The Dana Carvey Show documentary on Hulu

There was a study done by the University of Virginia of the Cool Kids in middle school. They were the 13-year-olds who dated and drank beer and tried marijuana and so forth, who picked their friends according to looks. I'm sure they had some term for them other than "cool kids", but that's what they called them in the press when they reported on the study. They followed the kids through high school until they were in their 20's to see how they fared, and the poor devils didn't do well at all.

Then essentially did things in middle school that most kids didn't do until high school. When they got to high school, they found all their peers were doing the stuff they did. So to maintain what they imagined their status to be, they took it all several steps further. They drank heavily, used a lot of drugs, committed crimes and became more and more screwed up.

Which brings us to the Dana Carvey Show. He was so big on Saturday Night Live that they gave him his own comedy-variety show. But, sadly, he decided he needed take everything a couple of steps further. They hired people like Louis CK, Steven Colbert and Steve Carell. This was their chance to go beyond the things that people liked and made them popular in the first place. They thought it would make them really, REALLY big. And. No. It didn't.

The documentary about the show on Hulu focused on the first sketch they did on the show. Bill Clinton announces that Hillary has been locked up and he will now be father AND mother to the country. He says he's been taking estrogen and can now breast feed puppies and kittens which he then does.

I guess it had comedic potential, but they didn't achieve it. They came up with a potentially funny idea and thought their work was done.

The show just didn't look very good, but we can see for ourselves. The few episodes they broadcast are available on Hulu and they're reporting that you can see clips from it on YouTube. I probably should have watched some before writing this.


I guess I'm still bitter from my years of not seeing anything funny about Andy Kaufman. I had an older brother and sister who thought he was hilarious for some reason. Now some of his admirers are claiming Kaufman wasn't a comedian at all---he was a "performance artist". Which is a tacit admission that he wasn't funny.

I think of the pain of those years, sitting in front of the TV, wondering why I wasn't sophisticated enough to see the humor.

I started to realize that maybe I was right and they were wrong when my brother angrily insisted on watching a made-for-TV movie comedy called Combat High about a teen sent to military school.

Perhaps ironically, it was the years I spent watching SNL with him and my sister that made me unable trust my own sense of humor which made me look down on a made-for-TV movie comedy. I felt I had to look for other clues as to whether something was funny. I watched the movie, most of it, and I thought it was ultimately right-wing Reagan era propaganda.