“Mighty Boosh” takes deadpan jokes through time and space
October 16, 2009 at 3:52 pm by Curt Holman in Comedy, Pop Culture, movies & tv, reviewDuring a tumultuous downer of a decade, it’s been awfully decent of the British to deliver up so many great comedy teams to distract us from out troubles. Like Abbott and Costellos or Laurel and Hardys for the 21st century, double acts emerging from the U.K. include Simon Pegg and Nick Frost of “Spaced” and Shaun of the Dead, along with “Extras’” Ricky Gervais and Stephan Merchant (who co-created a little show called “The Office” with Gervais). Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding of “The Mighty Boosh” master the same deadpan banter of their contemporaries, but routinely bend space-time to enter hitherto unknown comedic dimensions.
A new boxed set, released Oct. 13, traces the various incarnations of the “Boosh” and how Barratt and Fielding’s bizarre flights of fancy spring from the interplay of their alter egos. Originating with stage shows and then radio plays before the three seasons of the TV series, “The Mighty Boosh” follows two mismatched chums: Howard Moon (Barratt), a mild-mannered yet pompous intellectual with a weedy mustache, and Vince Noir (Fielding) a happy-go-lucky fashionista obsessed with retro clothes and his haircut. Their typical interplay finds Vince taking the piss out of Howard’s self-importance, as shown in the introductory scene of “The Mighty Boosh’s” first episode:
You can imagine Barratt and Fielding riffing off each other for hours in that vein without their wit running dry. The first season finds the pair as co-workers at a loopy English zoo called the Zooniverse (“where all your dreams come true… niverse”). The astonishingly dim-witted Bob Fossil (Boosh collaborator Rich Fulcher) manages the zoo and serves as Howard’s incessant annoyance. One of my favorite examples of “Boosh’s” off-kilter dialogue comes with Fossil’s attempt to describe a rogue zoo attraction. “It was the long mover.” “What?” “You know, the windy man.” “The python?”
The workplace repartee provides only a fraction of each episode, which typically sends the pair off to such exotic locales as the Arctic tundra, desert islands or Monkey Hell. Most episodes feature at least one incongruous musical interlude, and “Boosh’s” visual design looks like nothing on live-action television. The strikingly colored sets and freaky costumes suggest that the pair’s psyches are bubbling cauldrons of Sid and Marty Krofft-style kid’s shows, trippy music genres and outlandish album art. One of the weirdest, mostly strangely memorable numbers, “Eels” finds Fielding singing as a ghoulish 19th century cockney cut-throat called “The Hitcher.” His lyric could serve as show’s satirical motto: “Elements of the past and future combinin’ to make something not quite as good as either!”
“The Mighty Boosh” falls on a comedic spectrum at exactly the midpoint between the non-sequitur surrealism of the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim shows and HBO’s “Flight of the Conchords” – the New Zealand comedic duo have similar straight faced chemistry and musical interludes. “Boosh” only occasionally includes animated vignettes, but has fit right in on Adult Swim, which began airing episodes of the show in March. At its most idiosyncratic, “The Mighty Boosh” can be weirder than anything on Adult Swim (a remarkable accomplishment in and of itself).
At times “Boosh” seems to be odd for its own sake, and you wish Barratt and Fielding would put aside the surreal folderol and just talk to each other. Interludes from the Moon as a rambling nincompoop can seriously try the audience’s patience. While the second season spent too much time in the absurdist stratosphere, the third, centered around a curio shop called the Nabootique, spent a little more time on Earth.
Once you acclimate to Barratt and Fielding’s anything-goes creativity, you can appreciate such creations as Tony Harrison, a shaman whom Fielding plays as nothing more than a pink, tentacled head with hairless, cleft cranium and a strangled, easily imitable delivery. (His catchphrase: “This is an outrage!”) Sometimes you have to go over the top just to know where the top is.
November 9th, 2009 at 1:10 am
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