Daniel Tosh has long been one of
my favorite comics - timely, tawdry and deceptively
intelligent on a wide swath of subjects. He’ll make a joke
about drunken debauchery at the bars, mixing in an aside about
dinosaur anatomy, and wind up at a joke about the metal frames
being stocked on the shelves of Target stores nationwide. It’s
absurd, bizarre, ingenious.
He’s now finally been given his own television slot with
which to run rampant: the series "Tosh.0," which
airs 9 p.m. Thursdays on Comedy Central.
At first glance, it looks like a no-brain viral video
version of "America’s Funniest Home Videos," where
Tosh points to an array of hit online videos and cracks jokes.
But, as is so often the case with just about anything Tosh
does, "Tosh.0" is far more sophisticated than one
might expect. Aside from merely curating and commenting on the
videos he’s chosen, Tosh also goes about interacting with
these videos.
In the very first episode of the summer series, he tracks
down the actual people who had become online celebrities to
create a sort of sequel to the online video that became a hit.
In another sequence, he tries to replicate the stunts that
were being demonstrated in a second video, karate chapping
coconuts and attempting the "saltine challenge,"
where you try to eat a certain number of crackers in a certain
number of seconds.
In these ways, "Tosh.0" isn’t just celebrating
the best bizarre online clips, it’s attempting to do the
very same things that so many YouTube filmmakers do: Repurpose
and reinvent.
Case in point: You may be familiar with Keyboard Cat, the
online sensation that shows a cat wearing a t-shirt and
pounding away on a keyboard. In the days and weeks after that
video made its initial online debut, online fans edited it
into hundreds - probably thousands - of other videos, remixing
familiar scenes from such movies as "Chinatown" with
this goofy image of a kitty stroking the keys.
Tosh is doing much the same thing. He’s taking a video,
adding his own commentary track, and then picking out his
favorites to explore, investigate and even replicate. By
interacting with the material, he’s offering viewers the
chance to watch this whole new form of creative manipulation
in process.
Is he reinventing the wheel here? Not quite. But what
"Tosh.0" does do - in addition to making you giggle
at some the of the silliest online spectacles of all-time - is
capture the joy now being felt by so many amateur artists in
sampling the Internet’s greatest hits. Just as hip-hop
artists have risen to fame by taking snippets of songs and
mixing them into their new rap tunes, so is a whole new
generation of YouTubers making a name for themselves by taking
familiar images and remixing them to dizzying effect.
"Tosh.0" is a tribute, and a continuation, of
that very mindset. There’s nothing else like it on TV.
E-mail: SnyderReviews@hotmail.com
