Television Of The Weak: The Best Pick-Ups Have A Square Edged Design

Time got away from Tucker, so Martin Brown reared his head from seclusion to reveal he's been watching Last Comic Standing while Sean Witzke swallowed the entirety of the Young Ones and used Futurama to pick his teeth clean.

Last Comic Standing – Semi-Finals, Round 1"
Martin Brown

The difference between actors and comedians is that actors are symmetrical, physically, and comedians are lopsided. Thus, the semi-final rounds of Last Comic Standing are built expressly to pick the 10 most symmetrical comedians in the competition to send to the finals. If you look at the five finalists picked so far, you’ve got a nerd, an old guy, a fat Mexican, a fat old white dude, and a woman who is hot on a scale of comedian to one, but kind of lacking on a scale of one to actress. And yet, each of the finalists is totally television-worthy. You could plug any one of them into a sitcom right now and make a million a thousand dollars. They each have a decent chance of winning, probably have a solid constituency of less-TV-ready audience members in their corners, but none of them are really intriguing enough to root for. So Last Comic Standing is pretty much just a bland and inoffensive competition-based “funny” program. In other words, television.

The finalists are each, though, pretty funny. Or, at least, funny enough. And the15 or so other comedians that competed against them were pretty funny, too. Which begs the question: Would Last Comic Standing be a better show if it just ran the comics’ (edited) sets back to back to back, and got rid of the judges, the host and the competition? Of course it would. But that version of the show would never get on the air. For one thing, by the time it aired for its fourth week, it’d have to include some seriously ugly people, because I’m pretty sure that they used all of their vaguely attractive possibilities for the semi-finals, and that was, what, forty people? That, and nobody wants to watch stand-up comedians on primetime network television unless they all live together in a house and start getting real. And comedians do not get real.

They never get real, because they’re always trying to be funny, and, man, nobody wants to be around someone who’s always trying to be funny. If these guys are smart, they’re simply trying to parlay the exposure from LCS into a part on a sitcom. That’s definitely what Lil’ Rel was aiming for, since he chose to not even do stand-up comedy in his semi-final set, but instead wasted his time doing cheesy characters ripped from the Tyler Perry playbook.

Of course, none of the comedians will actually land a sitcom thanks to Last Comic Standing, and even if they did, host Craig Robinson should be a morality tale to ward them off of taking it. Dude is so bush league as the host of LCS that it’s hard to believe he ever had chops as a stand-up. It’s entirely possible that Robinson was flat-out miscast in his role, that his sense of humor—which thrives on awkwardness and silence—would never have been an appropriate anchor for a variety show. But Robinson isn’t helping himself out by overtly reading off the teleprompter while his unenthusiastic manner comments on how lame the jokes are. Plus, he spends a lot of time using funny voices and making weird faces, and every 4th grader knows, that is not the way to make friends.

Young Ones - both seasons
Sean Witzke

The Young Ones was a tv show co-created by Ben Elton, who is the guy who wrote the funny parts of Blackadder. Richard Curtis went on to make nice happy movies with ensemble casts about nice, happy people. They are awful. Elton went on to make a bunch of shit too, like The Thin Blue Line, but at least they aren't full of characters who exist in a shiny, conflctless universe full of smiles and hilarious romantic misunderstandings. Blackadder was always at its best when it took hard lefts and turned into two or three guys berating each other and devolving into chaos. And from what I understand, the best examples of this were the parts written by Elton.

Anyway, The Young Ones is Ben Elton's first show. It's where he got that style down. It's stupid and violent and idiotic, full of flat characters, no plot, ugly sets, musical numbers, puppets, and unlikeable actors. And oh my god, it's mean. There are four characters - Rick, a rich kid activist hypocrite played by Rik Mayall to be the most unlikeable human being on the planet; Vyvyan , a violent punk who destroys everything in his path; Neil, a worthless perpetually suicidal hippy you want to stab in the face every time he talks; and Mike, a wannabe ladies man cum con man who talks to camera all the time. And not a character, but the 5th cast member is Alexi Sayle playing every member of their landlord's family.

Yeah its kind of like the Monkees, it's 4 characters hanging out in a house and getting into "adventures" with musical numbers/guests poorly worked into the plot. The characters are awful. The stories don't exist, and when they do, they're quickly abandoned or undermined. It's an anti-sitcom, which I first saw when I was like 11 or 12 when it was running on Comedy Central. I couldn't have seen more than 2 or 3 episodes, because I thought Madness were just the band on the show instead of guests.

Its really stupid, but its really smart in its stupidity. In one episode, in mid-conversation, they zoom in on a can sitting on a shelf, then it grows teeth and says "don't look at me, I'm irrelevant". The show is flat because it's honest about its subject matter. Students, particularly these archetypal students, are superficial shitheads who only exist in opposition to each other. Kids are assholes, and the only reason to watch comedy television from any time period is to watch people be assholes to each other. They're stupid and violent, all their interaction with each other and the outside world shows them to be completely sheltered and incapable of doing anything but watching television and fighting with each other. Almost every episode ends with the characters being killed and their house being partially or completely destroyed. The terms "anarchic" and "surrealistic" get applied to a lot of things post-Python, but this is legitimately anarchic. Sitcoms are all this worthless and flat, with the exception of one or two, and at least the Young Ones is honest about it. It's really the precursor to Aqua Teen Hunger Force, it's 4 characters trapped in an endless conveyor belt of insults and awful, ugly sets. Around episode four of the first series (there are only 12 episodes in total), they reach the perfect balance of flippancy and anger. These guys don't know anything but they know they hate each other (except Mike and Vyvyan who appear to have a mutual respect for their disregard for the other two). Theres clearly a lot of improvisation going on, even in the editing where they'll randomly cut to other crap whenever theres a dead scene.

It's unpleasant and juvenile, uglier than you'd expect for a BBC show produced in the 80s (and thats saying something), there are episodes where they clearly run out of ideas and have Vyvyan smash the set, and Alexi Sayle completely derails every scene he's in by overkilling whatever brief moments they give him (seriously it's like dropping Brando into ep of Friends sometimes). But...

Fucking Motorhead and the Damned show up to lipsync, Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry show up just to get killed and make stupid faces, Terry Jones drinks like a fish. And yet none of those things are as funny as Vyvyan and Rik bickering like rabid dogs, or Alexi Sayle ranting in three accents. This is probably top ten sitcoms of all time, because four idiots screaming can be a gateway to genius too.

Futurama - "Attack of the Killer App"
Sean Witzke

Oh, an iPhone/Twitter episode! You eat it, I have Young Ones on my computer, and it was a show smart enough to end before it crawled out of the grave and into its own ass.

-Sean Witzke & Martin Brown, 2010

Comments

[John Pontoon]

Favorite Young Ones moment: Alexei Sayle is holding the four hostage at riflepoint and tells them to get on with whatever, because, "I'm not exactly known for me patience."

Rik: (Snottily. As always.) "Well, I guess you're not Dr. Kildare, then!"

Sayle responds by jacking Rik in the jaw with the rifle butt.

I guess you just had to see it.

[Comics Weekly]

My dread kin and I were raised on this show by inadvertently counter-culture parents. We will still - to this day - recite Neil's "We sow the seeds, nature grows the seeds, we eat the seeds" hippie mantra.

One of the few genuinely punk TV shows.

But don't watch BOTTOM, unless you have a high tolerance for people getting hit with frying pans.

[John Pontoon]

Yeah, somebody once loaned me a videocassette of "Bottom," and I got about 13 minutes in before my will gave up. The dismal non-"Young Ones" career of nearly everyone involved defies all reasonable odds; the only exceptions that come to mind are (obviously) "Absolutely Fabulous" (which scarcely counts despite Jennifer Saunders appearing on a handful of "YO" episodes and being married to Vyvyan,) and a minority of excellent episodes of "The Comic Strip Presents," particularly "A Fistful of Travelers Cheques," the one with Mayall and Peter Richardson (who turned down the role of Mike on "YO") as cowboy wannabes. Contains this great line:

"This is the Hotel Bastardos! You want the soft toilet paper? You go to the Hotel Gayboy! "

Anyhow, yeah, "Young Ones" was a supernova of awesome that burnt the talent out of its principals. Aah, no skin off my ass, I guess.

[Thrills]

Bizarrely, I have only just rewatched the first series of the Young Ones. Is it something in the water?

I am particularly fond of the absolute hatred of the police in the show, who are portrayed in the least subtle ways as thieving racist idiots.

[Abhay]

My favorite Young Ones moment is this tiny, tiny joke-- and I haven't seen the show since it was on Comedy Central so this is just by memory, but where, I think, Mike glances at his watch and some other character goes "Oh, is that the time?" And he goes, "No, time is an abstract concept; this is a wrist-watch."

It's a Douglas Adams joke, basically, but still, it stuck with me...

Bottom, though-- that was not good.

[sean witzke]

Thats a good one - my second favorite line like that is "I'm looking for my prince!" "Well, lets go see if they're upstairs with my etchings".

[Zeb]

I really like this:

"You could plug any one of them into a sitcom right now and make a million a thousand dollars."