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Why I Love...Wonder Showzen

Wonder Showzen puppets
  • Posted at 10:44am
  • 29 February 2008
  • by JackSeale-RT
  • 1 comment

Crackly, 1950s archive footage of a ten-year-old girl intently writing a letter. A voiceover by a real ten-year-old: "Dear Grandma. Your breast-enhancement surgery looks beautiful. I only wish you were alive to see it. We could barely close the lid of your coffin…"

Welcome to the deeply wrong world of Wonder Showzen. This American cult hit, which pops up randomly late at night on MTV Two, is the best comedy you've never seen. Even in the States, where MTV Two also aired it in 2005-6, it only attracted 140,000 viewers – although that probably saved it from being forced off the air by conservative watchdogs.

America's TV Guide called it "the Muppets on acid". Any writer who describes anything as something "on acid" should have their laptop confiscated, and they mean Sesame Street, not the Muppets, but they're not far off. Throw in a touch of Brass Eye and South Park (Matt Stone and Trey Parker are big fans), and you're there.

The trappings of kids' TV – puppets, cartoons, songs, talking letters and numbers – are present, but this isn't for kids. In one episode, a gay tryst develops between J, an orthodox Jew, and 8, an Arab; in another, the number 1 is supposed to star but drops out, so 2 fills in, but reveals a crippling inferiority complex caused by living in 1's shadow. Themes include the death of God and the dangers of imagination. Sketches are punctuated with clips of abattoirs, rotting animals and combusting zeppelins.

Writers Vernon Chatman and John Lee have clearly conceived this while drunk and angry at 4am. Yet while the sickness and silliness hit you first, this isn't just dumb fun. Chatman and Lee are antiwar, antireligion, anticapitalism, antilove; subjects where an unsophisticated howl of rage or a childish snigger can be very cathartic. The children haven't been gratuitously roped in, either: depressive one-liners like "My greatest wish? Dry sheets in the morning" and "I want to be remembered as a creepy loner" have a strange power when solemnly delivered by pre-teens.

The star is 12-year-old Trevor Heins. In shoots overseen by his admirably laissez-faire mother, Heins is a reporter with a style that would earn adult journos a smack in the face. His best sequence sees him on the streets of New York, asking passers-by "What's wrong with the youth of today?" while dressed as Hitler, complete with Nazi cap and uniform. When he peers up at a man in a cowboy hat and says, "Which hat represents more oppression – yours or mine?", it's the quintessential Showzen moment.

Wonder Showzen never sits still, never does what you're expecting. No item outstays its welcome. Some stop in mid-sentence. It can be dazzlingly inventive: Patience, the series one finale, is slow and repetitive on purpose; then at halfway it stops, apologises for being so silly, rewinds itself (now we notice that some of it was backwards already) and starts again. The adjective "Python-esque" is attached to all sorts of dreck, but isn't out of place here. Wonder Showzen is surprisingly, disturbingly, ridiculously good.

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  • Posted on 01 March 2008
  • at 1:51am
  • by coley23

Bang on the money. Is it still showing in the UK or available on DVD?

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