Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, October 26, 1995 TAG: 9510260015
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TOM SHALES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
On the ``Mad'' premiere, one of the sketches featured characters from the movies ``Forrest Gump'' and ``Pulp Fiction'' going back in time to join Lee Harvey Oswald in a window of the Texas School Book Depository so they could all fire shots at President John F. Kennedy.
One character missed as he fired and said he was ``aiming at Jackie.'' The laugh track found this uproarious. Some TV critics reviewed the show favorably and declared it to be ever so much more daring than ``SNL.'' It's easy to be shocking, of course, and to ``push the envelope'' and all that other baloney.
So much comedy is being churned out in Hollywood now that it is virtually impossible for even 50 percent of it to be funny. Tastelessness is the fallback position for hacks. ``SNL'' has, indeed, always been known for its irreverence and its challenging of TV taboos, but usually one could discern some intelligence and purpose behind those efforts.
You could herniate a disk trying to find intelligence on ``Mad TV.''
The premiere (which aired Oct. 14) opened, appropriately, in a bathroom. In this sketch, a cast member playing a Fox executive ordered minions to round up a cast for the new show, and they did, from among the homeless and hookers of Hollywood. A disgruntled postal worker, his uniform splattered with blood from a recent shooting spree, also joined the group. Ha ha ha.
Disgruntled postal workers who go on shooting sprees will apparently be a mainstay of the show's attempted humor. The second show had a sketch about a postal worker who brought a huge gun to work with him. This ended with three other employees pulling out guns and shooting. Many comedians have done jokes about disgruntled postal workers, but ``Mad's'' belabor the point sadistically.
Another recurring theme is masturbation. On the premiere, a fat cast member offered to read a list of ``women I've thought about while masturbating the past few weeks.'' On the second show, a family moved into a new neighborhood and discovered a convicted sex offender living next door. He came to call and solo sex was one of his major topics of conversation.
He also held the couple's little boy Timmy on his lap.
Perhaps the lowest of the low points so far, though it's hard to choose just one, was a sketch on the premiere all about cancer. Yes, cancer. A young woman lay in a hospital bed suffering from lung cancer while her chain-smoking mother made raspy-throated chitchat at her bedside. Obviously, the daughter had become ill on secondhand smoke. The sketch ended on this note of high hilarity: After beating lung cancer, the young woman came down with cancer of the mouth, contracted from being kissed by mom.
Here and there, a sketch has shown potential. The second show included a parody of the dreadful submarine movie ``Crimson Tide.'' Mad's ``Crimson Tide II'' replaced battling Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman with a prattling Whoopi Goldberg and Shirley MacLaine on a sub manned, as it were, by women. Instead of exploring the humorous possibilities of this situation (as would have been done on the old ``SCTV'' satire show), the writers quickly let the sketch degenerate into a series of jokes about menstruation.
On both of the first two shows, famous houseguest Kato Kaelin has shown up to do smirky, jerky cameos. Kaelin, the ultimate nitwit celebrity, could serve as the show's version of Alfred E. Neuman, the dopey-faced mascot of the magazine. But this is hardly enough to make the show worth tolerating.
By weird coincidence, the Oct. 21 editions of both ``Mad'' and ``SNL'' featured sketches in which people made alarming discoveries about a friend while going through the friend's apartment. Neither sketch was great, but ``Mad's'' was more puerile and hokey and smutty. ``Mad TV'' is bad TV.
by CNB