Only Stupid People are Breeding / The Cretins Cloning and Feeding
“The College Humor Show”/ Dustin Rowles
TV Reviews | February 10, 2009 | Comments (25)
Imagine every horrible sketch show you’ve ever seen. Imagine the worst sketches from “Mad TV” or the 12:54 sketches on “SNL” or the worst from Michael Ian Black’s “Stella” or three-fourths of Club Dread. Now, imagine they are 10 times worse, made for the more mature Nickelodeon viewers, and performed by Internet writers who make Horatio Sanz look like fucking Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. “The College Humor Show” is about half that good. In fact, “The College Humor Show” may have done the impossible: It’s so dreadful, it doesn’t even belong on MTV, which is kind of like saying your shit smells so bad it doesn’t belong in the sewer system.
I had hopes, folks. Minor, perhaps. But, about two years ago, I saw a video (which Stace attached to Pajiba Love) that made me kind of fall in love with the CollegeHumor folks. It was a lipdub video of Harvey Danger’s “Flagpole Sitta” that took place in the CollegeHumor offices. It made me sick with envy, which is not so easy for a guy who sits in his house all day and watches movies and television for a living.
What was great about the video was that it actually seemed to capture the vibe of the CollegeHumor office in Manhattan: A bunch of twentysomethings fucking around on their computers and camera phones for a living. And though that video was probably semi-choreographed, it felt mildly organic, and probably made half the jealous people watching it from their cube farms want to shove a flagpole through their nether orifices.
That organic vibe is nil in MTV’s “The College Humor Show,” which is a series of atrocious sketches haphazardly strung together and interspliced with a few College Humor Originals, edited videos from the website with all the humor whittled out. There is absolutely nothing redeeming about the show; it’s high-school bullshit, sketches seemingly put together by sophomores exclusively for the entertainment of their patronizing parents, like a beginner’s band recital for comedy, only the writing isn’t as sharp as the trumpets. It’s painful. It’s unwatchable even for the MTV audience, an audience that can sit happily through entire episodes of “My Super Sweet 16.” It’s a bigger embarrassment to the website than the Onion Movie was to that fine publication, and proves once again that Internet writers should not perform their own material. In the case of “The College Humor Show,” these writers shouldn’t even be writing material. I’ve seen better straight-to-DVD National Lampoon movies, people.
The debut episode, which is presumably where you trot out your best sketches in the hopes of gaining a few viewers, is scripted (boo!) and loosely about a rival website, whose owner ran a full-page ad in The New York Times boasting, “Fuck you, College Humor.” That rival website even won one of the College Humor staffers in a poker game. The rest of the episode is built getting revenge against the other site, which eventually culminates in a game of Beer Pong (obviously). The rest of the show is basically filler material — cast-off shit that they were probably too embarrassed to run on their own website. And if you don’t want to take the opinion of a guy who hasn’t been in college in a decade, just listen to … er … this kid, presumably part of the target audience:
Indeed, Ricky Van Veen, one of the founders of the website, recently said of the show to The New York Times: “The main thing it can do for us is make the brand more legitimate.” Yeah. So, about that: No.
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Comments
Posted by: Jay at February 10, 2009 2:24 PM
You're saying MAD TV had good sketches?
Tee hee hee!