Weekly Comedy: A Bunch of Stuff You Might Not Like

It’s another early Weekly Comedy! Ye Gods!

The big release this week is The Invention of Lying, which based on the trailers, looks pretty damn fantastic. Other than that, thanks to the overwhelming amount of decent comedy on TV right now (Curb Your Enthusiasm seems to be back to its usual quality and I was particularly impressed with Bored to Death and Community), even if the DVD + CD releases are light, there’s plenty out there to keep you busy. And by busy I mean sitting on your ass in front of the TV crassly judging performers and writers vastly more talented than you.

IN THEATERS

The Invention of Lying – Ricky Gervais’ hypothetical situation involves a world where it never occurred to anyone to speak anything other than the blunt, horrible truth about everything. So he starts lying and basically becomes a king among men, as is my understanding. Also starring Louis CK, so yeah, you pretty much have to go see this.

DVD

How I Met Your Mother Season 4 – This show isn’t particularly popular among comedy nerds – it is sometimes very cloying and overly sincere and is effectively a more clever and sarcastic version of Friends, but it does have a consistently funny internal sense of humor and some of the episodes are pretty great. It’s worth Netflixing for a boring Sunday if you’ve never seen it.

Away We Go – All of the marketing materials for this movie feature the title in a shaking, hand-drawn font and the film stars John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, so expect there to be many hoodies worn and many Regina Spektor songs on the soundtrack. It got mixed-leaning-positive reviews when it came out, so again, maybe it’s boring Sunday material.

NEW ON TV

Titan Maximum – The latest from Robot Chicken creators Seth Green and Matt Senreich (with considerable input from Robot Chicken writer Tom Root), this new series is essentially an extended parody of Voltron and other series like it. It’s been said in interviews that the goal was to portray “what would actually happen if a bunch of whiny, emotionally broken teenagers controlled a giant godlike weapon of interstellar war”, which sounds pretty funny but based on the first two minutes it seems like an episode of Voltron where everyone swears. But hey, that’s just the first two minutes. Give the full pilot a look-see for yourself tonight at 11:30pm on Adult Swim.

The Cleveland Show – A Family Guy spinoff wherein Cleveland, the slow-talking black guy, moves out of Quahog to Virginia, meets his high school sweetheart with two kids of her own and gets married. Their neighbors are a family of bears. Sounds zany! This seems like either a mild disaster or just another version of Family Guy with the characters swapped around. It’s on tonight after The Simpsons.

COMEDY SKIPPABLES THIS WEEK

Monsters Vs. Aliens - Dreamworks tried to sell this as an all-audiences comedy, but it's really just by-the-numbers, feels long even though it's pretty short, doesn't really have any laughs in it and isn't particularly clever or worthwhile. It's trying to be an out-and-out comedy but ultimately winds up being a generic kids' movie. Avoid it.