Jerry Seinfeld gets credit for reviving the sitcom. Desperate Housewives
brought nighttime soap operas back from the dead. Dave Chappelle gave
sketch comedy a needed kick in the ass. Comedy Central's newest show, Stella,
hopes to resuscitate the screwball comedy shorts of The Marx Brothers
or The Three Stooges. So far, Stella is off to an absurd start … and I
dig it.
Stella follows new episodes of Reno 911!, which makes it a reunion hour for fans of the mid-'90s sketch show The State on MTV.
Thomas Lennon, Kerri Kenney-Silver and Robert Ben Garant landed in
Reno. Michael Ian Black, Michael Showalter and David Wain are Stella. Most other members from The State have appeared on one show or will appear on the other, maybe both.
Michael, Michael and David play Michael, Michael and David: three
idiots in suits who live together in a bitchin' New York City
apartment. They wear suits wherever they go, but mentally, they're
somewhere around age 10. They build campfires in the living room. They
have wet-laundry fights. They perform open-heart surgery on their
landlord.
Stella is both a tribute and a parody of the comedy short, the
style that made stars of W.C. Fields and Laurel and Hardy. Characters
stay the same, but find themselves in fantastic situations with each
new episode. I keep thinking of The Stooges while watching these three
new guys. Black is Moe, the bossy man-child, the dad of the family.
Wain is Larry, the motherly goofball who wants everyone to get along.
Showalter is Curly, the biggest baby of the bunch.
That's not to say that Stella is a show for the antique
comedy geek who can spend hours arguing the relative merits of Shemp
Howard and Curly Jo DeRita. (Sorry ladies, it's a guy thing.) Stella takes the basic form of three bunglers on the loose and drags it through the last 60 years of comedy and culture.
In the first episode alone, a Looney Tuney car crash segues into the
Marx Brothers-style torture of an authority figure which becomes a
Chaplinesque hobo dinner and then an extended Flashdance parody, ending with a surprise guest star. Stella
is a smorgasbord of comedy: a little wordplay, a surreal detour into
fantasy and, of course, adult white males dancing like spazzes.
For some reason, one of the laughs that really got me was a throwaway.
Wain desperately runs through the rain to find the woman he loves, and
when she throws open her apartment door, it's still raining in her
hallway and steaming up his glasses. It was completely stupid, and
that's why it killed me.
In some ways, Stella reminds me of The Young Ones,
the BBC show that ran on MTV in the mid-'80s. That show tweaked the
conventions of TV comedy too. I wouldn't be surprised to one day see an
episode of Stella with Motorhead playing a concert in the boys' rumpus room.
Stella runs on Comedy Central, Tuesdays at 10:30 p.m., starting June 28, and repeating several times during the week.
