When Desi Lydic first auditioned for her job on “The Daily Show,” she created an alter ego in the tradition of what Stephen Colbert had done on the series (and later on “The Colbert Report”) when he played himself as a blowhard conservative broadcaster. “When you audition to be a correspondent, you write your own piece to give them an idea of what you might have to contribute,” Lydic told IndieWire. “In the piece I wrote for myself at the time — this was 2014 — I was a Fox News-type character, a combination of Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly. I thought maybe that would be my lane, that I would play a character like that all the time on the show.”
Once Donald Trump was elected President, however, Lydic let go of the persona. “It felt a bit unsavory to embody a character like that all the time,” she said. But the character never really left her, and just before the pandemic, Lydic saw a way of resurrecting her alter ego when the “Daily Show” digital producers came up with the idea for a series of shorts called “Foxsplains.”
“We were looking for some kind of segment we could do that would satirize the media, specifically Fox News and Fox News-type platforms,” Lydic said. “Our digital team came up with this idea of doing a refillable segment called ‘Foxplains,’ where one of us would watch an inhumane amount of Fox News and then regurgitate everything that they had just learned.” The persona Lydic came up with for the segments was less Fox anchor than Fox acolyte, but the core idea was the same: to satirize Fox News not by attacking it, but by enthusiastically amplifying its tenets in a way that revealed their absurdity.
Thus was born “Desi Lydic Foxsplains,” an ongoing series of digital shorts on the “Daily Show” YouTube channel in which Lydic explains current events through the lens of conservative media. (Recent episodes have “Foxplained” Anthony Fauci’s diaries, Trump’s ballroom, and the President’s clashes with the Pope, among other topics.) The series serves as an extension and expansion of Lydic’s work on “The Daily Show,” satirizing not only the news but the way we consume it and the way it spreads — and the way the media often obfuscates and distorts rather than illuminates.
“Foxsplains” not only comments on the ways in which information is disseminated, it’s often a victim of them, as Lydic and her producers find themselves at the mercy of capricious news cycles. “We have to move really quickly because their narrative can change so frequently,” Lydic said of Fox News, adding that digital department head Ramin Hadiati has good instincts for knowing which stories are going to stick and which ones will vanish after 24 hours. “When they fixate on something, we give it a few days to see how it percolates, and then we try to write it as quickly as possible before the story goes away.”
The style of “Foxsplains,” in which Lydic seems to be sending out dispatches from an undisclosed bunker, emerged out of necessity during the pandemic. “We did the first one in the studio, with a teleprompter and lights and the whole thing,” Lydic said. “Then when the pandemic happened, we were all working from home, so the next installment of ‘Foxsplains’ was shot with an iPhone against a blank wall in my apartment.” Lydic and her producers quickly realized that the lo-fi approach gave “Foxsplains” an added dimension, one which they kept even after the pandemic ended and everyone went back to work in the studio.
“There was something about filming it that way that worked so much better,” Lydic said. “It creates this idea that there’s not just mainstream media — everybody is media now, and everyone has a hot take, and they have to regurgitate it immediately to the public before processing it.” The premise — that Lydic is watching hundreds and hundreds of hours of Fox News and then giving her take — has allowed her to let loose and have fun in a way that’s different from what she does as a correspondent on the mother ship series. “It feels really fun to embody it and not just comment from the sidelines.”
As “Foxsplains” has evolved over the course of the last several years, it has grown both sharper and broader, moving beyond mere parody of Fox News to skewer media and internet culture at large. The show and Lydic have deservedly won multiple Emmys, and are nominated again for what has easily been the funniest and most insightful season yet of the series. The show’s consistency — each three or four-minute segment is a self-contained comic jewel — is largely due to the fact that Lydic and her collaborators aren’t beholden to rigid delivery requirements.
“We don’t have a regular schedule,” Lydic said. “We certainly try to get them out as frequently as we can, but we never want to force a story that isn’t a story. We really wait until inspiration strikes, until we see something on Fox News with a take that we can embody and heighten and play with the mental gymnastics. When we see that, and when the story seems to be in the conversation for a few days, that’s when we know to strike.”
Once a story is decided on, Lydic and the producers try to get their episode finished within 24 hours. “The team will take a couple hours to write a script,” Lydic said. “We’ll run down and film it in about 30 or 45 minutes, then it’ll be edited in another 45 minutes and we try to get it out the same day. Sometimes we’ll be collecting footage and watching a particular narrative and it starts to fizzle out; there’s a whole new conversation happening, and we miss the window. So it’s all about striking when the iron’s hot and having a team of producers who dedicate their lives to punishing themselves by watching too much Fox News.”
Though Lydic herself doesn’t watch as much Fox News as her seemingly insomniac doppelgänger, she does tune in enough to have a grasp on the network’s point of view. “I’m always curious to see what they’re talking about and how they’re covering the same stories that everyone else is covering in a completely different way,” she said. “I also watch it to learn how to talk to my relatives.”
In fact, if she wants to get the perspective of a regular Fox News viewer, Lydic doesn’t have to look any further than her own father. “My dad has been a Fox News watcher for quite some time,” Lydic said, adding that while she knows she’s not necessarily changing his or anyone else’s mind, she takes comfort in the fact that viewers on all sides of the political spectrum can laugh together. “Even being a Fox News watcher, my dad watches ‘Foxsplains’ and laughs at it. I think it’s because our writers are so good at finding the comedy in even the most insane, absurd stories.”
The insanity and absurdity are what Lydic loves about taking on “Foxsplains” in addition to her “Daily Show” hosting duties. “I love sitting at the desk, but that’s much more about reacting to and processing the news along with the audience,” Lydic said. “With ‘Foxplains,’ I actually get to embody the mania. It’s like having permission to go 200 percent. Creatively, it feels cathartic in a different way. It gives me a fulfillment I wouldn’t have otherwise.”
That said, Lydic says that she would be more than happy to never have to do ‘Foxsplains’ again if it meant that conservative media outlets had decided to start reporting responsibly, prioritizing facts over fiction. “That would be my dream,” she said. “But until then, I suppose we will continue to watch Fox and company until our eyes bleed and try to find the humor along the way.”
