![[Comedy Isn't Cuddly]](sanders961111.gif)
HBO's "Larry Sanders"
and "Mr. Show"
know the first
rule of satire is:
take no prisoners
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The center of TV-satire power has shifted. What Lorne Michaels and his merry band were to the '70s and '80s, HBO is to the '90s. A group of spectacularly talented performers, writers and producers have found cable's biggest premium channel to be mighty hospitable to their kind of comedy, and not just because they can swear. The list begins with Garry Shandling and also includes, "Six Degrees of Separation"-style, such performers as Ben Stiller and Janeane Garofalo and the ubiquitous front office team of Bernie Brillstein and Brad Grey, the George Steinbrenners of comedy. Sometimes the members of this group overlap each other's orbits; sometimes their work runs parallel courses. Either way, they're responsible for a satire/parody renaissance that recalls the glory days of "SNL" and "SCTV." Shandling's talk show within a sitcom, "The Larry Sanders Show," beginning its fifth season November 13, remains the best-written, most daring comedy series on TV; it's a hilariously mordant dissection of the TV industry and the posers and putzes therein. "Larry Sanders" shared many writers and producers with the brilliant sketch comedy series "The Ben Stiller Show," which ran for about 10 minutes on Fox in 1992. "Sanders" and "Stiller" also shared actors Janeane Garofalo (who played Larry's surly talent booker) and Bob Odenkirk, who showed up a few times on "Sanders" as an inept agent. Odenkirk now has an HBO show of his own, the Pythonesque "Mr. Show with Bob and David," which begins its second season November 15 (look for Stiller's cameo in an upcoming episode). HBO has another new sitcom debuting this month called "The High Life," about a pair of shnooks trying to get rich in 1950s Pittsburgh. The show, filmed in black and white, was produced by David Letterman's Worldwide Pants company and created by Adam Resnick, one of the twisted minds behind former Letterman sidekick Chris Elliott's brilliant but shortlived Fox comedy (what, there's another kind of Fox comedy?) Get a Life." Intended as a satire of everything's-rosy '50s TV, "The High Life" stuffs '90s invective-laced humor about the Ku Klux Klan and middle-class economic angst into the structure of an old-fashioned, innocent sitcom farce. Nice idea — unfortunately, it's as flat as one of those "SNL" skits that air between 12:30 and 1 a.m. The most interesting thing about "The High Life" is that it confirms what you've long suspected about Letterman: His favorite thing about being a TV producer is that he gets to torture viewers. Anyway, what "Larry Sanders" and "Mr. Show" have in common, besides intelligent and funnysatire, is a pleasing, sustained sourness, a lack of faith in the essential goodness of humankind. And both shows have the nerve to carry that pessimism through and not dilute their take-no-prisoners satire with sappy-happy qualifiers, like HBO's smug, overrated Dennis Miller is always doing. But I digress. "Larry Sanders" and "Mr. Show" have what "SNL" possesses only as a dim memory: Vision, energy, great versatile casts, writers who know the difference between entertainment and self-indulgence. And they only have to keep the momentum going for 30 minutes a shot. In a perfect world, you wouldn't have to pay extra to see these shows, but then, in a perfect world, you wouldn't be stuck with Goat Boy either. HBO's crown jewel of comedy goes into the new season with innumerable Cable ACE awards on the mantle and a recent (and well-deserved) best supporting actor Emmy for the incomparable Rip Torn, who plays Artie, Larry's ebulliently toilet-mouthed producer and protector. Having survived a divorce from wife number two, an ill-considered reunion with wife number one, a mild heart attack, an addiction to pain pills, a disastrous contract holdout and an affair with Sharon Stone, Larry's latest crisis concerns the network's seeming lack of confidence in his long-running late-night talk show's ability to hold the line with young viewers. In the November 13 opener, Larry plays head games with Jon Stewart, whom he fears the network is grooming to take over the show. The episode also features two frisky subplots concerning Elvis Costello and David Duchovny, who are both making their second appearances on the show. Costello turns up to sing "Little Atoms" and sell Larry's eternally gullible sidekick, Hank Kingsley (Jeffrey Tambor), his old sportscar (it soon becomes apparent why). Meanwhile, the deadpan Duchovny is an image-deflating hoot in a storyline that has him deciding to be Larry's best friend. He calls him every night. He sends him an "X Files" jacket. He invites him out to his beach house for the weekend. Basically, he kind of stalks him. Of course, this makes Larry even more squeamish than usual. He corners Hank's gay secretary Brian (Scott Thompson from "Kids in the Hall") and asks him if his friends think Duchovny is... you know. Replies Brian, "One-third think he's gay, one-third think he's bi and the rest don't care, they just wanna kiss him anyway!" "Sanders" is as wicked and subtle a satire of Hollywood as TV has ever attempted. You've heard of psychodrama — this is psychocomedy, a relentlessly stinging look at fragile celebrity egos and crumbling showbiz facades. The psychological offspring of Johnny Carson and David Letterman, Larry is aloof and needy; utterly unable to relate to other humans without a desk in front of him, he carries on a passionate love-hate relationship with himself. Chronically depressed and self-doubting, he's an attention-craving celebrimonster gulping antacids and avoiding conflict at every turn. These days, morosely single and obsessed with aging (he constantly asks flunkies if they think his butt looks too fat on TV), Larry is behaving an awful lot like a sad old movie queen. Shandling has never won an acting Emmy for "Sanders"; perhaps people look at his whiny, neurotic stand-up persona, and look at Larry, and figure Shandling's not acting. But for the past four seasons, he's been giving the most finely textured and bravest performance of any sitcom actor around. Pulled this way and that by ego, cowardice and guilt, Shandling's Larry can break your heart, even as you're laughing at him for being such a prima donna jerk.
On "The Ben Stiller Show," Bob Odenkirk hung around Stiller's puckish (and screamingly funny) movie and TV send-ups like a dark sullen cloud. Odenkirk was the guy who played Charles Manson as an advice columnist, as well as various petty tyrants, geezers and medieval peasants. He came off as a very strange man, an impression "Mr. Show" does nothing to dispel. Odenkirk stars in "Mr. Show" with former "Stiller" co-writer David Cross. Odenkirk has a sort of clean-cut Eagle Scout look with a hint of meanness around the eyes; in a previous life, he must have been a highway patrolman. Cross, who's balding and bespectacled, dresses like a slacker and has a gentle, bemused countenance. Physically and stylistically, they're a perfect mismatch. "Mr. Show" is obviously influenced by "Monty Python's Flying Circus" — skits blend into one another and episodes are titled with out-of-context lines of dialogue (the November 15 season opener is called "A Velveteen Touch of a Dandy Fop" — don't ask). "Mr. Show" delivers smart, savage and often very goofy political and pop cultural satire. In the episode running November 22, Cross plays a ponytailed, waifish Bill Gatesian billionaire (he invented the delete key) whose corporation, Grass Valley Greg's, is a place of mandatory fun; "Arbeit ist Spiel," work is play, reads the sign in the cafeteria, where Grass Valley Greg is always dragging employees for unwanted tofutti breaks. In the November 29 episode, Odenkirk and Cross declare the show an independent sovereign nation, which leads into a priceless bit about a Montana crank who becomes a nation of one when the FBI institutes a new policy of conceding to separatists. The Independent Nations Games, an Olympics for Freemen types, closes the show with events like "tumbling, threatening and the 400-meter food horde." Some of "Mr. Show's" most inspired bits are also its oddest. Odenkirk's obsession with unhip eras of American history comes out in the opener's swell sketch about the rise and fall of 1920s megaphone superstar "Dickie Crickets." Odenkirk also has a thoroughly daft bit on the November 29 show as F.F. Woodycook, an 1890s ice cream vendor in handlebar mustache and bow tie who hosts an "America's Most Wanted"-style anti-crime show. OK, "Mr. Show" is weird. But Odenkirk and Cross and their writing staff, many of whom were on the Emmy-winning "Ben Stiller" team, know how to find the balance between the head and the funnybone. Fans of "Stiller," and "Python" and "Kids in the Hall" and "SCTV," will instantly feel like they're meeting up with old friends. Mean, nasty, son-of-a-bitch old friends, to be sure, but who said comedy had to be cuddly?
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