Just for cheap solid ratings
Tired of trying to decipher televisual Rubik's Cubes like "John From Cincinnati"?
Longing for the days when you didn't have to be intimately acquainted with the Senate voting record of the fifth-place Republican presidential hopeful just to get your fix of late-night humor?
Remember when Sam Malone pursued Diane Chambers for 25 seasons? Now, Bret Michaels pursues 25 women in a single season, and that's just way too many pairs of identical foobs to try to keep track of, isn't it?
If you yearn for a time when a test pattern was the most complicated thing on TV, take heart. ABC has ordered 13 more episodes of its hidden-camera hit "Just For Laughs," a hidden-camera show that doesn't try to hide the fact that it's just another hidden-camera show.
Indeed, instead of using celebrities or super-intricate pranks to spruce up a concept that was invented when the big, bulky cameras of the day were actually pretty hard to hide, "Just For Laughs" actually marks a devolution of sorts from the 60-year-old "Candid Camera."
There are no big stars here, no elaborate set-ups and disguises. In fact, "Just for Laughs," a Canadian import that already airs in 125 countries, employs no dialogue. A narrator introduces the bits with some unnecessary contextualizing and that's pretty much it it. The pranks are short and straightforward and feature the same exact punchline every time, a startled or disbelieving person reacting strongly to some simple bit of slapstick.
For example, a female jogger smiles at an unsuspecting victim and then pretends to run face-first into a pole. The victim visibly flinches. Then the jogger does it again to another victim, and that victim visibly flinches too.
And you know what? The first time, the second time, the third time, the fourth time -- it's always great TV! As "George of the Jungle" proved years ago, and YouTube reminds us on a daily basis, watching people smack into things never gets old.
Every once in a while, "Just for Laughs" throws in something a little more cerebral. In one bit, a blind guy with a guide dog pretends to be lost. When passersby stop to help him, he hands them a map and asks them to point out the correct directions to his guide dog. Are Canadian guide dogs really that smart? Or is that Canadian people are really that stupid? Either way, Good Samaritan after Good Samaratin kneels down and shows the directions to Fido.
While each gag is done over and over to show how different people respond to, say, a monster popping out of a flower bed in a park, the entire segment never lasts much longer than a minute. Not even the evening news has an attention span shorter than "Just for Laughs," and that, ironically, makes it a show you could easily watch for hours.
As if to flaunt its dumbass genius, the show scores its gags with annoyingly zany music and the least convincing laughtrack in the history of television. "Look!" its producers seem to be saying. "Not only can we be funny without dialogue, we can even crap all over our show with these awful sound effects and still be funny!"
Yup, true enough. Now show us another lady running into a pole, would ya?
A frequent contributor to Las Vegas Weekly, Greg Beato has also written for SPIN, Blender, Reason, Time.com, and many other publications. Email Greg at [email protected]