top of all that, you need to make sure the show actually gets produced