IFC brings the funny

IFC is really bringing the fun these days. Starting with The Onion News Network’s spoof of cable headline news we “Enter the Fact Zone” with perky blonde Brooke Alvarez. The new network crams a 24-hour cycle of fake news coverage into a half-hour.

As is usually the case in these Onion-brand pantyraids the Fact Zone is a dead scream, but even funnier for the sideline stuff. For example, when fake FDA deputy administrator Steve Hoyer helmed a fake press briefing in which he urged Americans to just eat a damn vegetable once in a while. On the website they threw to you could see “POLL: Vegetables, what are they?” and “Maybe don’t melt cheese over every meal?” and “Water: It’s what people drank before soda existed” and “Eating fat makes you fat, Einstein” and “Maybe take a breath between bites, what are you, a pack of animals?”

So an episode of Fact Zone is actually funnier if you use the “Pause” function. But it’s pretty funny anyway, when it’s not being a little dark. For instance, the Fact Zone was all over the abduction of Susan Merriweather, one of ONN’s fake news correspondents by Afghani terrorists who deprived her access to hair and makeup facilities and she looked terrible. The blood and tears were really making her cheeks shiny.

Also, a white teen girl in Detroit’s alleged stabbing to death of a classmate left the judge no choice but to try her as an adult African American male, leading police to retroactively cite her for brutally attacking her arresting officer. The jury was given instructions to see her as a 300-pound muscular black male named Vondell Brown.

Yes, it was a full fake news cycle but they had time to throw to the shires, Channel 6 ONN Illinois affiliate where a perfectly good tire was found behind the Kroeger’s. ONN affiliates interviewed everyone in town, including the mayor who reminded us that whoever claims that tire, someone else is going to come right in behind them and say it was theirs, like when Steve left that couch on the berm and tried to take it back right when Toby was loading into the back of his pickup. Nice.

All that and they still had time for world affairs like Kim Jong Il agreeing North Korea will not pursue its nuclear program in exchange for the title role in the next “Batman” movie, and in politics, how some 62 percent of Americans support a Sarah Palin presidency out of morbid curiousity and the sheer entertainment value of it.

I have to say I’m liking this idea. I’m a huge fan of Jon Stewart on Comedy Central and sometimes the news of the world is so demoralizing you need to filter it through a certain level of comedy. Between Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, they deal with commentary on day-to-day events, and the “Fact Zone” makes stuff up completely out of whole cloth with a snarky attitude and a holographically perfect hostess and that’s exciting.

I remember when I was in college “The Onion” was this hilarious little underground whatsit out of Madison that occasionally made it to UND. It’s now available online featuring a broad variety of hosts and formats and “The Fact Zone” on IFC, viewed by 9 billion viewers in 811 countries, the most powerful news operation in all of recorded history, it’s the Onion News Network, together with the SportsDome on Comedy Central. And oh, please, for the love of God, it’s satire, it’s always satire, always check the source, people make absolute fools of themselves when they take the Onion seriously. Otherwise, enjoy!

"Mr. Show"

Also premiering on IFC it’s “Mr. Show.” I have no real use for “Mr. Show,” but it’s occasionally vaguely amusing. David Cross, the concept of spreading yourself too thin, you ever think about that? It’s like a few years ago when Martin Short was a guest on absolutely everything along with his Jiminy Glick schtick, it’s funny and then it’s less funny and then you’re reading the punchlines from the setups and poof, vanished. Naturally, this is sketch comedy from like 15 years ago so it’s no skin off his nose, but yeah, small doses. Smaller doses. That said, OK, yes, fine, I did absolutely love the first season of “The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret” and can’t wait for that thing to return.

I think what’s most annoying to me about “Mr. Show” is the recurring presence of what looks like a teenaged Sarah Silverman who as I have said elsewhere is about as funny as a knife wound in the face. Now that she’s broken up with Jimmy Kimmel and she appears in something, do we … are we meant to laugh or .. what? I know before, out of politeness, we’d at least smile or something but yeah, I’m of the opinion we just turn that off.

If you call yourself a comedienne, from now on, I say you have to actually be funny, not just say whatever outrageous racist, sexist thing stomps through your head because oh, it’s avant garde, it challenges our preconceptions, at least half the time surprising a laugh from someone because they’ve never heard anyone say something so ignorant or obnoxious out loud and are too polite to storm the stage, but we pay $40 a ticket plus the cover charge because we know you’re dating Jimmy Kimmel and we’re hoping at least some of his mildly amusingness has rubbed off on you when it clearly hasn’t and now you don’t even have that going for you. Yeah we’re long past the days of Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller, that’s for sure.

"Portlandia"

But IFC's “Portlandia” is off to a good start. “Portlandia” is Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, a pair of 40-ish gen-Xer comedians complete with ironic worldviews and hipster glasses, setting out to “Keep Portland Weird.”

The pilot episode that premiered Friday on IFC features Fred and Carrie beta-testing Mind-fi, when today’s wired reality gets so intrusive we have think-links and ads in our heads, a celebration of ‘90s culture, a couple who is so wackadoo concerned about the free-range nature of the chicken they’re about to eat (Is it USDA organic or Oregon organic or Portland organic?) they drive to the farm 30 miles south and spend five-years as sister-wives (yes, Fred too, in the character of sister-wife Peter, in a Nicole Sevigny “Big Love” frontierswoman yoke dress) until the farmer dies and his charismatic hold over them breaks and they return to the café and decide to order something else). Fred does play a woman in the … bookstore? on Women and Women First, where they are such idealistically ill-prepared shopkeepers and reluctant capitalists they have to close up shop and trek to the bank every time they need to make change for someone. And there was the adult hide-and-seek league that met in the Portland Public Library. Nice one.

So I can say it’s pretty funny, and a nice way to cap off the week, that’s “Portlandia” at 10:30/9:30c, following new episodes of “Onion News Network: Enter the Fact Zone” at 10/9c on IFC.

Coming up

USA premiered its new legal dramedy “Fairly Legal” this past week, more on that later, but I can for sure say it’s enjoyable. I recall Debra Messing’s “The Starter Wife” opened with a “Wizard of Oz” motif. In this case, Kate Reed assigns ringtones to friends, family and colleagues based on “Wizard of Oz” characters. She designated her late father as “The Wizard” – she calls to hear his voice, and communes with his mortal remains in an urn she stole from “The Wicked Witch of the West,” her stepmother and boss at the law firm of Reed & Reed, except she doesn’t really practice law anymore. She’s a mediator, and so she’s regularly thrown into a ring with a bunch of lions and is meant to get them to make nice. New episodes of that Thursdays at 10/9c following new episodes of “Royal Pains” at 9/8c on USA. That one came back for the season half of its second season OK, but I was much more interested in “Fairly Legal,” somehow in that leading lady Sarah Shahi is improbably hot.

“Fringe” returned on Friday this week and that’s just fine by me, Thursday night, Friday night, if they air it on late night Pakistani radio Sunday mornings at 3:41 in Urdu I will track it down and watch it. Observer-centric episodes aren’t always especially interesting but I enjoyed this one, and Walter’s musician who reconnected with his son in a time-bubble, and the problems with trying to outthink beings from the future who plot things out multidimensionally. Nice. That’s “Fringe’ on Fridays at 9/8c on FOX.

Also, Tuesday, President Barack Obama addresses a fresh new Congress with all sorts of new people and … their ideas in the State of the Union address. I for one am looking forward to it, that airs live on all channels at 9/8c.

I forgot to mention the premiere of the “Being Human” remake on Syfy. I mean, I know I’ve talked about it in the past, I’ve talked about it disparagingly and on top of that I missed it, but it looks like it’s taking over the whole grid Monday night and you can decide for yourself if a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost all sharing an apartment is especially interesting. Who knows, maybe it is.

"Black Swan"

I finally got a chance to see “Black Swan” this weekend and I have to say it was a tour-de-force. Natalie Portman plays a beautifully fragile ballerina who is living her mother’s dream. She is cast as the Swan Queen but the artistic director has the idea to doublecast the role with the seductive Black Swan. She’s got all the control and grace to present the Swan Queen, he said, but he pushes her to lose control and expand her boundaries with some frank talk about her sexuality. As rehearsals move forward she hallucinates, frightened that she seems to be taking the place of the company’s prima ballerina and while pushing herself for perfection she is taken over by a vision of the Black Swan until jealousy and rage consume her soul.

It’s a very intense set of perforrmances. I don’t buy DVDs anymore, but I will be buying this one. “The Black Swan” is exhilirating, it is emotionally exhausting and for theaterfolk like myself who understand what it is to give one’s mind over in developing a character, this was a deeply disturbing examination of how high that bar gets set. Brava.