The bastard spawn of VH1 and The Smoking Gun, with 50% more fetal alcohol poisoning.
Seriously. Have you seen this steaming pile of turd? Are you at all familiar with TruTV’s “World’s Dumbest Presented by The Smoking Gun”? That’s a show populated with pop-culture icons such as Tonya Harding, Danny Bonaduce, Frank Stallone, a Baldwin Brother, Leif Garrett and Random Black Chick Comedian. It’s the same thing only without hilarious footage of people getting maimed while doing stupid things.
The premise of “I Love The 1880s” is to add “a comedic and nostalgic” look back at history’s most iconic people and events through the eyes of today’s funniest comedians. That last part is important, “TODAY’S FUNNIEST COMEDIANS”.
The show premiered last night and I almost made it through 15 minutes of the half hour program. Almost. When I realized the History channel’s idea of humor was not unlike a mortician’s idea of a cheap date, I had to turn the channel. But let’s review what I did manage to see anyways.
The premier episode was called “Presidents Gone Wild”. Ooooh snap! Presidents done gone cray cray up in this bitch! Actually it was kind of, how can I put this delicately? Retarded. It played out like a History Major’s fever induced nightmare.
The narrator would provide us with an interesting tidbit about a President. Interesting, being an entirely subjective term and easily confused with a “who-gives-a-shit” tidbit. After they’d use their Monty Python style animation of old cartoon cutouts of the President in question, the crack team of joke-makers would show up with witty and edgy quips.
Did you know that John Adams liked to skinny dip in the Potomac River each morning? Well, now you do and after watching a paper doll version of John Adams execute a perfect swan dive into a charcoal rendering of the Potomac River, our comedians were quick to mention that you could “see his Star Spangled Banner bobbing in the breeze”. Or some similarly awful patriotic pun that wasn’t truly a pun at all but a crime against humor everywhere.
It was spastic to witness, they threw facts out about our past presidents and allowed D-list celebrity impersonators to make wise ass remarks about them. These are the type of people who you go completely out of your way to avoid in Wal Mart, lest they corner you by the adult diaper display and explain to you nine different ways to say “poop” because it’s HI-LAR-I-OUS!
Another thing that particularly irks me is that the show is called “I LOVE THE 1880s”. And they’re just running wild through every decade and every century at random. We heard about Washington’s false teeth, always a classic and timely reference. We heard about Richard Nixon courting his wife. Because, who doesn’t want to know how Satan found a bride?
They spoke of Presidents who wrestled. And then gave us a gut-busting voice over by generic funny man #2 giving names to their surely fictitious finishing moves. Lincoln had the “Emancipator”, Taft had the “Taftquake” and, well, I surely won’t ruin it for you. History will be repeating this show for about 200 solid hours over the next two weeks. You’ll have to schedule time out of your next suicide attempt to check it out for yourself.
At least you’ll have a good reason to go through with it this time.
Should you find yourself with time on your hands and a hankering for a hunka history, I suggest you avoid this show at all costs. It’s less informative historically than an episode of Pawn Stars and it has 100% less Chumley. Though I expect to see a guest appearance by at least one of the American Pickers and Larry the Cable Guy before this series is mercifully pulled from the rotation and buried in a crypt to be discovered in a thousand years by baffled archaeologists looking for a cure to Robot syphilis.
