'Man Show' Aims To Offend -- And Succeeds

Comedy Central Show's Appeal Could Be Due To Testosterone Poisoning

Betsy Gerboth, Staff Writer
March 21, 2001, 3:33 p.m. EST

I doubt that this will come as a great surprise to anyone: I hate "The Man Show" on Comedy Central.

That's the whole point: I'm a woman.

The creators of this sophomoric comedic pseudo-information show clearly have gone out of their way to offend women. We can only hope that they also offend enough men that the show is short-lived.

I've had the displeasure of sitting through a handful of episodes, but for the lucky uninitiated, here is a look at the "highlights" of the Aug. 4 show:

The theme of this week's show was, well, flatulence. Of course that's not how it was referred to on the show, but let's take the high road here (a concept with which "The Man Show" is clearly unfamiliar).

The show opened with hosts Jimmy Kimmel (also of Comedy Central's smart game show "Win Ben Stein's Money") and Adam Carolla (who co-hosts "Lovelines" on MTV and the radio) discussing this riveting topic at great length.

They explained that men and women feel differently about the subject. They declared themselves frequently flatulent -- and damn proud of it. They boasted that they find the subject enormously funny.

"It's funny every time," declared Carolla. "It never gets old. It was funny when I was 2. Now I'm 35, and I'm still laughing my ass off."

Indeed.

This segued into a pre-taped "comedy" bit in which Carolla hyped a fictional business called the Rest Assured Disposal Service -- a company that comes to your home immediately after your untimely demise and eradicates all evidence of your "hedonistic lifestyle."

The joke that got the biggest laughs from the predominantly Neanderthal audience was a wordless bit involving a bowling pin. Please don't make me go into the particulars of this any further.

This was followed by a segment in which Kimmel and Carolla discussed "Movies Men Don't Want to See." I confess that I chuckled when they showed a poster for a fictional film called "Jimmie Walker, Texas Ranger," with the tag line, "He's cleaning up the town with dyn-o-mite!"

I did not, however, chuckle over the description of "The Worst Little Whorehouse in Texas." Nor did I find anything amusing about the "Guide to How to Watch Baseball" or the smirkingly crass takeoff on the movie "Raging Bull."

I should point out that I am not a thin-lipped, humorless woman who wouldn't know a good joke if it walked into a bar. Nor am I easily offended; you can't spend 20 years in newsrooms and maintain any semblance of sensitivity to crude humor.

What does offend me is purposeful tastelessness -- offensive humor just for the sake of being offensive. With last year's success of "There's Something About Mary," not to mention "South Park," it's possible that this was merely the next logical step.

The difference here is that "Mary" and "South Park" and other movies and shows like it are genuinely funny (in spots, anyway). "The Man Show" -- and a handful of similar male-oriented shows cropping up, including FX's "The X Show" -- are nothing more than stupid and rather pathetic attempts to offend as many people as possible.

With less than a year and a half to go before a new millennium, I confess that I thought we had risen above this level of humor. And at first, I was at a loss to explain it: Is it a backlash against the 1990s Sensitive Man stereotype? Do men really feel that their backs are so close to the wall that they have to start grabbing their crotches, swilling beer and leering at women with pneumatic breasts in self-defense?

But I think I've figured it out now. It's a combination of testosterone poisoning and an urge to make a lot of money by appealing to the lowest common denominator (see "Jerry Springer" and "Sally Jessy Raphael").

"The Man Show" is dead right about one thing: Men and women are different, and thank goodness for that. But thank goodness there's also a difference between good TV and toweringly stupid TV, and people who are able to differentiate between the two.

"The Man Show" airs Wednesdays on Comedy Central.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]