TV REVIEWS : ‘Night Rap’ Has Fun With the News and ‘Nightline’

Finally, a television newscast that is not only funny, but also is meant to be funny.

“Hello, everybody, I’m Wayne Thomas Satz,” says the man who was known merely as Wayne Satz while a reporter at KABC-TV Channel 7. The middle name is essential for a program as weighty and, yes, as distinguished as “Night Rap,” an uneven half hour of news lampooning from Chris Bearde that HBO is testing as a possible monthly series.

It airs at 10:15 tonight, with Satz somehow able to remain almost inhumanly stony in his satirical role as the stuffy anchor of a “Nightline”-type program on which the first guest (Mike Michaud) is supposed to be a Death Row inmate at San Quentin.

The subject? The televising of the man’s execution. Well, no wonder Satz is so serious.

What initially seems too absolutely straight to be funny quickly warms to its farcical task, and it’s not long before you’re laughing out loud, as a so-called Fox Broadcasting executive (Hugh Jeffries) and the condemned man’s so-called agent (Kathy Griffin) join the interview. It seems that this “high-concept event,” as the Fox man envisions it, or “project,” as the agent calls it, will also include a follow-up TV movie about the condemned, with the prisoner himself adamant about Judd Nelson playing the lead.

Meanwhile, it seems that Doug Llewelyn of “The People’s Court” has been tabbed to take part in the Sunday night execution telecast. Satz: “Because of his judicial background.” The Fox man: “And plus, his personal presentation is impeccable.”

The second segment of “Night Rap”--an “uncensored look at obscenity”--is just as improvisational, but infinitely more belabored and infinitely less funny than the first segment, which should not be missed. Never have so many straight faces collaborated on such absurdity.

Except on a real newscast.