Laughs for the Christmas holidays - and buddy, we'll be needing laughs big time - work for this blog.
Having concluded that the best of the best sketch comedy as the 20th century wound down was Late Night With Conan O'Brien, a show with a creative staff of writer/performers, here's Brian McCann as MINTY THE CANDY CANE!
As we extend more love, admiration and resoect for the incredible Dick Van Dyke, now 100 years old, we shall follow Minty with a bit from the Van Dyke and Co 1976 Christmas special, featuring Andy Kaufman.
In the unique comedians, we miss Andy Kaufman and even more, miss Pee-Wee Herman - and, lo and behold, there was a Pee-Wee's Playhouse Christmas special.
And yes, Virginia O'Brien, there are DAVID LETTERMAN Xmas shows!
Mad TV was the very, very VERY broad alternative to Saturday Night Live (which at that time featured Will Ferrell, Molly Shannon, Cheri Oteri, Ana Gasteyer, Tim Meadows, Darrell Hammond, Tracy Morgan and Chris Kattan) in the latter 1990's. SNL and Mad TV competed to sign members of The Groundlings. This blogger prefers SNL, but concedes that MadTV had its moments. As far as sketch comedy fans go, there are no half-measures regarding this series. IMHO, there are periodic decent sketches which get interspersed with too many loud skits that go big-big-big and beat the viewer over the head repeatedly in case one didn't get the joke the first time.
The extremely broad Mad TV was stylistically somewhere between The Ben Stiller Show and In Living Color - and reminiscent of the also extremely broad "Fridays" ABC sketch comedy series of the early 1980's (featuring Larry David and Michael Richards, among others), so we're not expecting Noël Coward. The cast featured such talented improv comedians as Phil LaMarr, Debra Wilson, Alex Borstein, Will Sasso, Mary Scheer, Nicole Sullivan, Michael McDonald, Mo Collins, Stephanie Weir and, towards the end of the sketch comedy show's 14 season run, Keegan Michael Key & Jordan Peele.
Particularly enjoy madTV's sendup of Rankin-Bass.
After madTV, Key & Peele moved on to their own very funny series.
Find the Key & Peele series in many respects comparable to Tim Robinson transitioning from SNL to his incredibly absurdist I Think You Should Leave.
As we soon finish dreadful, godawful 2025, by far the worst year of the nearly 20 years of this blog, it seems weirdly appropriate that the last topic of today's post is a fundraiser for one of the friends of this blog.
In closing, the gang here is happy to be among the supporters of the following Go Fund Me. If one can help a friend or a community in need at this time of year, do so.
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