Friday, September 20, 2013

New Whose Line! Episode 11: Alleged Football League

Starring Wayne Brady, Jonathan Mangum, Colin Mochrie, and Ryan Stiles!
Plus special guests Chloe Butler and Monique Gaxiola, from the Greater Los Angeles Metropolitan Statistical Area Temptations!


Hollywood Darth-rector: Luke Skywalker (Ryan) and his “faithful android sidekick” C-3PO (Jonathan) are preparing to destroy an enemy force field when Dark Vader (Wayne) speeds in on a hoverbike to attack them. Colin directs, wisely instructing them to redo the scene as used car salesmen and as porno au fromage.

TAILSDISSECTION: It’s really starting to get frightening to consider just how much Ryan has never experienced in his 54 years on the planet! He doesn’t have email, doesn’t use any social networking sites, barely speaks to people on the telephone, and now he doesn’t even know something that ANYBODY should know by pop cultural osmosis! I would say he’s like me and is more of a Trekkie than a Jedi, but it’s clear to anyone by now that he’s faking his way through that too. Ryan’s misquoting is almost as confusing as Wayne’s chagrin at being cast as Darth Vader just because he’s a black guy, when Darth Vader’s voice was provided by a rather famous black guy. But then again, Wayne doesn’t have the best luck when it comes to voices, especially since his Hulk Hogan sounds more like Macho Man Randy Savage with a cold. Ooooh yeeaaahh!

JESSICANALYSIS: Wasn’t the first, or at least one of the first, Hollywood Directors in the UK version about Star Wars? If Whose Line was being cancelled after this season, this would’ve been a great way for things to come full circle. But, alas, they’re making more. What a shame. It’s a pretty good scene, though. Jonathan did great, and I enjoyed the brief glimpse of his C-3PO… though I also have a minor nitpick about the used car salesman style. Why oh why wasn’t Wayne the manager Jonathan consulted, instead of the invisible person? Not that Wayne’s alternate role as a somewhat offensive ethnic stereotype wasn’t a good alternative. Ryan’s dumb guy mix-up was pretty amusing here as well. (CONFESSION TIME: I too have seen neither Star Wars nor Star Trek, though unlike Ryan I have not lived under a rock my entire life, so I can actually differentiate between the two!) As for the cheesy porn, well, I’ve already resigned myself to the fact that this game must always involve “DO IT SEXY!” or something similar. Also, this game must always involve an awkwardly edited ending, because nothing they do after the sexy one matters apparently. SEXY!


Do It: Waynathan sings to Chlonique in the style of the Rolling Stones.

TAILSDISSECTION: Y’know, I’m really starting to wonder if those girls actually know the rules of football. Do they know the AFC from the NFC? Can they name five teams and describe their logos accurately? I think those two are just a couple of fake sports girls who try to dress up all sexy without even bothering to learn about the culture! FAKE SPORTS GIRLS! Though to be fair, Wayne obviously never got picked for football either, considering how he couldn’t catch a ball that was rather gently thrown at him from a close distance, and how he fell like a sack of potatoes from a rather light push. Jonathan kept his face scrunched up for most of the game in a vain attempt to do a Keith Richards impression, and he succeeded… if Keith Richards was incredibly constipated and not strung out on six decades worth of drugs. It’s almost like getting cheap eye candy as “special guest stars” doesn’t really make for good comedy! Go figure!

JESSICANALYSIS: Okay, so, I’m not necessarily against the idea of women playing sports in sexy lingerie. The way it’s marketed is definitely icky but, y’know, do whatever you want wearing whatever you want, nobody has any right to tell you different. The thing I really have a problem with are the way that nobody put any thoughts into how to incorporate those shoulderpads into the rest of their uniforms organically. They’re wearing a bra and panties and then these comically oversized shoulderpads! What the fuck, man? As you might’ve expected, they’re really awkward special guests, too. They do that thing that all special guests on Whose Line with physical claims to fame do, where they try to do a little routine demonstrating their talent, but they just come across looking like a normal average Joe (or Joanna) badly miming that thing, despite ostensibly being a quasi-notable professional at it! To their credit, Wayne and Jonathan didn’t contribute to the sheer awkwardness of this round, at least. If you can ignore the left half of the screen, their song is actually pretty fun, even if Jonathan’s Keith Richards seems to have perpetually just been kicked in the rolling stones.


(W)hat’s in the Bag: Captain Kirk (Ryan) and Spock (Colin) have beamed down to a planet’s surface, where they capture and examine a distressed (and neurotic) alien lifeform, Wayne. The exciting assortment of items in Suzanne and Rosie’s bags include a lovely white hat, empty water bottles, a fat sack of pistachios, and a highly suspicious sponge.

TAILSDISSECTION: Dammit Jim, if you’re gonna do a Star Trek scene in a game that revolves primarily around doctors, why didn’t you include the character who’s an actual doctor! You didn’t even pack an honest-to-god tricorder in those bags of yours! At least Ryan knows enough about Star Trek to know who William Shatner is, but not much of anything else about the series. Colin pretty much completely gives up on being Spock, but I think not being assigned the role of Scotty for once threw him off-guard. The purses also didn’t give them very much to work with. Well, less than usual, anyway. This game needs a bit of an overhaul, like maybe if they actually started making their own purses with harder things to just explain away or repeat the same jokes about? But then again, they really have forgotten that this is an improv show, it seems. Can’t make things TOO hard for the improv veterans and one less experienced guy. Sigh.

JESSICANALYSIS: Omigod, it’s a What’s in the Bag scene that isn’t about doctors! Except, in practice, it is. Ryan commits to his Shatner impression for all of one line before he’s the same doctor character he always in this game, slicing people open with the power of the sun all willy-nilly. I admit to being a little puzzled by the given scene, too. Did they seriously plan on including both a Star Wars and a Star Trek game in this taping from the outset, which is both terrible editing as well as a remarkable coincidence given Ryan’s mix-up? Or did the powers-that-be decide on a whim to ditch the scenario they originally had planned for this game specifically so they could make fun of Ryan? It really feels like the latter, but I really hope it’s not. I know the style for the credits is decided during the show because it’s often a reference to something, but I always assumed that every single other game with pre-prepared suggestions didn’t tamper with them after they started taping, because girls are naïve. I feel deflated, somehow. The fact that this scene involves the ridiculousness of Woody Allen Matthew Broderick as a sickly alien helps boost my spirits a bit, though. Similarly, Suzanne and Rosie may have been made fun of on national television, but at least they now have a one-of-a-kind photo of Colin teabagging Wayne.


Tired Premises from a Hat: Waynathan and Rylin are required, for some reason, to stand on opposite ends of the stage in order to act out: “Songs that celebrate divorce”, “If dogs went to therapy”, and “Conventions you don’t want to be invited to”.

TAILSDISSECTION: I was surprised to see how well this game started out. SFAH is normally my favorite Whose Line game, but I have my expectations set pretty low for the reboot. But this actually made me laugh quite a bit! They had good suggestion after good suggestion… and then they got to the convention suggestion and they went back to sucking. But the first two were good! This doesn’t exactly please me, however, since it feels like the quality of the games and even the performers have gotten so low that even the slightest deviation from boring is enough to get me excited. I’m trying not to be jaded, I really am.

JESSICANALYSIS: Do you suppose the CW put off airing the Colin and Brad special last week simply so Colin’s joke here about doing mouth-to-mouth and getting lost wouldn’t air so close to the Two Man Group one where he does exactly that, to a duck? The answer: no, of course not, the CW does not give a shit about this show being incredibly repetitive, it was stupid of you to ask, etc. Anyway, this is one of the better Sceneses from a Hat of the season, at least for the first two suggestions, and I’d like to specifically commend Jonathan on being utterly adorable as an excited dog. (But what the fuck do you mean if dogs went to therapy?) The third hat-scene is, of course, where the jokes about butts and wee penises go, and then there’s Ryan’s joke about the Republican National Convention, which is funny but a little odd. Ryan has never really been a political comic, but he’s suddenly had Republicans (and more specifically Mitt Romney) on his mind all season. Was this some sort of personal bugbear for him at the time, even though it was a few months after the election? Or did he just discover (possibly by way of Greg Proops) that saying “Republicans, am I right people?” is a surefire way to make audiences in LA cheer without requiring any actual effort at all?


Alarming Scenery: Ryan and Colin are firefighters asleep in their station when they get a call that a fire has broken out in a department store. Chloe and Monique have absolutely no problem with being regarded as objects.

TAILSDISSECTION: Let’s face it; you could all see this game coming a mile away. Ryan and Colin spend a whole game acting like creepy old men while stubbornly trying not to be creepy old men, and the girls do bizarre shit while showing off as much of themselves as possible. It’s getting so overdone that I’m almost wishing Ryan and Colin WOULD start copping feels just so something different can happen! It’s very bad when I’m wanting people to violate other people’s space just for entertainment, and it’s also bad when this game is starting to make me roll my eyes at any attractive or provocatively dressed woman that comes on this show! That’s a big sign that this game really needs to stop being played, or at least needs a giant revamp.

JESSICANALYSIS: Y’know how they ALWAYS dress Ryan and Colin in untucked dress shirts that are extra-long in front? It didn’t occur to me until this episode that maybe they do that so you wouldn’t be able to see if, um, shall we say, either of them became particularly excited by a round of Living Scenery. I…… really wish this hadn’t occurred to me. Oh god. God. NO. C’mon, Jess, try to distract yourself from that. Try to think of something you actually enjoyed about this game. Um. Well. There’s really only one thing that amused me, and that’s the way the powers-that-be made Chloe and Monique carry their helmets out, only so they’d have to immediately set them down on the side of the stage to get them out of the way. This season is pretty goddamn stupid, is what I’m saying, and you have to be able to laugh at it or you’ll go insane. (Alternately, I could stop watching, but that sounds like too much effort.)


TERMINUS TAILSDISSECTION: Remember when I was actually excited about Whose Line being on TV? Remember when I was still optimistic about the games and the styles and how it was all new and exciting and something I haven’t seen in awhile? Yeah, me neither. I think my honeymoon period with the reboot ended a few episodes ago, and there’s only one more episode left for this season. This episode had a few laughs in it, but it was mostly overshadowed by my annoyance with their choice of special guest and repetition of games that didn’t include the guest. Hopefully the next episode will leave this season going out with a high note instead of with a bad taste in my mouth.

CONCLUSIVE JESSICANALYSIS: Each of the non-special-guest games tonight has at least one fairly funny thing going for it, so of course they had to make the special guest games even sadder to compensate. The worst thing, though, is that I know that most of the people who will agree with me about not enjoying Chlonique’s guest spot will do so for reprehensible reasons. “They’re wearing skimpy clothes,” those people will say, “and therefore they are bad sluts.” (These people rarely have a way with words.) And, y’know what? That is BULLSHIT. Who gives a fuck what or how much they’re wearing? How does that make Chloe or Monique any less of a person? No, they’re only bad special guests because they don’t know the first thing about improv, so they’re a really awkward fit (and the fact that everyone is actively encouraged to objectify them doesn’t help). If you find a girl who CAN improvise - like Heather Anne Campbell or The Mysterious and Enigmatic Nyima Funk for instance! - then she can go ahead and improvise while wearing whatever she goddamn pleases. She can do it wearing weird lingerie with mismatched football shoulderpads. She can do it wearing ten sweaters and twelve pairs of snowpants. She can do it wearing nothing. She can do it wearing a fucking chicken suit for all I care! It doesn’t matter!


NEXT WEEK ON WHOSE LINE: In the exciting and dramatic SEASON FINALE - so important is this episode that the CW won’t even upload a promo for it to their website lest they spoil even a minute of this high-octane thrill ride - Nyima Funk gets to play one, maybe two games before being shuffled into the background in favor of special guest Shawn Johnson! (SPOILER ALERT: Despite being named Shawn, she is a lady and doesn’t actually have a Johnson at all.)

No comments:

Post a Comment