The Daily Show correspondent Desi Lydic created a segment called Desi Lydic Foxsplains as a way to poke fun at the more “out there” views shown on Fox News. She takes on another persona in front of the camera when she performs for the series, one that she says is not too foreign to her. “That ‘woman on the verge’ thing unfortunately comes very naturally to me,” she laughs. “Just ask my husband.”
Lydic was a fan of The Daily Show for years before she moved to Los Angeles. “I found myself gravitating towards comedy and the improv work,” says Lydic. “In my mind there were two shows that you aim for when you’re in that world, and its SNL or The Daily Show.” Inspired by the Daily Show era of Stephen Colbert, Steve Carrell, and Rob Corddry, Lydic auditioned a couple of times before landing the job in 2015 when she found her wheelhouse. “My audition for the show was very much in that lane of Fox News blonde,” she laughs.
And that lane has worked out well for her as she started a segment called “Desi Lydic Foxsplains” during the pandemic, where she takes that “Fox News blonde” persona to the extreme. Lydic found the segment to be a way to “embody this sort of very specific, nutty narrative and that feeling of paranoia and mania,” with the premise that she has just binge watched 100+ hours of Fox News.
Luckily, she doesn’t have to be the one to keep an eye on Fox News. “Fortunately we have an amazing team of producers and writers that do really the majority of the dirty work,” says Lydic. “Sometimes I watch it on mute though, just to feel the energy.”
The episode titled “Desi Lydic Foxsplains: Vaccine Mandates” is being submitted for Emmy consideration in the Short Form category. “It just felt like the one that sort of resonated with the most people,” says Lydic. “The logic [of Fox News] is always insane, but for this one in particular it was really fun to try to use their language and put it in such a completely insane, nonsensical way and flip it around on them.”
It’s not surprising that Fox News is a well of material for Lydic, but she says it can be a difficult line between satirizing and perpetuating falsehoods. We’re trying to shine a spotlight on how dangerous it can be,” she says, “but it can be tricky territory because you don’t want anyone to ever feel like that’s our actual point of view.” While that may seem apparent on a show like The Daily Show, Lydic says there’s been some confusion. “This has happened a couple of times,” she says, “where someone from Fox News has actually repeated something that we did in Foxsplains on Twitter. We did it as a joke, thinking this is heightening the satire, but I guess we have to keep upping our game. We’re gonna run outta stuff.”
