By Pat Bataillon
A little Animal Planet can go a long way, especially when there is nothing else on. Every time there is a whole bunch of nothing on the television set I flip through all the channels on an endless search for something to occupy my time. Typically, I find the usual nonsense on Fox News, some CSI-type show on Discovery, and the regular C-SPAN stuff that is truly a bore. Then there is a flickering light, this little light o’ mine, this thing called Animal Planet.
I watch this channel for about an hour every day. Last night I watched a documentary on penguins. Penguins are a fun sort of creature, God’s cruel joke, wings and can’t fly? What a crock.
I came to watching this feature when I saw a penguin walking on thin ice and falling face first through a weak spot. I found this hilarious. Watching anything fall without knowing it is going to fall is funny. Call the funny police, TBS. Speaking of that, TBS’s “knowing funny” commercials that is, those commercials are really pompous. What gives TBS the right to determine what is and isn’t funny? They have funny shows on but they also have really unfunny shows on.
For instance, Friends. I hate this show. I never liked this show. Let me examine a re-occurring plot. All the “friends” are sitting in a coffee shop making fun of the dumb blonde one; she says something stupid and the dumb Italian says something even dumber. The wise-ass mocks both of them, gets hit by the poor hottie, then the poor hottie is ridiculed by the quasi-hottie. The tool of the show comes in with another sob story. There you have it, I just wrote the outline for every Friends episode ever made. Friends is not funny.
By using the transitive property (I just used math in real life!), if Friends is not funny and TBS airs it and is the self-proclaimed funniest network on television, then TBS is not funny. Animal Planet has more room to claim the funniest network on television because of that falling penguin.
Honestly, I would never get bored watching some dumb-ass penguin bite it over and over again. Come to think of it, I would rather watch the cast of Friends bite it on some thin ice. Now that would be funny.
Posted on September 15, 2006