Why Comedy Slapdown is balls.
Comedy Slapdown is a new production from Australia’s Comedy Channel, the channel that’s brought you such other quality productions as basically nothing. With the possible exception of Hahn Ice Headliners, which started and finished about a decade ago and is largely responsible for the fame of Rove McManus, the bald guy from The New Inventors and the host of The Einstein Factor.
So, Comedy Slapdown is balls. It’s balls because it’s a rip-off of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, one of my favourite television shows of all time. It’s balls because it takes a formula that’s so insanely simple that it cannot possibly fail, and fucks around with it until it fails so miserably the failboat won’t even sail past to rescue it.
Allow me to summarise the selling points of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, and discuss how Comedy Slapdown destroys them.
1. The points don’t matter.
Both Drew Carey and Clive Anderson made great humour of the fact that the “points” awarded to “contestants” on WLIIA are essentially just a plot device to move the show along. It’s not a competition, the focus is entirely on the improvised humour. Comedy Slapdown takes this to new extremes by providing a panel of judges (all comedians) who score each round in a fairly serious fashion, which is utterly pointless and wastes time that could be better spent, gee, I don’t know, being funny.
2. Half an hour is all you need.
An entire hour of forced improv interspersed with unamusing scoring sequences and game titles trying so very hard not to infringe on WLIIA’s game titles is tedious. Half an hour of quality comedy was not.
3. You don’t need ten comedians, five is just peachy.
Comedy Slapdown has a cast of ten plus. Three contestants per team, one host, three judging panelists and a guest star of some kind. This is a lot of people to get to know, and this process is made even more difficult by the tendency of most of them to be about as amusing as a damp sock. A great deal of the joviality in Whose Line Is It Anyway? stemmed from running jokes between the contestants, with a cast of five, this kind of humour can flourish happily. With ten, the chances of running jokes developing and actually being amusing drops phenomenally.
4. Don’t camp it up.
Is there really a need to set the program in an arena and stage everything as if it’s a battle? Surely just a stage would have sufficed. Again, this seems to me to be a method of avoiding instant recognition of the production as a WLIIA knock-off, but I think that was inevitable, so why bother?
I’m annoyed. A while ago, I suggested that an Australian version of Whose Line Is It Anyway would be a good idea, and I still believe it would be. The comedians would need to be cleverly chosen, and the formula religiously followed. Comedy Slapdown is a poor, poor substitute so far, and I hold little hope for it improving.
But hey, anything’s possible.
Tags: Rants and Vitriol | 
Stumble it! //
I love Whose Line! It’s just so freakin funny. I agree on the whole points dont matter thing.
You’re pretty spot on about all the pomp and ceremony that goes into a show like this. It’s because the people behind it really know very little about Improvisation at all. They don’t know how to package it well and it’s not a certain product, it’s very risky.
So they create a heavy base of rules and restrictions: They only play certain games.
The games last for a certain time.
They spend half the time fluffing about between judges and hosts who aren’t funny.
…it’s unfortunate. Even Whose Line was incredibly restrictive on the improvisers; they were talented enough to make it work but those guys can all do so much more, still a quality product though.
My hope is that Slapdown and TGYH (more madlibs than Impro) will raise interest in improvisation and eventually a quality product will get off the ground.
Oh, there are a couple of actual Improvisers sprinkled around the celebs in slapdown, like Rik Brown who is amazingly talented. You give guys like this a show where they can create stories instead of being forced to gag, and it will be hilarious.
I agree. I have nothing whatsoever against the comedians and improvisers involved in it, I just take umbrage at the format that doesn’t allow them the freedom to improvise properly.
I find it incredibly hypocritical for a program to tout itself as an “improv” show, then to format itself so that the responses by the participants might as well be scripted anyway.
Whose Line was pretty restrictive itself, as you said, but at least it acknowledged its purpose and didn’t lock everyone into little games with mere options to choose from.
I suspect Whose Line’s success comes mainly from its origins in the British series, which focused more on acting, characterisation and real improv than madlibs and sight gags. I personally prefer the US version, because it struck a good balance between the more serious aspects of the British version and the running gags and general humour an American audience would expect. While still being genuinely witty. Which is saying something, really.
As simple as it sounds, I believe Comedy Slapdown could have been improved tenfold by ditching the hour-long format in favour of a half-hour program, and halving the number of participants.
Another note. I’ve hunted around Youtube and watched many a behind-the-scenes or outtakes video from Whose Line, and its apparent that the show is essentially shot as a several-hour-long piece and edited down to the parts that work on TV. (Unfortunately, this means some extremely funny stuff gets axed, either due to not making sense out of context or because it gave the censors conniptions, but hey.) I really get the impression that Slapdown is shot in one continuous hour and every gag is put in the can on the first take. If it’s not, it certainly seems like it is.
I think this comment’s longer than my original post.