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.

The Ricky Gervais Show - Series 5

The Ricky Gervais Show, involving Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, creators of The Office and Extras and Karl Pilkingon who does nothing, slides into it's last series of shows with the energy of a woman waking up for a ten hour shift at Denny's with three hours of sleep and a hangover.

For those who don't know, the show (once podcast, now audiobook) centers almost entirely around the off-the-cuff discussions between Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington. While this may not sound like much it is - Karl is a very strange, stupid human being and Stephen and Ricky are two intelligent human beings with sharp senses of humor. Put them together and you have comedy gold. Usually, Ricky and Stephen find some aspect of Karl to look into and examine, like his diary entries, and then marvel at how Karl can write about things like doing absolutely nothing on his vacation and saving bugs from certain drowning. Ricky and Stephen then ask the questions that everyone wants to ask, like "WHY?!?!"

However while the previous podcasts were great, this one feels thrown out there. The Fifth Series, (named so because they are counting the various specials as the Fourth Series) is only an hour and a half compared to the four to six hours you would get with the previous series, yet costs the same. Sure, seven dollars is pretty good for an hour and a half worth of material, but seems like somewhat cheapened in comparison to the amount of material you got in the previous series.

Also, the material in this series just isn't as good. While previous series had "Monkey News" (Where Karl would make up absolute bullshit stories about monkeys) and mor readings from Karl's Diary. The only memorable discussions tha stick out in my mind about this podcast are where Karl is asked what would he banish from existence and he says "slugs" and a discussion about Nazi Germany and how Karl would casually tell Jews hiding in his attic to take off if they were up there too long.

Other disucssions just seem tired. They talk about the chairs they are sitting in and spend a good deal of time talking about how long they have been doing the podcast. They at least seem to realize that as they are doing it, the show has sputtered to and end and this being the last series seems to confirm that. It's somewhat sad to see such a terrific show end with a somewhat lame encore, but at least it was good while it was around.

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The Stand-Up Comedy of Grand Theft Auto IV

Grand Theft Auto IV is the record-annihilating bestselling video game for the XBOX 360 and Playstation 3. In it, you can run over pedestrians with an ice-cream truck, throw grenades into Internet cafes, and watch stand-up comedy.

This is what this article will focus on - the stand up comedy. The least interesting of the above choices. Sure, there's been games with comedians in them, like Gallagher's Gallery, (which was neither stand-up or comedy) but I do not think there has ever been a game with stand-up comedy in it. My, the advancement of gaming technology. Revel in it. Revel.

So, let us examine the stand-up. You have comedy from the likes of Kat Williams to Ricky Gervais. Actually, just Kat Williams and Ricky Gervais. Not too many choices there, but a good range of demographic is covered, from pimp lover to comedy nerd. Perhaps in the future incarnations of the game one can see the likes of Maria Bamford and David Cross. Or more likely, charged ten dollars to download them into the game.



The stand-up comedy is performed at a comedy-club stereotype, the "Split Sides" comedy club. The outside of the club is pictured above. You can either go to the club itself in the game or occasionally catch the acts on television...also in-game.

I think this is the first video game in which which you can sit down at your television, playing a video game in which you are watching television. The mind reels.

When you are at the comedy club itself (in the game) one thing of note is that you can't actually interact with the club or the comics. You go to the club, and basically you are treated to a non-interactive cutscene rendered in the game engine.

This is a bit of a disappointment. Not that I would like to shoot Ricky Gervais or Kat Williams and hit them with a car in real life, but GTA IV is all about doing stuff in the game world you would never do in the real world, so it feels like you are getting cheated that you can't just walk in and blast a comic with a shotgun mid-act. Or blast an annoying audience member. Or set the bar on fire.

Perhaps there was an agreement with the comics that they would only appear in the game as long as you couldn't kill them. For that I say: give the comics guns. Does anyone not want to play a video game in which you can get into a gun battle with Ricky Gervais? I submit this question to you.

Okay, well, let us put hypotheticals aside and go to the presentation as is. You go to the club, the cutscene begins, and the comic comes out and does about ten minutes of stand up. Occasionally the camera cuts back to you, Nico, sitting at your table stone-faced. That part is actually amusing. The audience, being that it's essentially computer-animated canned-laughter does what canned laughter does and laughs like people have never laughed ever in recorded history.



Also, obviously a lot of work was done with motion capture to make the comedians move in a way that represents the actual comedian's movements themselves, but they still don't look quite right in the game engine. For example Kat Williams does a bit about listening to a song about "Hustling" and how that might make him move in places like, the supermarket. So he moves but it's like looking at a well-done marionette.



Ricky Gervais I have not seen do stand-up ever and after watching him do stand-up in game I still don't think I've done stand up. He's done brilliant work writing and performing in The Office and Extras, but here, just doing straight stand-up it is just weird. Especially with the LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE coming from the NOT REALLY AN AUDIENCE in reaction to his very dry humor. For instance, he talks about how he talks about how he was incensed that a cancer patient he was doing a benefit show for was still around years later. ENORMOUS LAUGHTER. Yeah.



Kat Williams is presented as the "local" so he mentions living in the city. Since the city is a facsimile of New York, one of his bits is about living in a studio apartment and how hard it is to move around. Again, the marionette factor kicks in with a bit like this, where you are distracted by the fake Kat Williams moving around in the game engine, trying to demonstrate how small his apartment is and not actually enjoying the physical comedy. It's unfortunate that a lot of his stand-up bits are physical in this sense.

Overall, the stand-up is a nice bonus feature to an already very fun game. It's a little odd in it's implementation, but then again, it's a bonus. You can always go back to killing hookers with shotguns at any time.