The best way to describe Comedy Central’s captioning of  the Daily Show with Jon Stewart (one of my most favorite shows on TV) is: crappy and useless. Who’s at fault for this? It’s a rather opaque chain of command involved with this problem. I’m already aware that many producers out there aren’t involved with captioning or subtitling of their shows- that’s a piece that gets lobbed on in a post-production process- often by some third party organization. The producers and writers of the Daily Show ought to realize that the captioning of their show is awful enough that no seriously hearing impaired person is laughing when they watch the comedic show. This means that many thousands of people either change the channel or they sit through the broadcast with blank stares and get little out of the show. Why? First of all, comedy requires good timing –the rhythm of delivery is important to the comedic flair of people like Jon Stewart, Samantha Bee, and carefully edited bits from Fox News. All timing and rhythm is lost in the captioning of the show. A punch line hits and the partially jumbled text from the joke arrives about five to ten seconds later. I’m now listening to something that has nothing to do with the text on the screen- a complete mismatch! My solution? I turn the captioning off because its pointless, and I turn the tv and my hearing aid up. I can handle this because my hearing is just good enough- but I do miss a key word here and there- and I don’t end up laughing because I missed what was funny. I find this extremely frustrating – I have a right to captioning that’s done competently and correctly.

The Daily Show isn’t the only show out there with terrible captioning. South Park (also on comedy central) has terrible captioning- so do enummerable shows out there on other networks. The captions arrive late and end up garbled or wrong. Captioning as a whole is in a dismal state of disrepair. I can’t even use captioning anymore. When friends that are watching the TV with me aren’t used to captioning, they end up flabbergasted and laught and sarcastically repeat the jumbled mess on the screen. They look at me like: what the fuck was that? That didn’t make any sense! … my attitude isn’t one of surprise and I’ve seen the mess on the screen so often that I’m jaded and a little too complacent.

I thought I might solve the problem by going on Hulu.com, a service presented by Fox and NBC that offers streaming video of their TV shows, and watching the the shows (the select few that have captioning online) online. I was wrong. The captioning on hulu.com presents the same crappola captioning that you can find on broadcast tv.

I think people who use captioning end up frustrated like myself. But we don’t complain enough or write the networks with those complaints. Its fairly obvious why: its 10 or 11 o’clock at night, we are tired after a long day, and were sitting on the couch doing the modern American thing of relaxing by watching TV, and we aren’t about to get up off the couch and fire off a letter. Maybe that can change:

You can find information about how to file an effective closed captioning complaint here

I complained directly to Comedy Central here: http://www.comedycentral.com/help/questionsCC.jhtml

Tweet This Post