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 At
last, there's a late-night talk show where the gaseous
wiener's the running gag, not the host. I always liked Conan's
work on The Simpsons, and Late Night carries on that tradition
of high quality with top-notch (to say nothing of
side-splitting!) sketches like The Art Gallery and Desk Drive,
in which Conan and his cohort Andy Richter wheel the
traditional talk show furniture staple around a series of
badly superimposed backgrounds. Equally cheesy but no less
amusing are Conan's chats with celebrities "via satellite"
(actually, they're just stills of celebrities, with Bob
Smigel's voice and lips tacked on, but I won't tell if you
won't!), which often prove more entertaining than the actual
guests. Oh, and there's plenty of thrills for fans of
more conventional talk show elements, like a great band (a
GREAT band?! Hell, the Max Weinberg 7 is the best in-house
band on television, although judging from the competition,
that's really not much of a feat...) and well-known guests
ranging from Sting to William Shatner. I'm not crazy about
Conan's enthusiasm for Kids in the Hall and Saturday Night
Live (I get the feeling that he gushes over them to stay cozy
with that moron Lorne Michaels... WHY!? If you ask me, "Late
Night" doesn't NEED to be shackled to that talentless
has-been! If Conan were smart, he'd ditch Michaels, create his
own company, and produce the show himself... but I digress),
and a few of "Late Night"'s most recent sketches have been
censored by the "good" folks at Broadcast Standards and
Practices, but those are teensy weensy inconsequencial
quibbles. Conan O'Brien slices, dices, and makes julienne
fries out of Leno, Letterman, and Greg Kilborn (OK, I've
officially beaten THAT joke into the ground...), so check him
out every weekday night at 12:30 on NBC.
TV
FUNHOUSE
After years of contributing great
comic sketches and cartoons to popular NBC shows like Conan
O'Brien and Saturday Night Live, writer Robert Smidgel has
decided to strike out on his own in the series TV
Funhouse. This show starts out a little like Captain
Kangaroo or Pee-Wee Herman, with a dopey host who creates
different themes for each episode and dresses
appropriately. Unfortunately for him, the animals who
are supposed to co-host the show are more interested in having
adventures of their own... after giving him some lame excuse,
they leave en masse to bars, strip clubs, casinos, and even a
cannibalistic cafe whose motto is "You Eat What You
Are". Meanwhile, the host mopes around on his own,
showing the occasional cartoon (classic Smidgel stuff like
Wonderman, a horny superhero who's the exact opposite of The
Ambiguously Gay Duo) and short black and white
film.
There are a few things you'll
notice pretty quickly about TV Funhouse. First, the
puppetry and cartoons that made Conan O'Brien's show even
better and Saturday Night Live almost worth tuning into don't
work so well on their own. Smidgel's material is great
for holding more substancial comedy bits together, but without
them, the stiff animation, less-than-Muppet quality puppet
wrangling, and crude jokes go from funny to irritating in
thirty minutes.
Secondly, if The Drew Carey Show
is, as its star has said, "the drinkingest show on
television", TV Funhouse is easily the fuckingest. You
can't go five minutes without seeing someone banging someone
else, and although they're always puppets or cartoon
characters, it's still a little disturbing. Special
guest Triumph the Insult Comic Dog (yes, THAT insult comic
dog) actually gets himself stuck inside a leather clad poodle,
and then has to perform stand-up live in a Las Vegas casino
with the prostituting pooch still attached. Robert
Smidgel's apparent obsession with sex becomes even more
grating when he goes out of his way to slam abstainence in a
parody of those old instructional films which compares sexual
responsibility to holding in a bowel movement
indefinitely. Ha ha. Yeah, that's, um, really
hilarious. Let's see you try to laugh off those genital
warts after having a one-night stand with someone you've never
met, Robbie.
Finally, I'm still not sure if
Robert Smidgel is trying to make the show work on its own
merits or just cashing in on his best creations from SNL and
Conan O'Brien. Triumph has already made several guest
appearances on the series, and even before that, all of the
dogs in the show had that same rough Slavic accent.
Despite this, the best characters from Saturday Night Live
only make brief cameos in the opener... they're never in the
show itself, which is aggravating because The Ambiguously Gay
Duo rates up there as one of the best animated comedy sketches
ever.
TV Funhouse didn't really meet my
expectations, and after watching a couple months worth of
episodes I doubt that it will ever improve. It's good
enough to keep you tuned into Comedy Central after South Park
is over, but I personally think Smidgel's best work is still
on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. |
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