New Whose Line! Episode 12: Please Return to Your Low-Rated Grave

Starring Wayne Brady, Nyima Funk, Colin Mochrie, and Ryan Stiles!

Plus Special Guest Star Shawn Johnson, from the greatest commercial in the history of humankind!

(Watch this episode here!)

Hardcore Sex Scenes from a Hat: The guys (and the token lady) act out “If Sesame Street characters appeared on other shows”, “Tattoos that you don’t want to discover on a new partner’s body”, and “The spells Harry Potter tries when he thinks no one is looking”.

TAILSPRESUMPTIONS: I think I’ve officially decided that I love Nyima, since she managed to save this game in more ways than one. She actually made them feel like honest SCENES from a hat! How many other people can say that? She’s like an improv superhero – snatches jokes back from the jaws of failure! Able to leap bad punchlines in a single bound! The Sesame Street scene is particularly interesting, as we learn a little something about all four performers. Nyima shows off a decent Cookie Monster, Wayne does a pretty good Elmo, Colin does an homage to one of my favorite bits ever, and Ryan… I’m beginning to question if he’s ever seen Sesame Street. If it’s possible to miss a show that’s run for 50 years while having three children, then he really IS living under a goddamn rock.

JESSICRITIQUE: Hey, look, the SFAH hat is so empty that you can actually see the bottom when Aisha lets us take a look inside! The only logical conclusion is that AISHA TYLER IS SOME SORT OF CONJURER. Well, if we’re going to make this game a showcase of magic anyway, I say they might as well take the next logical step for hat-based improv illusionism: SCENES TAPED TO THE BACKS OF FLUFFY WHITE BUNNIES. On top of that, Aisha is a top-class impressionist, busting out a spot-on Fran Drescher laugh in response to Ryan’s aggressively lame Big Bird Apprentice joke. Why isn’t she headlining her own show in Vegas yet?? Mocking aside, though, this was actually pretty good (aside from the Harry Potter scene in which Wayne makes the same joke twice), as New Whose Line SFAH goes! In particular, The Mysterious and Enigmatic Nyima Funk does great for her first time out, even saving Wayne’s “long-awaited” rest stop joke. I suppose anyone who earns an enthusiastic, passionate “YES!!!” from him deserves at least an “okay, you’re cool, come back next year” from me, right?

Poops: It’s Wayne and Colin (two of those shitty off-brand lollipops with the loopy sticks) vs. Nyima and Ryan (two big, floppy blunts) in a fight to the death… of comedy.

TAILSPRESUMPTIONS: Sadly, not even Nyima’s influence can save this travesty of a game. She tried her best, but being paired up with Ryan and things that are obviously meant to resemble fecal matter didn’t help the odds much. Not to mention her rather obvious Star Wars misquote. For a minute I thought that the CW was just messing up with its subtitles, but nope! At least it’s easier to understand than whatever the hell Colin and Wayne were attempting to do when sticking their heads in those things. I have no idea what they were trying to accomplish. I know it looks dirty, but… in what way?

JESSICRITIQUE: Why, Jess? Why did you go and get yourself roped into writing about every game this season? What can I even say about this? There’s a joke where Nyima forces us to imagine her with buttcheeks so surrealistically packed with collagen that they just dangle from her body, like a two-tailed cat. (A catsune?) So, um, if your fetish is for girls with tailbutts, this is probably the game for you? How would that even work if she ever wanted to try anal? You’d need, like… some sort of pulley system to hold them up and out of the way, I guess. I probably shouldn’t search Google for buttcheek pulleys, right? Okay, I won’t. Meanwhile, Aisha Tyler is all like, “HEY, GUYS, LOOK AT ME, EARRINGS ARE THE HEIGHT OF SATIRE!!” There. Analysis! Happy?

Magic Matt’s Lameprov-a-Ganza: Flirtatious handyman Colin is painting the apartment of sexy housewife Nyima, whose gangster husband, Wayne, arrives to find the door locked. The styles used include a Harry Potter movie and King Kong.

TAILSPRESUMPTIONS: This was actually better than all of the other Sideways Scenes I’ve seen on this show. Not because of anything explicitly funny the performers did, but because everything seemed to get out of control and unpredictable very fast. With Nyima scooting slowly over to the door not knowing that Wayne’s dropping in, Colin hiding under the bed and suddenly finding Wayne on top of him, and bending and eventually breaking the “props”, this had me laughing just in a sense that I had no idea what the fuck was going on. And I imagine that the performers didn’t either. Though it did drive the unfortunate fact home that a lot of these scenes are being calculated in order to form what feel like very forced running gags.

JESSICRITIQUE: Okay, Dan Patterson and company, I have a bone to pick with you. It seems like every single time you have a woman on the show these days, or even a guy playing a character explicitly designated as female, she’s the obvious villain of the scene because she’s cheating on her man. And it’s never the man who’s bad for cheating, always the woman. Even in Maggie Q’s round of Dubbing, where Ryan played a womanizing senator, Maggie’s character was STILL the only person in the scene actually called out for cheating! It never bothered me back in the day, when I was really into the fandom and believed that every single thing on Whose Line was perfect and wonderful, but now that I’ve stepped back and taken a good hard look at the situation, it’s like...

"...the fuck is wrong with you losers?"

Living Syrupery: Ryan and Colin are frisky newlyweds enjoying the amenities of their luxury RV before exploring Yellowstone National Park, the Pear Capital of the World! Nyima and Shawn Johnson provide the tiny props.

TAILSPRESUMPTIONS: Can it be true? A game of this that actually managed to make me laugh? Miracles DO come true! Ryan really seemed insistent on that whole frisky newlywed thing, and apparently it’s okay for Colin to get too hot for prime time when he’s doing it with a fellow performer and not the guest, which I suppose makes sense. But with a luscious, viscous temptress like Mrs. Butterworth on board, how can things not get a bit frisky? Am I right fellas? After a wild fling with her, you’ll definitely need a shower, now in the fancy London Bridge model. But if you find a sexy honeymoon to be at Yellowstone Park in an RV, you probably don’t have the highest cleanliness standards.

JESSICRITIQUE: Hey, remember the last Living Scenery with tiny, almost inconceivably wholesome Olympic athletes? Remember how Ryan and Colin still felt like they had to make a few token jokes about doing dirty stuff to them even though they clearly had no desire to and never followed through with it? Remember how weird that was? Well, they’re still going to do that every single time, but at least Nyima is here now, and she’s clearly down for just about anything. Including being a popular brand of pancake syrup, apparently! One big laugh is one big laugh more than this game usually gives me, so I feel contented. FUN FACT: If you start typing “is Mrs. Butterworth” into Google, the first suggestion is “is Mrs. Butterworth black”. People really want to know! The race of our imitation maple syrup is important! And now they want to know more than ever, I’m sure, because how else will we know if Ryan is a terrible racist for saying that or not? Well, I can’t speak for Pinnacle Foods Group LLC, but the very first person to portray Mrs. Butterworth in television commercials was white. A white man. Ah, America! Anyway, you can decide for yourselves how offensive that makes it.

Waynest Hits: Colin and Ryan sell Even More Songs of the Plumber, as performed by Wayne in the styles of rockabilly (“Snake It!”) and Hawaiian ukulele music (“My Husband’s Home”).

TAILSPRESUMPTIONS: This is probably my favorite game of the evening, not just because it’s one of my favorite games that hasn’t been tainted by the revival, but because it’s hilarious to see Colin be 3000% done with Ryan’s shit here. And considering that Ryan was telling him rather obviously about it, Colin has every right to be sighing and facepalming the whole game through. It was interesting to see Ryan attempt to be topical and Colin pretty much completely ignoring it to bring back an old joke he made during Remote Control, as well as conjuring up some bizarre scenario in which turkeys can cluck. But of course, the crown jewel of this game is the music, and while the first song was catchy, the second song was actually surprisingly beautiful. From time to time I forget that Wayne really does have a very pleasing and versatile voice, and this is a style I wish they’d break out more often.

JESSICRITIQUE: Here’s a game that tries really, really hard to make a bad first impression! It’s about a topic that has already been done twice on various versions of Whose Line alone, and I generally assume they did one on Improv-a-Ganza too. It doesn’t help that said repeat topic is one that virtually guarantees jokes about poop and/or pee, and sadly I’m not the kind of person to laugh at those words or the fact that I just used them. But, y’know what? Sometimes first impressions can be deceiving! As it turns out, it’s one of the best games of the season, and certainly the best singing one. Wayne has come so far as a performer, and the Hawaiian song gives him a chance to showcase that in a style that Whose Line hasn’t done to death yet, which is obviously nice. And on the other side of the stage, we have a particularly tight version of the modern “Ryan says something dumb and Colin reacts without being given the opportunity to say much” shtick. This was a rocky season, but thank Arceus the last proper game managed to end things on a high note, right? It’s almost enough to make you forget that this is the second game tonight promoting the unfortunate stereotype that all handymen are fucking your wife right now even as we speak! Something something erectus giganticus.

PIECE DE TAILSPRESUMPTIONS: I’m happy that they chose this episode to end the season with, since I feel like it’s one of the better ones. The special guest was downplayed enough to not feel like it was being shoved down our throats like a generic taco, and it had some decent laughs and good games to its credit. It’s incredibly depressing to me when I think of how happy I was when Whose Line was back on the air and how let down about it I am right now. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy it was revived, since the world doesn’t feel fully in balance to me if these guys aren’t on TV being funny, and there were some good things about it too. There were a few funny games, one or two of the guest stars didn’t feel completely out of place, and Wayne is honestly better and funnier than he ever was on the old version. I just feel bad that he’s finally come into his own when the rest of the show is turning out to be such a big disappointment. I will tune into the second season, since there’s no way I wouldn’t, but I want the show to get a big revamp. Ditch the guest stars, or at least get people who are interesting, or better yet, funny. Have Aisha participate in games. Bring back more of the old cast and let the newer ones actually do something. Bring back more of our favorite games and give them a better rotation. Stop making everything feel so calculated that it feels like the true improv is gone. It’s called Whose Line, so make it feel like Whose Line! We’ll all be better off for the trouble.

ONE MORE EXTRA JESSICRITIQUE: A few months back, I was so excited to hear that Whose Line was returning from the dead, but we’ve seen by now how that optimism has been turned on its head. In an odd way, this episode feels like it was re-edited at some point in an attempt to diffuse the criticism of the special guest gimmick, by including only one game with Shawn Johnson. That, of course, has the problem of making you wonder EVEN HARDER why she’s there, because it feels like such an afterthought. But never mind that. This is one of the best episodes of the season, and while it has most of the same problems as the last eleven, it also has a few moments that remind me of the show I used to like, before the Neenas and the Veenas and the Richard Simmonses of the world took over. Next season, naturally, I hope they lay off the special guests, choose to air a wider variety of games (this season contained ZERO playings of Party Quirks and Hoedown!!), incorporate audience suggestions more, hire more competent editors… you know the deal. I get the feeling that they won’t, but for now this episode gives me reason enough to enjoy the fantasy that they will. Oh, I almost forgot! There’s one other change that they NEED to make…

YES I AM 100% SERIOUS ABOUT THE BUNNY THING I MEAN IT