EVIL COMEDY - A PRIMER
Around the time that BORAT came out, critic Victoria Alexander stated that, "Evil comedy, a new genre, has arrived". She's certainly right, in that BORAT qualifies as evil comedy, but what he fails to realize is that the genre, which is really more of a sub-genre, has existed for a little while now. I don't know exactly what the definitions for qualification are, or what fits into the category, but I've been considering these things for a couple of months now. I've also been thinking about what my favorite comedies of the 2000s are, and I'm realizing that more and more of them could be considered Evil Comedy.
STRANGERS WITH CANDY debuted in 1999 on Comedy Central, and I never really caught onto it. I think I was still a little too young. Besides that, still being in high school, maybe the material hit a little too close to home. After all, it's easier to laugh at the stringent caste system that is public education when you've got a bit of distance from it. Now, five years out of high school and with a more refined sense of taste (and a copy of the complete series on DVD), I realize that STRANGERS WITH CANDY is perhaps the meanest, most brutal, least sentimental comedy series ever aired.
Created by Paul Dinello, Amy Sedaris and Stephen Colbert, the show satirizes after school specials as it follows 46 year old high school freshment Jerry Blank, who identifies herself as a "boozer, user, and loser". She is hideously ugly and has a dark and troubled past. The average after school special would thus turn her into an inspirational story, someone who turns their life around and realizes the inherent beauty of the world. STRANGERS, though, gives us Jerri's insides, and they're even more bruised than her outsides. She is a cruel, self-centered racist who likes "both the pole and the hole" but also cracks homophobic jokes and cooks up drugs in her bedroom for the pretty blonde future soriority girls to OD on.
STRANGERS pulls no punches in brutalizing high school life, but it's often the adults who are the cruelest. Teachers and administrators seem to view students as nothing more than means to realizing their own abandoned dreams. STRANGERS shows us how people are so easily victimized, but also how people will allow themselves to be victimized in order to seek validation or self-assurance. People are co-opted, certainly, but they're also eager to be co-opted, just so that they feel like they belong to something or are a part of something. STRANGERS is just as unsympathetic towards the victims as it is towards the aggressors. It is sick and twisted and so blackly funny and just utterly ruthless and unsentimental.
Perhaps the only show currently to go as far down this road is FX's IT'S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA. Maybe it helps that I've spent a great deal of time in the shithole city that the show is set in, but I realize what an absolutely miserable place Philly is, and how hilarious it is that people are so proud to be from there. The characters that populate SUNNY are the exact kind of people who would brag about the city they call home. The four main chracters are Charlie, Dennis, Dee, and Mac, who play four part-owners of an Irish bar. They are best friends, but they're also constantly exploiting and manipulating one another. Each episode sees some combination of the quartet divising ways of cheating the others out of money, prestige, humility, or some other equally valuable comedity. Along the way, they commit arson and welfare fraud, supply minors with alcohol, lie about having cancer, spew racism and homophobia at the drop of a hat, lie about being molested as children, ingest copious amounts of alcohol, anabolic steroids, and Elmer's glue, go America on everybody's asses, and run for public office. The list of people they offend is all-inclusive, but the show never seems purposefully edgy. It more has the feel of a bunch of guys goofing around, telling jokes in their shitty apartment, getting high. In other words, it's something more organic than calculated.
But that isn't what we're talking about here. SUNNY is evil comedy at its best, perhaps even funnier than STRANGERS. Each of the four characters is utterly self-obsessed and has no motivations outside of their own betterment. They are mean to their friends and they're all unlucky in love and life. Dee and Dennis obviously loathe their father, Frank (played by Danny DeVito), who only wants to get closer to them. Charlie and Mac are determined to get closer to Frank, who hates them, but also seems them as perhaps the children he always wanted. In other words, everyone is seeking validation and self-worth from everyone else. People are exploited endlessly and relationships mean absolutely nothing. The show's highlight is in "100 Dollar Baby" from season 2, when Mac and Dennis convince Charlie that he's a future underground fighting legend. The show has a training montage, set to "You're the Best Around" by Joe Espozito from that classic 80s story of underdog hope and heroes, THE KARATE KID soundtrack, but the training montage consists of Dennis and Mac drinking heavily and hitting Charlie with heavy blunt objects. Charlie, for his part, eats steroids, cries heavily, and has a nervous breakdown on screen. The imagery, juxtaposed with the schmaltzy song, illustrate the true, black heart of the show; a perversion of something pure and innocent (the 80s underdog story). Motherfucking EVIL.
Danny DeVito is also a producer of RENO 911!, the excellent Comedy Central series which has now reached four seasons. It was created by a lot of the people involved with THE STATE, chiefly among Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant. While RENO is certainly not SUNNY or STRANGERS in terms of the darkened tone, it perhaps surpasses the other two shows in terms of sheer volume of mean-spirited comedy. The difference is the way that the show is hued. RENO presents us jokes about (male and female) rape, incest, pedophilia, crystal meth, lost dreams, and crushed hopes, but it always does so with a smile on its face. The sherrifs from RENO remain optimistic even while they're sobbing. The show also has moments of hope and moments where we're supposed to sympathasize or identify with the characters. (A quick note: in no way am I saying that these facts are bad or that they hinder the show. I am merely suggesting that they ultimately keep it from the level of Evil that SUNNY and STRANGERS attain.)
Just the same, RENO just may be the funniest of all three of these shows. If I had to pick a favorite episode, it'd be "SARS Outbreak", where Brian Unger portrays Reading Ron, a fallen children's TV show host. He's airing on public television, and he takes a backseat to the stuffed talking animal who he co-stars with. He's also a former cocaine addict who lost his big house when the family took off. He has hopes of capturing some uplifting footage to show to the kids at home, but what he's given are the sheriffs talking about prostitutes (or "buckets") performing fellatio on Puerto Ricans, mothers dying while rollerblading and holding their babies, and, of course, rape. (Rape was at the forefront of LET'S GO TO PRISON also, which was co-written by Lennon and Garant.) The sheriffs want to give Ron some footage he can use, so they orchestrate a cat on a roof that they must save. Junior (Garant) climbs up on the roof and rescues the cat, while Reading Ron talks to the children on TV about cops and cats. And then the cat scratches Junior, and he drops it into a woodchipper, sending blood splattering on the side of the house. The sheriffs stand around, stunned, and Reading Ron has a nervous breakdown on camera. Hilarious, sick stuff.
Pretty much episode has things of this nature, but it's all balanced by the fact that the sheriffs all seem to like one another. This lends the show a warmer edge, but it also detracts from the ultimate EVIL of it all. CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM, Larry David's amazing HBO series, is in a similiar vein. Larry is constantly being screamed and swore at by strangers and friends. He is complely self-involved and selfish. However, he also has a wife who stands by him despite it all, and his friends do things to help him out. Larry, also, is basically a good guy; he's just hopelessly self-centered and neurotic. This is in direct contrast with the characters who populate SUNNY and STRANGERS, who are self-centered, neurotic, and not at all good people. This ultimately sets it apart from CURB and RENO, both of which never seem to go as far as SUNNY and STRANGERS so gleefully do.
I have the first season of WONDER SHOWZEN to watch in the coming weeks. From the two or three episodes I have seen, it is perhaps the evilest of Evil Comedy. I am utterly excited to finally see it.
STRANGERS WITH CANDY debuted in 1999 on Comedy Central, and I never really caught onto it. I think I was still a little too young. Besides that, still being in high school, maybe the material hit a little too close to home. After all, it's easier to laugh at the stringent caste system that is public education when you've got a bit of distance from it. Now, five years out of high school and with a more refined sense of taste (and a copy of the complete series on DVD), I realize that STRANGERS WITH CANDY is perhaps the meanest, most brutal, least sentimental comedy series ever aired.
Created by Paul Dinello, Amy Sedaris and Stephen Colbert, the show satirizes after school specials as it follows 46 year old high school freshment Jerry Blank, who identifies herself as a "boozer, user, and loser". She is hideously ugly and has a dark and troubled past. The average after school special would thus turn her into an inspirational story, someone who turns their life around and realizes the inherent beauty of the world. STRANGERS, though, gives us Jerri's insides, and they're even more bruised than her outsides. She is a cruel, self-centered racist who likes "both the pole and the hole" but also cracks homophobic jokes and cooks up drugs in her bedroom for the pretty blonde future soriority girls to OD on.
STRANGERS pulls no punches in brutalizing high school life, but it's often the adults who are the cruelest. Teachers and administrators seem to view students as nothing more than means to realizing their own abandoned dreams. STRANGERS shows us how people are so easily victimized, but also how people will allow themselves to be victimized in order to seek validation or self-assurance. People are co-opted, certainly, but they're also eager to be co-opted, just so that they feel like they belong to something or are a part of something. STRANGERS is just as unsympathetic towards the victims as it is towards the aggressors. It is sick and twisted and so blackly funny and just utterly ruthless and unsentimental.
Perhaps the only show currently to go as far down this road is FX's IT'S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA. Maybe it helps that I've spent a great deal of time in the shithole city that the show is set in, but I realize what an absolutely miserable place Philly is, and how hilarious it is that people are so proud to be from there. The characters that populate SUNNY are the exact kind of people who would brag about the city they call home. The four main chracters are Charlie, Dennis, Dee, and Mac, who play four part-owners of an Irish bar. They are best friends, but they're also constantly exploiting and manipulating one another. Each episode sees some combination of the quartet divising ways of cheating the others out of money, prestige, humility, or some other equally valuable comedity. Along the way, they commit arson and welfare fraud, supply minors with alcohol, lie about having cancer, spew racism and homophobia at the drop of a hat, lie about being molested as children, ingest copious amounts of alcohol, anabolic steroids, and Elmer's glue, go America on everybody's asses, and run for public office. The list of people they offend is all-inclusive, but the show never seems purposefully edgy. It more has the feel of a bunch of guys goofing around, telling jokes in their shitty apartment, getting high. In other words, it's something more organic than calculated.
But that isn't what we're talking about here. SUNNY is evil comedy at its best, perhaps even funnier than STRANGERS. Each of the four characters is utterly self-obsessed and has no motivations outside of their own betterment. They are mean to their friends and they're all unlucky in love and life. Dee and Dennis obviously loathe their father, Frank (played by Danny DeVito), who only wants to get closer to them. Charlie and Mac are determined to get closer to Frank, who hates them, but also seems them as perhaps the children he always wanted. In other words, everyone is seeking validation and self-worth from everyone else. People are exploited endlessly and relationships mean absolutely nothing. The show's highlight is in "100 Dollar Baby" from season 2, when Mac and Dennis convince Charlie that he's a future underground fighting legend. The show has a training montage, set to "You're the Best Around" by Joe Espozito from that classic 80s story of underdog hope and heroes, THE KARATE KID soundtrack, but the training montage consists of Dennis and Mac drinking heavily and hitting Charlie with heavy blunt objects. Charlie, for his part, eats steroids, cries heavily, and has a nervous breakdown on screen. The imagery, juxtaposed with the schmaltzy song, illustrate the true, black heart of the show; a perversion of something pure and innocent (the 80s underdog story). Motherfucking EVIL.
Danny DeVito is also a producer of RENO 911!, the excellent Comedy Central series which has now reached four seasons. It was created by a lot of the people involved with THE STATE, chiefly among Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant. While RENO is certainly not SUNNY or STRANGERS in terms of the darkened tone, it perhaps surpasses the other two shows in terms of sheer volume of mean-spirited comedy. The difference is the way that the show is hued. RENO presents us jokes about (male and female) rape, incest, pedophilia, crystal meth, lost dreams, and crushed hopes, but it always does so with a smile on its face. The sherrifs from RENO remain optimistic even while they're sobbing. The show also has moments of hope and moments where we're supposed to sympathasize or identify with the characters. (A quick note: in no way am I saying that these facts are bad or that they hinder the show. I am merely suggesting that they ultimately keep it from the level of Evil that SUNNY and STRANGERS attain.)
Just the same, RENO just may be the funniest of all three of these shows. If I had to pick a favorite episode, it'd be "SARS Outbreak", where Brian Unger portrays Reading Ron, a fallen children's TV show host. He's airing on public television, and he takes a backseat to the stuffed talking animal who he co-stars with. He's also a former cocaine addict who lost his big house when the family took off. He has hopes of capturing some uplifting footage to show to the kids at home, but what he's given are the sheriffs talking about prostitutes (or "buckets") performing fellatio on Puerto Ricans, mothers dying while rollerblading and holding their babies, and, of course, rape. (Rape was at the forefront of LET'S GO TO PRISON also, which was co-written by Lennon and Garant.) The sheriffs want to give Ron some footage he can use, so they orchestrate a cat on a roof that they must save. Junior (Garant) climbs up on the roof and rescues the cat, while Reading Ron talks to the children on TV about cops and cats. And then the cat scratches Junior, and he drops it into a woodchipper, sending blood splattering on the side of the house. The sheriffs stand around, stunned, and Reading Ron has a nervous breakdown on camera. Hilarious, sick stuff.
Pretty much episode has things of this nature, but it's all balanced by the fact that the sheriffs all seem to like one another. This lends the show a warmer edge, but it also detracts from the ultimate EVIL of it all. CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM, Larry David's amazing HBO series, is in a similiar vein. Larry is constantly being screamed and swore at by strangers and friends. He is complely self-involved and selfish. However, he also has a wife who stands by him despite it all, and his friends do things to help him out. Larry, also, is basically a good guy; he's just hopelessly self-centered and neurotic. This is in direct contrast with the characters who populate SUNNY and STRANGERS, who are self-centered, neurotic, and not at all good people. This ultimately sets it apart from CURB and RENO, both of which never seem to go as far as SUNNY and STRANGERS so gleefully do.
I have the first season of WONDER SHOWZEN to watch in the coming weeks. From the two or three episodes I have seen, it is perhaps the evilest of Evil Comedy. I am utterly excited to finally see it.
Labels: Evil
posted by travis at 10:16 AM
1 Comments:
Good for people to know.
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