Watching an episode of Comedy Central's new series "That's My Bush!" is like eating an Italian sub from Blimpie's -- you know it isn't good, but there are so many factors at work that you're not sure why.
Where the sandwich is riddled with dry salami and rancid mayonnaise, the myriad problems with "That's My Bush!" include a misguided premise and writing that insults our intelligence.
For the three of you that haven't been privy to Comedy Central's advertising blitz, "That's My Bush!" is a sitcom by Trey Parker and Matt Stone -- the creators of "South Park" -- that stars George W. Bush (Timothy Bottoms) and his wife, Laura (Carrie Quinn Dolin). Rounding out the cast are Karl Rove (Kurt Fuller) and the inimitable White House maid, Maggie (Marcia Wallace).
The show has gotten a lot of press because of its disrespect for the White House and its blatant offensiveness. No need to worry -- in practice, the two cancel each other out.
Take the first episode, in which the leader of the pro-life coalition is a 30-year-old aborted fetus. This might get a laugh on "South Park," but post-Lewinsky viewers have become so desensitized to gross-out humor in a presidential context that the tactic seems pedestrian.
Bottoms' rendition of George as a bumbling ignoramus is nothing terribly new either. In the second episode, George invites his old frat brothers to an execution. Stone and Parker are beating a horse that Letterman and Leno have long since left behind. It's sad, but disrespect for the Oval Office doesn't raise eyebrows anymore.
The supposedly clever twist, though, is that "That's My Bush!" isn't really about George W. Bush or the White House at all. It's a send-up of the tiresome traditions of TV sitcoms. In the first episode, George tries to have a dinner with Laura while hosting a pro-life/pro-choice summit at the same time. He dashes between the two events in increasingly frenetic fashion until the whole thing collapses.
Sound familiar? That's because it's a storyline that's been done on nearly every run-of-the-mill sitcom for decades. "That's My Bush!" gets the details just right, giving the impression that Parker and Stone studied a few episodes of "Three's Company" and "227" before penning the script.
The satire is so on-target that I was surprised when I didn't laugh once. I eventually realized that one reason "That's My Bush!" isn't funny is that it imitates sitcom stupidities all too well. When considered as a whole, the only significant difference between "That's My Bush!" and your standard grade-B sitcom is that the former is intended to be watched with a rather ironic distance.
The paradox is that viewing with ironic distance doesn't work if a show is designed to accommodate it. The fun of watching "Charles in Charge" with ironic distance is that you're reading the show in an entirely different manner than the creators intended. When the writers of "That's My Bush!" go to such great lengths to remind you that the show is intentionally dumb, you don't feel clever anymore. You feel like you're just watching a dumb sitcom -- surprise! You are.
"That's My Bush!" also falls flat on another front by choosing a woefully easy target. Stone and Parker try to get a laugh by pointing out that sitcoms can be formulaic and banal. This is really innovative comedy? Sitcoms have been the bastard child of television for longer than the co-creators have been alive.
Also, hasn't Comedy Central saturated the market for shows that play off traditional TV conventions? The network already has "The Daily Show," "Win Ben Stein's Money" and "TV Funhouse." It's as if Comedy Central is striving to become one 24-hour joke, a continuous satire of other networks.
The problem with this, as with all media self-absorption, is that if it's taken to an extreme, there is no longer any substance. "That's My Bush!" is a perfect example. The show simulates a stupid sitcom well enough that it leaves almost nothing to distinguish itself from "real" sitcoms. We're simply supposed to know it's ironic because it's on Comedy Central.
In order for "That's My Bush!" to become bearable, it has to diversify its humor. The three other Comedy Central shows I mentioned are successes because they work on multiple levels, beyond a satire of TV traditions. Until "That's My Bush!" achieves the same result, its reliance on one painfully obvious joke will become more and more mundane.
