Barbara Walters Becomes Subject On Comedy Central

Wed., March 18, 1998

Aaron Barnhart Kansas City Star

“The Barbara Walters Special” has become an annual Oscars-night tradition, right up there with dinner at Spago and interrogations with the Joan Rivers fashion police.

Tonight at 7 and 11, however, the Walters show gets a delicious sendup with “The Beth Littleford Interview Special” featuring the comedian and correspondent for Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.” The program, a compilation of previously shown segments, airs mere days away from the real “Barbara Walters Special” on Monday.

In her 18 months on “The Daily Show,” Littleford has made a specialty out of these gauzy, patently insincere interviews. She kills her guests with kindness in person, then chops them into hamburger in the editing suite.

Thus, what must have seemed at the time an innocuous discussion of gardening with ex-surgeon general Joycelyn Elders is jerked out of context and massaged into a suggestive (and hilarious) romp.

And imagine white supremacist David Duke’s face after viewing the edited result of his day with Littleford. The segment ends with Littleford pleasantly asking the onetime Klansman about his plastic surgery and how to get stains out of a white sheet.

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Barbara Walters Becomes Subject On Comedy Central

Jesse Tinsley

Jim Meehan

Molly Quinn

Rob Curley

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