The title of tonight’s episode,
“Three And A Half Men,” does help clarify my still-evolving
feelings toward Workaholics—for all my reservations, I’d
rather watch a Workaholics marathon than five minutes more of Two And A Half Men. Cheap joke? Sure—but while the incessant
parade of juvenility, scatology, and bro-centric boorishness can
sometimes make Workaholics cringeworthy, at least it’s not
smug about its smuttiness. There’s an ambition at work here which
operates on more than one level. Maybe not multiple levels, but at
least one and a half. Split-level comedy, let’s call it.
On the first level, (the one which
Comedy Central’s ad campaign seems to think is the only level that
exists—or at least the only one they imagine the show’s fans care
about), Workaholics is a gross-out, douchey guy-fest.
(Seriously, the commercials consistently highlight each episode’s
most vulgar lines and images, as if trying to win back viewers still
pining for the return of The Man Show—something akin to 30
Rock’s The Man Cave, created by Todd Debeikis.) And
while Workaholics certainly spends a lot of its time goofing
around on this level—to greater or lesser effect—there’s more
going on than the episodes’ plot descriptions generally indicate.
Tonight, for example, the idea that the
guys, hired by their boss to film a boring corporate documentary,
instead decide to spend their time (and Alice’s $300) making a
documentary about Karl getting his dick cut off and then transplanted
onto Blake might seem, on the surface, to be a tedious, shrill
adventure in sophomoric buffoonery. And it is. But what sets Workaholics apart is the way its main characters (and
creators) play around with the idea of sophomoric buffoonery. While
not precisely deconstructing “dude comedy,” the show consistently
sets it up as a figure of fun in the persons of its three
protagonists, whose perpetual inability to fully commit to the
repellant male stereotypes they’ve chosen to emulate underlies
their invariably destructive actions. Which is a long way to go to
say that Workaholics is a little smarter than it’s given
credit for.
That’s not to say that the show isn’t
gross, dumb, and crass—just that Ders, Adam, and Blake’s
characters serve to undermine all the oafishness with just a smidgen
of subtlety, even heart. And that the three stars’ undeniable
chemistry reliably produces a comic tone that is uniquely theirs; I’m
a sucker for weird, improvisational underplaying, and that’s something the guys
are especially good at. When Adam, mocking Alice’s corporate-speak
script, jokes, “Synergy? What’s that, the devil’s energy
drink?” and looks to Blake for response, Blake’s matter-of-fact
“I didn’t like it,” makes us laugh because it’s part of the
trio’s ongoing comic conversation. What both the real life and
fictional Adam, Blake, and Ders do so admirably is portray the way a
group of close friends really interact with each other—their every
reaction resonates with a palpable affection, which gives them that
other half-level. When Adam goes off on an escalating rant about how
McDonald’s flip-flopping on the super-size policy has caused his
recent weight gain, Blake and Ders both sympathize and mock him in
equal measure, and Adam’s post-freakout sincerity in claiming, “I
hate myself, I hate myself and my body…” is weirdly sad as well
as funny.
But we were talking about Karl’s dick
being cut off.
Here, too, Workaholics mines the
silly setup for some subtler laughs. While Adam yelling about hot
dogs, slo-mo deep throating hot dogs, and acting out the nightmare
scenario of Karl’s penis-ectomy with hot dogs gets old pretty fast
(his documentary idea is to eat 1,000 hot dogs in a week), the episode
benefits from letting co-creator Kyle Newacheck’s Karl insert his
weird, singular energy into the proceedings. With his spacey, laconic
delivery of Karl’s often disturbingly outré take on things,
Newacheck is part of Workaholics’ reliable stable of
supporting oddballs. (He sounds a lot like Kevin Smith, actually,
even down to Smith’s occasional conversational placeholder, “and
whatnot…”)
And while I wouldn’t want a steady diet of Karl—he,
like Montez, is best in small servings—in this episode, his
single-minded, cross-eyed determination to follow his latest strange
obsession really sells the outlandish premise, at least enough to
keep the comic engine running. From his monologue explaining how his
penis runs his life (“I’m sick of livin’ come-to-come!”), to
his outrage at the idea that Blake intends to actually wash Karl’s
transplanted penis from time to time (“It’s very well-seasoned, like a cast iron pan. If anything, you just put a moist towel on it
and then hit it with a lot of sand!”), to his choice of fantasy to
bid goodbye with one last erection (“mom from Home Improvements,
mom from Home Improvements…”), this extended glimpse
inside the mind of Karl Hevacheck is surprisingly rewarding.
With so much Karl, the guys themselves
don’t get as much to do. Adam’s hot dog eating plot goes nowhere,
with Adam Devine’s deliberately obnoxious energy crossing into
unintentionally obnoxious at times. His subplot falling for the
plastic surgeon’s transgender assistant (Cerina Vincent) similarly
yields little, apart from the line, “There’s a homosexual way to
eat hot dogs—yeah, I didn’t know that. I was just trying to
protein-load.” Adam’s always been the show’s loudest presence,
but he’s more amusing when underplaying, as when he realizes,
mid-sentence, that he’s incapable of spitballing non-pornographic
movie ideas: “So it’s two best friends, and one has been wrongly
imprisoned. But the movie is really about the wife banging all the
friends… and and that is another porno—dang it!” His
manic character has been creeping
more to the center this season, which works against the
show’s greatest strength. Workaholics
works best when the guys wreak havoc as one, single-minded—at
most—unit.
Stray observations:
- Director Ders aims high: “A dick-swap
between friends is the new subject of this documentary, and we’re
gonna win a moon man!” - As are his ambitions for getting into
Sundance, “where chicks ski down mountains with their boobs out.
True story.” - Blake’s well-thought-out plans for
his new penis: “Wash it every day with Caress daily silky body
wash. And a loofah.” - And further: “I’m probably gonna
cut a hole in a seedless watermelon, microwave it for 30 seconds, and
then fuck the shit out of it…” - Even further, his ideal threesome:
Joesph Gordon-Levitt, Olivia Munn, and Manny Pacquiao. When Ders
points out that that’s three people already, Blake replies, “Oh,
I watch…” - As ever, sometimes it’s just funny
when the guys forget how to talk. Dears: “Why come?” Adam: “Why
come not?!” - Blake understands Karl’s fantasy:
“Jill Taylor—she’ll chub ya’…” - “It’s like she’s playing jazz
music with that gentleman’s penis.” - Two weeks in a row with no Jillian? Her I could stand to see more of.
- Bodily function count: poop (only
referenced, with sound effect), likewise Karl’s sideways “ejac.”