Decades before The Daily Show, ABC built a satirical TV news show stocked with top-tier comics—and aimed it straight at Johnny Carson’s 11:30 stronghold.
It lasted just eight episodes.
“ABC-TV is trying to solve a riddle that has puzzled it and CBS-TV for a good many years,” reported the November 19, 1972, Lowell Sun: “How do you beat NBC-TV’s Tonight Show?”
Taking down Carson wasn’t a realistic goal for last-place ABC—but the network kept trying anyway.
Its most ambitious swing was ABC’s Wide World of Entertainment, a late-night carousel inspired by the network’s successful Wide World of Sports, mixing a series of made-for-TV movies, talk shows hosted by Dick Cavett, Geraldo Rivera, and Jack Paar, concerts, and comedy specials under a single rotating umbrella.
“With Wide World, we have found a new place where we can develop new concepts, new talents and new forms,” Michael Eisner, then ABC’s vice president of program development, told Time in early 1973. “It gives us the ability to fail—and without this, you will never succeed.”
One of those experiments was ABC Comedy News, a TV-news spoof featuring some of the biggest comedy names of a generation.
Among those who appeared: Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers, Mort Sahl, Dick Gregory, Fannie Flagg, Robert Klein, Stan Freberg, Bob and Ray, and Don Novello in his first nationally televised appearance as Father Guido Sarducci.
“They represented the best of what was going on in comedy in that moment,” says TV producer and comedy preservationist Dan Pasternack.
All told, the show aired eght 90-minute episodes: four over the course of a single week in November 1972, and four more one-offs at irregular intervals between January and July of 1973.
Only one episode is known to survive—and it offers a rare glimpse at what ABC was trying to build.
That episode, embedded below, captures both the show’s ambition and its limitations—mixing sharp stand-up with broader, more conventional TV satire.
But while Comedy News may look like a rough early cousin of The Daily Show, it was missing the very thing that would later define the format: immediacy.
“You couldn’t get very topical because it could be two or three months before scripts aired,” recalls Allan Katz (M*A*S*H, Laugh-In), who served as a staff writer on the show. “So you could be generally political, but not specifically political.”
That limitation (and others) blunted what many of its contributors did best.
“I don’t think they were allowed to spread their wings to really do satire,” says comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff. “Even when you bring in Mort Sahl and Dick Gregory and people from the Second City who are all known for critical satire, they’re going to be defanged for network television.”
Critics at the time saw the same tension. “Comedy News is a fairly bald title for something as sinuous as topical satire,” wrote Oakland Tribune critic Bob MacKenzie. “It may be a clue that the show won’t be striving for subtlety.”
Still, flashes of what the format could be broke through. MacKenzie singled out a “startling” Richard Pryor routine that skewered Black chauvinism—evidence of the sharper voice the show might have developed with more freedom and time.
At other moments, the tone veered toward broader sketch. One segment featured Kenneth Mars as a bloviating TV newsman covering a marijuana burn: as the smoke filled the air, his anchor grew increasingly stoned, eventually wandering off into the bushes mid-report.
“Not everything fit together,” says Pasternack, noting the contrast between laid-back stand-up segments and more exaggerated, anchor-driven satire.
“And sometimes the laugh track is laughing harder than it should be,” adds Nesteroff. “It just makes it feel corny and contrived.”
If Comedy News was meant to challenge Carson, it never got close. But the larger Wide World of Entertainment experiment showed early signs of life.
After Wide World‘s first full year on the air, the Los Angeles Times reported ABC’s ratings in the time period were up 46% year-over-year—still leaving the network in third place, far behind The Tonight Show, but “plenty to keep the ad sales people happy.”
“Philosophically, I am wildly enthusiastic,” Eisner told Time of the format in its early days.
The gains didn’t last. As the novelty wore off, Wide World of Entertainment faded. By 1976, ABC was filling the tine period with reruns of Charlie’s Angels and Fantasy Island. ABC Comedy News had already disappeared years earlier.
Behind the scenes, its short life came as no surprise.
ABC Comedy News “never had a permanent slot or an order, ‘Oh, we’re going to buy this show, and we’re going to put it on the way they do Saturday Night Live,’” says Katz.
Why didn’t ABC commit to a project featuring so many major comedy voices?
“I think those were the days,” Katz says, “when the networks just didn’t know what they were doing.”
ABC Comedy News exists today less as a lost building block than as a curiosity—a glimpse of a format that would later thrive, but here never had a real chance.
“I don’t think it led to the next political satire show,” says Nesteroff. “In an era before VCRs, before YouTube, those were all meant to be disposable… You were never supposed to see them again.”
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