BLOGS

Funny or Die Presents: The Same Crap They Put on the Website Tonight (or early tomorrow, ya sticklers) at midnight, HBO's partnership with Adam McKay and Will Ferrell's website Funny or Die expands with a half-hour, televised sketch show cleverly called Funny or Die Presents. I watched the first two episodes, and, just like what's on the website, it's hit and miss in a way that's largely miss. A lot of it is the kind of crap that your friend with the way too broad sense of humor would send you. In other words, most of it falls flat, wastes your time and annoys you, but some of it is pretty brilliant. The new "Drunk History," for example, is amazing. Jen Kirkman should never be sober.

I don't want to spoil the new installment of boozy book reports for you, but you should know that newcomer Don Cheadle fits right in, Will Ferrell looks like he had a kindergartener make his Abraham Lincoln beard and that Zooey Deschanel shows up as Mary Todd Lincoln. And that Jen Kirkman eventually can't understand why she's not wearing pants with her dress. It's very, very funny. It's been a long time since we've had a new "Drunk History," but this makes up for the wait.

The rest of it plays like either amateur hour (there's a Jimmy Buffet T-shirt that tries to date rape Busy Philipps and a whole lot of Rob Riggle yelling as a comedic approach, to name a few) or like a pasteurized Tim and Eric segment (surreal severed penis humor and Slovin and Allen as Gatsby-era-dressed twins wide-eyed in a hall of mirrors). Aside from the one installment of "Drunk History" (and that's the only one we're going to get for now) and a pretty satisfying sketch called "Playground Politics," in which children don T-shirts named "America" and "North Korea" and "Africa" to show us how bleak the world is in children's terms, none of this is stuff you can't get elsewhere and better, either on the Internet or even on television. So I don't really see the point.

But you do get to see Paul Scheer take a very girly bubble bath, so it's not all a wash (pardon the pun).

2 Comments

February 22, 2010 10:49 AM
LInda
Reply

Drunk History and Space Baby made me LOL, the rest was idiotic. I expected WAY more from Funny or Die.

September 1, 2011 10:24 PM
international
Reply

"Intern" is a fancy word for “if you have rich parents, you can work here for free.”

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