Unambiguously Hilarious

INSIDE THE IDIOT BOX

April 23, 2006


Loyal Idiot Box Addicts know that I often lament the sad state of Saturday Night Live these days. This season has been a tiny bit better than the past few, highlighted mostly by the introduction of digital short films like “The Chronic(What?)cles of Narnia,” (go to "videos" section here) which starred the unlikely rapping duo of Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg and sped around the Internet over the winter.
But most of this season's skits, which have always been the show’s raison d’etre, have remained unendingly lame, and even the hard-to-mess-up "Weekend Update" segment is frequently marred by the constant giggling of co-anchors Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Memo to the ladies: Just because you laugh at your own jokes doesn’t make them any less lame to the rest of us. Thankfully, Fey’s reign of terror as head writer might be over soon, as she has written a pilot (in a fit of creative genius, she based it on a female head writer at a late-night comedy show) that’s under consideration for NBC’s fall schedule. SNL fans can only hope it gets picked up.
But where was I? Oh, right. I can’t believe I’m actually writing this, but this week’s edition of SNL is guaranteed to be funny. And I don’t mean just knee-slapping funny – I’m talking stomach-grabbing, pause-the-tivo-so-you-won’t-miss-the-jokes-while-you-laugh, tears-flowing, flat-out high-larious.That’s because this week, SNL is airing “The Best of Saturday TV Funhouse,” a 90-minute compilation of those animated shorts by Robert Smigel – the twisted genius behind Triumph the Insult Comic Dog – that have been the only consistently humorous thing about the show for, oh, the past decade or so.
The show will be “hosted” by animated superheroes Ace and Gary (pictured), the stars of “The Ambiguously Gay Duo,” who have frequently saved the world, or at least the TV Funhouse universe, while cluelessly spouting out sexual double entendres and confusing everyone around them, especially the villains.
Other TV Funhouse recurring shorts you can expect to see include “The X-Presidents,” which features ex-Oval Office dwellers Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton as League of Nation style superheroes; “Fun with Real Audio,” in which Smigel takes bits of audio from actual shows and adds wholly inappropriate, completely hysterical animation; and “The Divertor,” about a superhero whose powers divert the nation’s attention away from real issues and to celebrity gossip.
The satire in the cartoon short skits is far smarter and more biting than anything achieved by the humans who now populate SNL, making this week’s show the first must-see episode since, well, right about the time Will Ferrell jumped ship. Keep a careful eye out for the compilation of holiday spoofs, including my favorite all-time TV Funhouse installment, “The Narrator That Ruined Christmas,” which manages to skillfully lampoon the holiday classic Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer at the same time it explores and pokes fun at the nation’s post-9/11 angst.
Oh, and here’s a little piece of TV Funhouse trivia to impress your friends at cocktail parties: The voices of Ace and Gary are supplied by Stephen Colbert and Steve Carrell, who were writers along with Smigel at the short-lived Dana Carvey Show, where the shorts first aired. Sad, but true: The funniest thing on Saturday Night Live was imported from another show. How the mighty have fallen.
The Best of Saturday TV Funhouse airs Saturday night at 11:30 p.m. on NBC.

MALCOLM 150X: Tonight’s episode of Malcolm in the Middle at 7 p.m. on Fox marks the show’s sesquicentennial airing (that’s 150 for those of you too lazy to get off the couch and google it). If Malcolm were a professional golfer, the show would be known as a grinder – never a superstar, but just good enough to make a living on tour. Face it: You’ve very rarely had anyone say to you, “Yo, did you catch Malcolm last night?” and yet here the show still is, plodding along and having made a star (well, at least a B-lister) out of Frankie Muniz. That’s quite an achievement in and of itself, when you think about it.
Sorry, Frankie. We kid because we love. On tonight’s landmark episode, the gang attends something called “morp,” which is billed as the anti-prom. As to whether this Idiot will be watching it, the answer is “on."
Malcolm in the Middle airs tonight at 7 on Fox.