Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Good Grief, The Comedian's A Bear!

For those afraid to watch: A Real-Time Review of The Jeff Dunham Show

00:03 – We open on a shot of the “characters” (I hesitate to use that term, as that would imply that Dunham actually put some creativity into them aside from “Annoying Puppet A” and “Annoying Puppet B”) driving around in a car, vaguely reminiscent of Entourage. Only one is a show about hollow douchebags with someone’s hand constantly up their ass, and the other is The Jeff Dunham Show. *High Fives Self*

00:45 – For reasons completely beyond me, an entire room full of people are clapping for this dicksmear. Apparently, a lot of people want to know what this show is about, which can basically be summed up as: Racist Puppets say the Darndest Things. And by “Darndest”, I mean “Cripplingly Unfunny”.

01:30 – First puppet to get fisted by Dunham: Walter. He’s the old racist puppet, not to be confused with the purple racist puppet, the black racist puppet, the dead racist puppet...Hmmmm, starting to notice a most common denominator here?

02:00 – Not only is Jeff Dunham a terrible comedian, but he also doubles as a terrible ventriloquist. Honestly, he’s barely changed his voice at all, his lips are visibly moving, and I think he just snickered at one of his own jokes. He might as well, considering no one else will.

03:00 – For the sake of putting the puppets in real-life scenarios, Jeff and Walter are seeing a therapist. Let me save you both an hour here: Dunham is compensating for his embarrassingly small penis by taking out his frustration on the world through his show. You owe me $100 there, Mini-Schlong.

04:00 – Oh look, our first minority to make fun of: Gays! Honestly, considering how many fucking lame-ass gay panic jokes you straight people ring out of us, we should really start demanding royalties on your ignorance.

05:00 – Awwww, how cute, they’re bonding over how they both hate gays! That wasn’t a joke; they are literally bonding over their own shared hatred of other people. And people are expected to laugh. Did you know this show actually leads into South Park? As in the show that won a fucking Peabody Award. Where is your Godtopus now?

5:15 – And now the puppet is taking a shit. Groundbreaking television.

06:30 - We’re back from commercial with Ahmed the dead terrorist. You might remember him from the fourth most watched Youtube video in history, or as I like to call it, “Five minutes of my life that I will never get back”.

07:30 – Our next skit features Ahmed in his own comedy show, which feels vaguely prophetic and borderline threatening considering the ratings this show pulled in. Between this and the continued existence of Ed Hardy, I’m entirely convinced that the entire world hates me.

08:30 – The sad thing is, the whole joke about this bit is that Ahmed is supposed to be an ignorant hack, yet his routine is oddly similar to Dunham’s own schlock. Hell, I think it actually qualifies as better.

09:00 – Really? A Kramer Meltdown reference? I was in High School when that happened. You honestly couldn’t find something from this year?

10:30 – You have got to be fucking kidding me. A Dave Chapelle reference? Really? How topical, and you only missed the mark by...four years. You goddamn hack. The premiere episode of your own TV show, leading into South Park, and this is the best you can offer?

12:00 – And now he’s pulling out an Olsen Twins joke, which would have been much funnier back when they actually had a career. Or relevance. Actually, scratch that, this joke would never have been funny no matter when he told it.

12:30 – I love how their idea of “Cameo by a hot starlet” consists of Brooke Hogan. I honestly can’t tell who’s making a bigger mistake here. On one hand, Brooke Hogan is about as sexy as a pile of week old dog shit covered in bronzer and bad hair extensions, and on the other hand, this show is the comedic equivalent of water-boarding your grandmother in piss. I’ll just call this a draw.

13:30 – No offense, but the idea of Jeff Dunham giving someone relationship advice is sorta like getting career guidance from Lindsay Lohan: The best case scenario is that you wind up with a DUI and a condom full of blow shoved up your rectum.

14:00 – I stand by my assessment of Brooke Hogan’s superficial beauty: The woman has the build of a linebacker shoved into about 3 square-inches of fabric. You can park a truck on her shoulders. I would say that she inherited the worst traits from both parents, but that would assume they actually had good traits.

15:00 – Oh joy, one of the puppets is going into anaphylactic shock. Normally, I would say that life-threatening allergies are nothing to joke about, but the idea of one of these annoying little bastards being but six feet under is just too tempting a deal for me.

17:00 – Thank you, Jeff Dunham. You’ve taught us all a valuable lesson: A comedy show doesn’t have to actually be funny. Or even interesting.

18:00 – And for this next segment, we’re taking the ignorant hick out to a gun range! No, not Jeff. I meant one of his puppets. Although I can see how you might confuse the two.

19:00 – In the space of fifteen minutes, he’s managed to tell three ridiculously ignorant jokes against blacks, women and Jews. Although I can’t really call them jokes. Honestly, one of his zingers was “My worst nightmare: A chick with a gun!” That is the joke in its entirety. No set-up, no anticipation, no punchline. Apparently, the notion of a woman using a gun is hysterically funny and should be laughed at. Pretty soon, they’ll be demanding equal rights and control over their bodies and everything! There’s a fine line between being subversive and being hateful, and Dunham is pretty much doing a Doggie-Butt-Scootch on it.

20:00 – And just in case you were thinking he’s a total racist, Jeff is also joking about how much middle America loves guns and beer! This would probably almost count as satire if it weren’t for the continued existence of Sarah Palin.

20:30 – “If you didn’t have a dong, I’d marry you!” This is what Comedy Central has devolved too. The network that hosts The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and South Park, the three sharpest satires to ever emerge on television, and they’re running this?

22:00 – It’s over. It’s finally fucking over. Literally the single worst TV show I have ever sat through, and it’s finally over. For those of you who’ve never seen it: Don’t. In the space of 22 minutes, Jeff Dunham, a comedian on a comedy show on The Comedy Network failed to tell a single joke. There was never a set-up, no actual punchlines, just one shallow, ignorant view after another that the audience was expected to laugh at, as if trained Pavlov-style to giggle hysterically whenever he said “Black”, “Gay”, “Jew” or “Woman”.

Out of curiosity, I went onto Metacritic to check out how bad this show is. Among 7 critics, it held an average of 20, with its best review basically saying that the only people who would enjoy it would be those with already low standards. Only five shows managed to score lower than The Jeff Dunham Show:

· Category 7: The End Of The World

· The ½ Hour News Hour

· The Real Wedding Crashers

· Cavemen

· Momma’s Boys

If Howard Beale existed, this show would give him a conniption. That slight tremor you may have just felt was Jim Henson rolling in his grave, and I have no doubt Miss Piggy will be sending a pipe-bomb to the Dunham residence. This is the kind of show that will make you punch an absolute stranger in the face out of frustration, sob uncontrollably in public then drink yourself to the point of alcohol poisoning. It’s just that bad.

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