Jmunney's Blog

Season Analysis: Season 2 of Comedy Bang! Bang! reached the heights of 2013 television as its absurd brand of deconstruction made it one of the best shows about putting on a show of all time.

“Gillian Jacobs Wears a Red Dress with Sail Boats”
In playing around with the conventions of talk-based television, Comedy Bang! Bang! understands that effectiveness is achieved by specificity.  The ubiquity of Chris Hardwick hosting live recap shows is ridiculous, and it would be even more ridiculous if one of those recap shows were recapping a talk show (parody or regular).  Thus, the Comedy Talk! Talk! segment is spot-on and filled with crazy details (one of Hardwick’s guests will be Jacoby from the band Papa Roach, the winner of a Twitter-based contest will receive a “bucket of backyard bourbon burgers”).  It is not too of-the-moment, because it must be of-the-moment to effectively skewer the state of television.  “GJWaRDwSB” also gets a lot of mileage out of its parody flashback/flash-forward structure, going so far as stretching the gag out to a future beyond episode’s end, as “It Was Onions” (the in-universe name of the episode) completes the EGOT, with Adam Scott himself presenting the Tony, and then taking the flash-forward to the past, as time travelers head to the prehistoric era to present this episode for caveman Reggie Watts’ viewing pleasure.  There really is no opportunity to catch your breath with all the structure-breaking of this episode, as also exemplified by the “clip” from Gillian Jacobs’ “new movie,” which seems to be taking place backstage during this episode.  Finally, “GJWaRDwSB” is chock full of great performances, particularly from Jason Mantzoukas as vampire chef Emeril Luigi (actually Lugosi), who isn’t particularly monstrous or even a jerk.  He’s just professional and annoyed that Scott isn’t; you may think that, as a vampire, he would want your meats to be bloody, but he’s more concerned about cooking food properly, so as to avoid watery shits.

Season Analysis: Scott Aukerman has a great rapport with Reggie Watts, and a great rapport with all of his funny friends.  There are several funny segments that I assume were brought over from the podcast.  But sometimes it all gets a bit silly.

“Elizabeth Banks Wears A Red Dress”
The most important part of comedy is the element of surprise.  So for a show as ironic and absurd as Comedy Bang! Bang!, it’s hard to continually produce good comedy when surprise is always expected.  So it was nice to have a guest like Elizabeth Banks, who more or less acted as herself instead of trying to match Scott Aukerman as he played “Scott Aukerman.”  But the real reason this wins as best episode is David Wain, who appears as television critic Gordon “The Hatchet” Thatchet.”  Wain operates on a different comedy plane than everyone else in the room (always a formula for success), as he constantly assigns star ratings to every moment of the show and tells Scott, “You’re no Johnny Carson, honey.”