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As the writers’ strike continues, Creative Loafing has assigned itself the unenviable task of watching the dreck the networks are pumping out. We will do this until it hurts. Then we will do it more.

Just for Laughs (8 p.m., ABC)

You know how certain crappy TV shows can still seem really funny when you’re under the influence?

Just for Laughs isn’t one of them.

Before last night, I’d never actually sat through this half-hour Canadian import hosted by stand-up C-lister Rick Miller. Featuring sketch pranks played on unsuspecting pedestrians in public parks, gas stations, street corners and parking lots, J4L is essentially Candid Camera lite, a laugh track-inducing way for us to watch normal people get punked.

And if you’re the kind of viewer who finds men in wigs, seeing-eye dogs wearing glasses and TP stuck to shoes the stuff of comic brilliance, then I strongly suggest you tune in. The rest of us will devote 8 o’clock to more entertaining pursuits, like cleaning the fish tank and brushing our teeth. Seriously: Sketches included an empty car driving itself, while senior citizens freaked out in the parking lot (it was an empty vehicle, moved by hidden actors) and a kid getting people to pay for his candy in a convenience store.

One gag made me chuckle in my head maybe once, but only because it involved poop.

“Just think,” said Miller, smiling under his stellar puff-’do, “if nothing’s going your way today, at least you didn’t get caught in any of the gags you just saw.”

To think I would’ve had to tell some kid I wouldn’t buy him candy!

People’s Choice Awards (9 p.m., CBS)

It pretty much jumped the shark before the first award was announced.

“I know, I know. I look great, right?” said Queen Latifah, opening the 34th annual People’s Choice Awards.

To be fair, CBS gave the legendary sell-out a difficult task this year: Hosting a basically negligible circle-jerk ceremony for the entertainment biz and its peons in a time of all-consuming industry upheaval. As already evidenced by the impending Golden Globes train wreck, this will not be a good year for awards shows. The two-hour PCAs kicked the season off last night by handing the Queen a pre-recorded sound stage in place of a live audience and the chance to shuffle awkwardly around the winners’ political grandstanding.

Unfortunately, it seems 2007 was as bad a year for entertainment as ’08 will be for the red carpet. I’d say something insightful about the decline of civilization and the patent mediocrity of American taste, but I assume you watched Jordin Sparks sweep American Idol, too.

What did we produce in 2007? The tenor of the ceremony was set by Robin Williams — who, I’m sorry, isn’t funny, and yes I’ve seen Dead Poets Society and Good Will Hunting and yes I wretched through both — winning Favorite Funny Male Star. Becoming Jane beat out A Mighty Heart and Sicko for favorite “independent” film.

The grossness that is Justin Timberlake is apparently our nation’s Favorite Male Singer.

Knocked Up and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix — Harry fucking Potter, that is — won favorite movie comedy and favorite movie drama, respectively.

It would have been one thing if the network had just roll called the winners in half an hour. What actually happened: We got to re-live old lapses in judgment via embarrassing montages of “Choice Moments” from PCAs past. Will Smith, Jim Carrey, Mel Gibson, Jim Carrey, Tim Allen, David Hasselhoff, Jim Carrey. A tipsy Cameron Diaz telling us how much she loves to “bring smiles to all of your faces.”

This year’s choice moments entailed various odes to “Our Amazing Writers,” as everyone from Joaquin Phoenix to Reese Witherspoon breathed sanctimonious flames about people they might have met once because their agent made them.

“As every actor knows, we’re nothing without our writers,” said Witherspoon, accepting the favorite female movie star trophy from the set of her upcoming film, Four Christmases.

But with drivel like Four Christmases on the horizon, are we sure we want the writers back?

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