posted 2007/05/12 at 21:48
Returning to the subject of animation again, there's something I've wanted to say here for a while about modern animation. Back when I was getting ready to start teaching composition a couple of years ago, one of the things I did was to try to make myself at least somewhat conversant in the television shows that I knew people my students' age liked to watch. (I didn't exactly have the money, or the willpower, to try to immerse myself in their music or movies.) This meant watching a whole lot of Comedy Central, and my thoughts on Dave Chappelle and Ned Mencia will probably be kind of long, but they'll have to wait for a non-animation entry.
Anyway, this was the first time since its first season that I really watched South Park on a regular basis, and as much as I'd like to enjoy Matt and Trey's work, I just can't. I can appreciate that Matt and Trey try to tackle relevant social themes in their work every once in a while, and even if I disagree with their opinions sometimes I can still respect their opinions. My problem with their handling of social themes is that they're far too heavy-handed, and too often their "commentary" just becomes too mean, and whatever "humour" there is in the show is from cartoon kids cursing up a storm, and I'm sorry, but even when I watched the first season of South Park the novelty of that kind of wore off quickly. Matt and Trey's hatred of the people and phenomena they skewer too often overrides whatever comedy they try to put into the show.
That being said, I absolutely and completely fell in love with Drawn Together. In addition to appreciating how much effort they put into drawing each of the main characters in the style of the eras they represent (another thing I picked up from my father), the show is laugh-out-loud funny, reminding me a lot of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 in the way that they're able to land new cultural references every few seconds, ranging the gamut from high-brow humour to the lowest of potty humour, and doing it in such a rapid-fire matter that even if you don't get the reference of one joke, there'll be a joke that you do get in just a short while. More than that, Drawn Together often manages to be more crude and more vulgar and more explicit than South Park (or anything else on Comedy Central), and they never come off as mean, both because of the incredibly over-the-top atmosphere they create and because the writers really know how to do insult comedy without coming off as being genuinely hateful of the topics they discuss. (I have to admit that being a long-time fan of both Betty Boop and Tara Strong probably influences my opinion of the show as well.)
Of course, once I really started getting into the show, Comedy Central had to go and shelve the second half of the third series, introducing a never-ending litany of bad shows in Drawn Together's old timeslot and killing them off just as quickly as they put them up. That would be bad enough, but Comedy Central already airs far too many repeats of their shows, and every time I check the TV listings and see a repeat of Ned Mencia's show airing in prime time it makes me want to scream. Now watch Comedy Central cancel Drawn Together outright just to spite me.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon