10 years before he created the hilarious, Stephen Colbert-produced ‘Tooning Out the News,’ R.J. Fried spent time in the trenches of actual cable news, working for MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell. That experience, along with his years as a writer for ‘The Late Show with David Letterman’ and Robert Smigel’s Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, helped prepare him to run what has somehow become the most consistently funny and hard-hitting political comedy show on TV. On this episode, Fried breaks down how he gets people like Alan Dershowitz, Matt Schlapp and real-life members of Congress to subject themselves to brutal interrogations from the show’s cartoon news anchors—and reveals which right-wing pundits he’s turned down.

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Highlights from this episode and others at The Daily Beast.

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