Idiot Box Savant: Naughty cartoons!

Naughty cartoons!

By Andrew Kiraly

It was 4:42 p.m. on Halloween when the doorbell rang. Wha? The sun was barely setting and already the costumed grommets were out for glucose! On the sofa, the Savantette and I shared a guilty look from behind faces smeared with chocolate--chocolate that was meant for the suburbo-larva currently trolling my stuccohood, most of whom were dressed as various rumpled iterations of Spider-Man, pressed into service by Lincoln Navigator mombots standing sentinel on the sidewalk while they bleated on cell phones.

Whoops. See, I thought we were playing it smart this year by buying Halloween candy the day before--thereby theoretically eliminating the attrition that inevitably takes place when you stock up too early. Theoretically. We got so carried away watching the gripping, snacktacular saga of Leprechaun 4 in Space, in which the famous buckle-shoed munchkin of the B-flick horror series kidnaps a space princess in hopes of becoming king of the universe (yes, really)! (Spoiler alert! He ends up getting sucked through the airlock and is sent spinning into outer space, where he inexplicably blows up like an overripe papaya). Somehow, the movie seemed to call for us to fashion choco-manwiches out of Butterfingers and Snickers, glued together with Pixy Stix flavor-dust. The Halloween candy pre-emptively obliterated by our gnashing attack-molars, we ran to the store, where the only thing left in the ravaged aisles were...Cheetos snack packs? Fortunately, the kids will accept anything in their sugarholes. A close call, but Halloween was saved!

Anyway. What's up with cartoons? It's like they're no longer the sole preserve of kids anymore. I mean, sure, you can tune in on Saturday morning and catch some Pokemonstrosity between commercials for Cinnamon Toast Prison Torture Crunch, but these days you're just as likely to catch animated stuff on late-night cable. Once the province of the cereal-hyped kidlets, cartoons are now just as amenable to adult treatment--see, for instance, the Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" suite of shows, including "The Brak Show," "Harvey Birdman" and "Aqua Teen Hunger Force." Chalk it up to my generation's staunch refusal to grow up in any conventional sense, and instead yank along with it into grudging adulthood the accouterments of youth culture such as cartoons, dressing them up in irreverence and pure naughty (see also "The Simpsons," "South Park" and "Family Guy").

The latest entry: Comedy Central's "Drawn Together" (Wednesday, 10:30 p.m.), which aims to riff on both the reality show genre and cartoon tropes by lumping into a single house, a la "The Real World," a gaggle of eight disparate personalities who just happen to be cartoons. Among them: Captain Hero, a fratboy with a cape and canned hams for biceps; the prissy, unworldly Princess Clara, straight out of a whitebread Disney vomitmare; Xandir, the fruity elfin video game hero; Ling Ling, a Pokemon spoof who speaks trading-card Japanese gibberish; and Foxxy Love, the "mystery-solving musician," a slutty Josie and the Pussycats upgrade.

Considering how overkilled the reality show genre is (these days I indulge my addiction as far as "Survivor," "The Apprentice" and, when I need some cranial fiber, PBS' "Frontier House") and the surfeit of "adult" cartoons out there, I was skeptical about "Drawn Together." But goddamn if this chit isn't funnier than terror-metaphor wolves attacking America as represented by a green, dew-dappled forest glen--or almost. In last week's premiere, we got to see cartoon pigs shitting in cantaloupe halves, suicidal Betty Boop parodies beheading themselves and hot lez jacuzzi tongue-hammering between Princess Clara and Foxxy Love (a plot development rendered in a sighing, Disney-esque musical breakout by Clara in a song whose chorus was "I've got a black chick's tongue in my mouth").

The show also skewers reality TV conventions and rightly attacks the very assumption that such progs show us reality, poking fun at the power of producers to edit in order to skew portrayals of contestants. Okay, "Drawn Together" isn't as funny as "Harvey Birdman," but its steadily bubbling cleverness (if not its frequently one-note, raunchy humor) represents another coup for Comedy Central. Between such gems as "South Park," "The Daily Show" and "Chapelle's Show," this channel is raising the nation's funny alert to unprecedented levels of imminent attack! Now if they'd just stop airing Jim Breuer stand-up reruns in between all this good shit.