This fascination between the murky and unsettlingly irrational realm of unconsciousness, or indeed subconsciousness, is important to any surrealist work. Modern surrealism may no longer draw directly from dreams, but it has the power to evoke that same discomfort, that same sensation that the world is slipping away from you and the shadows in the corners of your eye are growing. The sense that, at any moment, you could awaken in your bed and find that what seemed to be your life is now a distant, fanciful imagining.
Here, I will suggest three television series which I believe capture that sensation of the surreal and uncomfortable, series that straddle the back of the nebulous nightmare and ride that pony for all she's worth. The fact that all three play these uncomfortable moments for laughs (at least, ostensibly) is likely due to my own preferences and predilections.
Almost certainly the most well known on this list. I've always felt it a bit unfair that (the still quite good) Monty Python and the Holy Grail is their most famous work, and that tons of people are simply ignorant of the other films in their oeuvre, and this, the TV series which began a revolution in the field of sketch comedy. Dispensing with the punchline format of previous BBC sketch series, Flying Circus represents a stream-of-consciousness format in which the various sketches blend together in strange, organic ways with no meaningful distinction between them. With satire, animation, full frontal nudity, and an enormous amount of enthusiasm in every moment of the series, it's clear how Monty Python as a group was a necessary predecessor to future sketch outfits such as the Kids in the Hall and the Upright Citizen's Brigade.
The surrealism of the series comes largely in the transitions between sketches, or rather, the absence of them. Sometimes a sketch would begin with one premise and end with another, while other sketches simply ended abruptly. Often a theme of some sort, especially earlier in the show's run, would pepper an entire episode, never overtly acknowledged (unless it was funnier to do so, in which case it was very overtly acknowledged). There is a sense of reality coming undone at the seams when watching this show, as if the cardboard sets of studio scenes, rain-slicked location shots of the filmed segments, and chaotic iconoclasm of Terry Gilliam's animation were merging and diverging like vines along a trellis. It is this air of confusion and discomfort against stultifyingly well-written material which makes Monty Python's Flying Circus such a surreal success.
Jumping forward about forty years, we come to possibly the most disturbing collection of moments ever to be broadcast in the continental US. Often cited (incorrectly) as a paragon of "random humor", Awesome Show! is so successfully surreal because it is anything but. Every 11-minute window into a nightmare realm is carefully crafted, with a three-act narrative keeping things tied together between fake advertisements for ill-advised, often downright dangerous products and surprising celebrity cameos which place less emphasis on the men and women they bring in and more emphasis on the absurdity of celebrating the individual in the first place.
And yet strangely, Awesome Show is never vindictive with its humor. While including some of the most frightening and peculiar individuals who could ever be found wandering the streets of Los Angeles, their involvement is more like being welcomed into a family than being derided as stars of a carnival freak show. These are people whose burning dream is to be on television, and Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim give them that opportunity when possibly no-one else ever would. Even the viewer needs some time to get used to this bizarre aesthetic; the first few episodes may be more off-putting than entertaining, but enjoyment of the material grows in a brain like fungus, and eventually you'll find the humor in there. I often worry that the series is in fact the vector of some crippling brain ailment, and that in recommending it (a symptom, of course) I am helping an unfathomable cosmic horror to propagate in the human collective unconscious. Of course, that won't stop me from doing so.
The world which exists in Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! is an undeniable horror, a realm in which whatever can go wrong, will go wrong, and even that which can't will make a damn good try. Inspired heavily by public access television, itself a portal to an unbelievably awkward hell, Awesome Show combines that homespun failure with the more sleek, modern, and misguided failures of major corporations. The show is hilarious, uncomfortable, satirical, and occasionally absolutely terrifying. An amazing experience, all around.
A short run is often the curse of the surreal show, and while it afflicted Food Party, rest assured that what is contained within is pure, nightmare gold. In listing these programs alphabetically, I have also inadvertently listed them in order of ascending surrealism. While there is a certain tendency to a dream-like quality in the preceding series, the entirety of Food Party feels like an uncontrollable fever dream. With little to no coherent connections between episodes, save the ubiquitous presence of creator Thu Tran, Food Party steamrollers over basic narrative. Every garish cardboard second is an assault on conventional narrative, every grotesquely gyrating puppet a slap in the face of story structure. At no point do the contents feel random; rather, they seem to be obeying a kind of logic which is so utterly alien to our own as to be deleterious to the very fabric of local reality.
The most obvious thing about Food Party is its occasional tendency to present itself as a cooking show. Ingredients which shouldn't even be stored in the same room are tossed together in a pot and cooked over a red felt flame. While the overall feel of the series is one of unrelenting cheerfulness, there are moments where it descends suddenly and powerfully into the realm of eyeball-peeling, bowel-loosening horror. These moments are made all the more powerful by their sugary surroundings, and they only ever last for a moment before the status quo returns and another unappetizing meal is prepared. Food Party represents the same half-forgotten fragments of subconscious experience which so vexed Dali, Magritte, and Ernst.
Wow that was a lot of words. I hope that my (hopefully not too powerfully pretentious) recommendations lead to some folks watching these series who had not before. Each of the three is a gem in and of itself, stripped of any analysis, and each work deserves to be encountered by as many people as possible.
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