Poor Mojo's Newswire

· “If I ever found myself in that tent in a blowing cold mountain top on what could very well have been the last night of my life? And if I were a Teenage Girl…. I’d totally be all about that doggy & diamond double dicking!” · “There wasn’t a girl in my theater tonight that wasn’t wondering if the diamond sprinkled vampire skin would be more like the pyrex dildo or the cyberskin one?” · “And the team Jacob girls [fantasizing about sex] with the German Shepard…. mmhmmm, you know it.” · “[Bella’s father is] kinda freaking out, because he doesn’t know how to act about it, because he looks at Robert Pattinson’s Edward and he can’t imagine the teenage girl in him f**king that.” · “Bella is putting out f**k me pheromones like a bitch in heat - and Jacob’s doggy sensitive nose can not stay out of her crack. He might be ‘talking’ about her ‘heartbeat stopping,’ but what he really wants is that hymen. HE KNOWS IT!” · “Just look at [Jacob’s] pert always hard boy nipples? They’re just so amazingly in focus. They’re just asking to be nuzzled at the very least.” · “This is absolutely better than WOLVERINE was… a bit gayer, but ya know… there’s some cool f**king action, way cuter girls… well, way cuter guys too, if that like makes you questionable curious or not, might be up to your on threshold for thinking about wonder what it’d be like…” · “I can go home, tell my wife I’d totally do ‘______’ with you… And I’ll get laid tonight. Seriously, that’s the kind of f**king date you have tonight.” · “The future of your dick is on the line here. GO and it will be yours.”

I wanted to make reference again to that special Mr. Show quality, that drop of something extra that Bob & David added to their best stuff that elevated it beyond the norm of sketch comedy and elevated it to a level of genius that made this the greatest of American sketch comedy shows. It's hard to quantify (as is almost everything in humor), but I think there's two factors that could be isolated and identified as its main ingredients. The first is commitment. Like the greatest comics (I've mentioned Andy Kaufman in this regard before, and I could mention others, going all the way back to Buster Keaton), Bob & David threw themselves into every sketch with all their power, and never let go. They were into their material. They not only never gave up the game, they didn't even let on that there was a game being played. The way they fully inhabited every sketch -- physically, emotionally, in their character and their language and their movement -- carried lots of bits that would have been merely average in other hands over the top. The other is the ability to go one jump ahead, one step beyond, where most other comics would take a sketch. While there were elements of the genius of other great sketch shows in Bob & David's work -- the formal absurdism of Monty Python's Flying Circus, the showbiz/pop culture parody of SCTV, the quirky character work of The Kids In The Hall -- their particular gift lay elsewhere. As David Wolinsky astutely observed in his Better Late Than Never article on Mr. Show With Bob And David, many of their sketch ideas were pretty fucking stupid. They were not, as a rule, telling ten-percenter jokes. What they were doing was coming up with an idea, and then taking it to someplace entirely different, someplace that lesser comedians wouldn't dream of visiting. Instead of coming up with a sketch idea and then filming that sketch, the Mr. Show writers came up with a sketch, then came up with, for lack of a better way of expressing it, a sketch about that sketch, a bit that took the premise or the implications of the original idea and turned it inside out, with the result being something entirely more audacious. We'll see a lot of that approach at work in these two episodes, which I believe are both hindered by a major flaw in each, but are also the first episodes where I think the show really became the legendary thing that it is today. Despite their flaws, these are the episodes, for me, where the Bob & David Genius Injection became standard procedure for each bit, instead of something they used only on special occasions.