Why don't they come up with a comedy format OTHER than the Daily Show format? Somehow what FNC is doing sounds very unoriginal.
Well, two reasons:
1) It's successful.
2) It's cheap. Standard set, small cast, mostly other people's video and a few studio guests. If you did staged comedy, you'd need sets, actors, props, etc. Talk shows, by comparison, are really cheap.
Successful and cheap is the Holy Grail of Television.
Frankly, I'd like to see them use a cast of impersonators for some of the name players, and do fake 'segments behind the news' kind of things (like Joe Biden trying to breathe life into his campaign by trying on blackface, stuff like that). I'd love to see them introduce a Barack Obama puppet, which is really nothing but an Armani suit on a wire armature that makes it look like it's empty, worked like a marionette from above during an in-studio interview (maybe cut back at the end of the interview to see who's pulling the puppet's strings...hehe...)