CNN Headline News isn't the first place you'd look for comedy, but the network says it will try to have fun with some of the clips in its news archives.

Not Just Another Cable News Show will premiere April 5, the network said Monday.

"It's an entertaining way to recall some of the more memorable moments captured on video," said Ken Jautz, executive vice president at CNN Worldwide.

The 30-minute show will be on Saturdays at 7 p.m. ET, then repeated twice later in the evening. It will be followed each time by News to Me, a series that shows hot Web videos.

You have to give Barack Obama credit, he's overcome a great deal. Not just he's an African-American. Barack Hussein Obama is his name. His middle name is the last name of Iraq's former tyrant. His last name rhymes with Osama. That's not easy to overcome. I think we all remember the ill-fated 1944 presidential campaign of Gaydolf Titler. It's just a shame, Titler had so many good ideas. We just couldn't get past the name. And the moustache.

The political gap irritated Michaels and a cast member, Seth Meyers, also the show's lead writer. The show prides itself on political parody and here, during one of the most exciting nomination contests in generations, the writers have been sidelined. Mitt Romney's Republican candidacy was gone before they returned. "I was in a rage for three of the four months," Michaels said, "then I sort of calmed down."

Even though some talk shows returned without writers until the strike was settled, Michaels said it was never an option at "SNL." NBC placed no pressure on him to do so, either. Returning before the strike ended would have been a breach of faith with the writers guild, but also in the collaborations between writers and cast members on the show, he said.

Meyers - who joined with O'Brien and David Letterman in growing a "strike beard" - shaved his off before going back to work. Some of his creative energies were burned off doing a weekly theater show with a fellow cast member, Amy Poehler, and "a lot of wisecracks in bars," he said. "I did that a lot. It pays almost nothing. You have to do it for hours to get people to pay for a drink."

Despite ABC's affection for "Cavemen," which premiered Tuesday on Channel 5, any sitcom about Neanderthals as an oppressed minority in homo sapiens America has very limited potential. The question regarding the series has never been "Will it be good?" so much as "Just how bad will it be?" And the answer is, "Cavemen" is pretty bad. It's definitely among the stalest pieces of bread in the loaf, which already includes "Two and a Half Men" and "According to Jim." And it's certainly the most tasteless.

Oddly enough, ABC aired a re-shot pilot on Tuesday, since the original pilot was offensive as well as unfunny. But some of the worst material made the new cut, as the cavemen face the same stereotyping as black people - that they're good in bed, for instance, or that they all look the same to white people. Also, the lead caveman, Joel (Bill English) takes flak from his caveman roommate Nick (Nick Kroll) for dating a white woman - excuse me, a "sape." Nick, a bohemian know-it-all, is a fount of lines such as "Crave the cave." It's as if the show is delivering retro black jokes thinly veiled as cavemen jokes.

The producers of Desperate Housewives got an earful from the Phillipines government over a perceived slur against Phillipino medical personnel that aired during the show last Sunday night. It caused such an uproar, the producers have issued an apology. During a scene in which Susan visits the ob/gyn he gives her a shocking diagnosis that she thinks is wrong. She then asks to see his medical degree to make sure it's not from the Phillipines.

Want to hear two short jokes and a long joke?" he asks as his co-star in the scene, Paul Gulyas, pedals past him on a tricycle that he's about 20 years too old for.

"Joke," Tondorf says. "Joke. Jooooooooke."

Welcome to the set of HBO's newest series effort, "Runaway Joke of the Day." Only don't expect the episode to actually run on the network; it is meant strictly for the Internet. And it may be a stretch to call "Joke" an episode, given that it's over in about 30 seconds.

Absurd riffs like "Joke" are a staple of HBOlab, an unlikely off-the-radar experiment under way for nearly a year now at Time Warner's prize programmer. With an 11-member unit willing to try just about anything online, the TV industry's prime mover is finding its footing in the amorphous world of digital media. And if you mistake any of them for the rabble on YouTube, you're excused -- that's where some of the HBOlab staffers were recruited.

Meanwhile viewers should start complaining, because now a bunch of commercials will interrupt the usual relatively commercial-free first half hour of your favorite late-night network talk show.

Jokes in those monologues that need a lot time to develop will now need to be rewritten. CBS has already been experimenting in running early-in-the-show commercials this summer during "The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson" - all because of the coming commercial ratings, which are replacing program ratings as the main currency for TV advertising deals.

Good news: David Letterman typically has only has about three bits in his short monologue. That means early commercials - like those for young-skewing products, theatrical movies, videos, and mobile phone companies - can be easily squeezed into the early part of his show. The same can't be said for NBC's Jay Leno, who seems to have an extra-long initial monologue - seven or eight bits for his intro.

Because viewership is higher earlier in the evening, commercials - now subject to commercial ratings - will run earlier.