OK, so Onion SportsDome was kind of lame. Here’s five ways to make it better

Finding the perfectly-tuned “Daily Show for sports” TV show has been an unobtainable quest so far, like the perpetual motion engine, or a Pacquiao-Mayweather fight. The latest stab at it is SportsDome, produced by the The Onion Sports Network, which made its debut on Tuesday on Comedy Central. Don’t get me wrong; there were portions of the show that were very funny. But ten minutes in, I was totally exhausted. A little Onion-style sports humor goes a long way on TV.

The genius of The Onion comes in its concepts, and most if the time a headline is enough to convey the entire joke. Example: Center Worried He Did Something To Make Quarterback Call So Many Shotgun Formations. That’s hilarious, and it’s all you need. But by virtue of its format, SportsDome is forced to flesh out those jokes and make them into full comedy bits, and too often the result seems padded and forced. A good example from last night; the Miami Heat’s James, Bosh and Wade change the rules of the NBA. After this example: “Dribbling will be optional if you’re planning on doing a really sweet dunk,” you just don’t need the other eight or nine new rules. I loved the bit at the beginning, but by the end I hated it.

So, here’s five ways to make SportsDome infinitely better:

1. Get in and get out.

Let’s look at the consensus top ensemble comedy heavyweight of the previous millennium, Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The typical Monty Python TV sketch ran its course with the least amount of wear and tear on the viewer. If they felt a concept had mined all of its laughs, the bit was over, no matter how awkward or abrupt that ending had to be. Many times, Graham Chapman would just show up in the sketch out of nowhere dressed as an army general and summarily halt the proceedings. Don’t be slaves to convention. There’s no minimum time limit. Don’t be afraid to “Get on with it!”

2. Live audience.

You’re not going to grow unless you can get some sort of a sense of the organic reaction to your show. The audience is a big part of The Daily Show, sort of a 12th Man. A lot of what Jon Stewart does is simply mugging for the camera, relying on the audience to react to the situation. It would be hard to imagine The Daily Show, or to an even larger degree, The Colbert Report, without a live audience. It’s why Seinfeld and Leno are always taking their act on the road, even though for them it’s no longer financially necessary. They’re test-driving jokes. Comedy in a vacuum is bound to fail sooner or later.

3. Remote segments.

The strongest part of Conan O’Brien’s game are his live-on-tape remotes, where he essentially acts as straight man in a variety of situations with real people doing real things. In this regard he’s even better than Letterman, as this segment, in which O’Brien participates in an old-time baseball re-creation game, proves. Some of the best segments on The Daily Show are its live remotes in which Samantha Bee or Jason Jones interview seemingly insane people, like that guy who wants to form an all-white pro basketball league. In that case, the jokes just told themselves. Or how about the Conan O’Brien remote in which Triumph the Insult Comic Dog interviews people at a Star Wars Convention? Comedy Gold. That’s what SportsDome should aspire to.

4. It has to be more than a send-up of ESPN.

I saw a headline on one review today which read, SportsDome takes a shot at ESPN. Don’t they realize that the entire concept of SportsDome is to mock ESPN? But to survive, it has to be more than that. How dreary would The Daily Show be if they replicated the Fox News set and made the show just about mocking Bill O’Reilly? Even Colbert, whose shtick is that he’s a faux conservative TV host, goes way beyond that. Great example: The time he had to lay off the guy who ran the Starbucks located beneath his desk. (Luckily, however, there was a second Starbucks on the other side of his desk that was still in operation). Topical. Genius. The type of thing I could never imagine seeing on SportsDome in its present format.

5. Go after the big guys.

Unless I missed it, there wasn’t a sketch about the absurdity of the lack of a college football playoff system, or the shenanigans of Cam Newton’s father, or the hypocrisy of Major League Baseball advertising beer and cigarettes at the same time it’s courting younger fans. It’s easy to pick on LeBron these days. A little harder to go after Phil Knight and Nike.

Sports humor is tough, especially on television. You’re basically playing to an audience most of whom think that Brett Favre penis jokes are the height of sophisticated comedy. But if SportsDome can get away from doing fake reports on Favre, and maybe go out and interview the guy who lives in a house shaped like Favre’s head, then they’ll have something.

***
SportsDome [Onion Sports Network]