A mockumentary on the daily routine and role of a village idiot, it’s five minutes of John Cleese playing a dignified rube discussing his history and training regiment for being a gibbering idiot who runs into things.
Ernie Kovacs most representative sketch was probably this one, in which he put three men in ape suits and had them mime to a twee piano tune. Like a lot of Kovacs’s work, it’s not exactly funny, just remarkably offbeat ‘ and recognizable in dozens of comic descendants.
Rendering future soap-opera parodies unnecessary, SCTV’s “Days of the Week” stretched through two seasons in the early ’80s. This clip is from the climactic wedding episode, and it includes a promo for SCTV’s Sweeps Week.
“I am crushing your head,” is a phrase synonymous with Kids in the Hall, not just because of the regularity of the bit but because it’s two seconds of pure idiocy that personifies the show.
The cult classic “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” is so campy and over-the-top that it would seem to defy parody. Yet master satirists Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders manage to one-up the film with this ten-minute homage.
Here’s where it all started, with Jennifer Saunders as a flighty, fashion-obsessed mum, and Dawn French as her sensible offspring.
Hearing a businessman scream on a golf course about shoving 3,000 pennies into his anus daily is notable on its own, but in 1998, when televised comedy was restricted to premium channels, low-ebb SNL and MadTV, it was a breath of fresh air.
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