Kung Fu Panda 2 (Jennifer Yuh Nelson, 2011)

If the best sequels build off their predecessors in ways that progress and deepen the shared material, then good sequels must at least avoid simply rehashing the original. In many respects, Kung Fu Panda 2 feels like the first installment of a franchise that, to be frank, never needed to be a franchise. But apart from a too-comfortable relationship with fat jokes in times of crises, the film never comes off as a retread. My favorite aspect of the first film was its respect for Chinese culture, incorporating its art and architecture—the latter, in my opinion, being the most beautiful in the world—with reverence as it played around in the digital sandbox. That sense of appreciation of the culture, even if it is a background for Jack Black's decidedly non-classical style, extends to the sequel, and I found it funny how the faithfully rendered Chinese palaces and pavilions almost seemed a flight of fancy on the part of the animators because of their beauty and grace.

If the first film occurred in tucked away villages and training halls, Kung Fu Panda 2 moves deeper into the urban sprawl of feudal China, massive collections of homes under the watchful eye of a pagoda so large that, were it any taller, God would strike everyone in it with different tongues to stop all communication. But the religious elegance of the pagoda, like the rest of Gongmen City, also carries a grim sense of oppression, one heightened when a wrathful prince returns to reclaim the throne his horrified parents denied him so long ago.

Heckler

At one point in Jamie Kennedy's Heckler, an investigation into the nature of the (de-)evolution of vocal and written criticism, filmmaker Joel Schumacher angrily asks, "Does any child want to grow up to be a critic?" Not a bad point. As someone who only moved out of his teens a few years back and obviously seeks to be one (a real one) someday, I might as well share my own feelings: from the ages of 2-5 I wanted to be a garbage man, simply because I thought the trucks were magical. Feel free to hold that over my head. Then I wanted to be an engineer, though why I can't be sure. Maybe it's because I just liked building crap with Legos and was brainwashed by all that talk of "my brother used to play with Legos all the time. He's an engineer now." Anyway, I kept with that ill-defined dream into my first year of college, at which point I found that I hated every one of my courses pertaining to the major.

I'd had the idea to perhaps study and write film criticism in my spare time since I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey a year earlier and had been changed by it, so I simply decided to shift my focus to make a career out of seeing and reviewing films, essentially because I wanted to see if there was a movie out there that could affect me so profoundly again.

I say all of this because Heckler brings up a number of good points about the impersonality of critics. A critic must rightly live in a vacuum, away from the stars and filmmakers you will later have to review, possibly negatively, and one must try to add an objective tint to the very definition of subjectivity. But that impersonality also makes some criticism perhaps too rigid, and definitely too harsh. The comics and filmmakers Kennedy assembles stress that they all have feelings, and that today's style of vicious criticism can have terrible effects on them. They're quite right: Lord knows I've devoted ream after ream of bile directed at anything and everything to do with the new Transformers, and at times I feel an almost insatiable need to insult rather than truly critique. This is a shameful practice which I've tried to curb for all but the most loathsome theater-going experiences I have in a year, but we can all agree that, sometimes, an insult is just fun.

I also share my pathetic, truncated life story because Heckler's chief weakness is its inability to see the critics, too, as people. While many have kind words to say about Pauline Kael or Roger Ebert, who are constructive even in their most scathing reviews (though the nicest thing you can say about Ebert's review for North is that he like Wood and Reiner's other films), a number of the interviewees erect critics, be they paid -- for lack of a better term -- "professionals" or anonymous Internet commentators, on a pedestal. To them, critics are nothing more than glorified hecklers, and the lot of them can be grouped into an institution as corrupt as any government.

That simple-mindedness, perpetuated not by all of the subjects but fatally by Kennedy himself, turns Heckler from a potentially insightful look into the Internet's effect on cruelty and rudeness in criticism into what feels like, ironically, Jamie Kennedy's video blog, one long rant against the haters who so torment him.

The first segment, which tackles hecklers in clubs, is the most immediately rewarding, because we can see the comics fighting back. Classic clips such as Bill Hicks' verbal assault on a hostile crowd, which remains as terrifyingly entertaining now as it was the first time I saw the video years ago, rub up against more recent footage of Kennedy and other comics handling the drunks and the asses. Revealingly, a number of these comics simply aren't funny; one poor sap even manages to turn the entire audience against him with bad jokes and worse defenses against the heckler. Kennedy himself, it must be said, is too quick to fall back on the easy sexual jokes about drunken girls' promiscuity and standoffish males' inability to get laid.

Kennedy only makes matters worse when he interviews some kids who openly profess themselves hecklers; snotty, hipster, virginal teenagers all, they cannot articulate their thoughts beyond, "You're not funny." Now, I'm willing to cut Kennedy a lot of slack, because anyone who would pride himself on being a heckler is probably a world-class douche anyway, so these interviews are actually a nice bit of fun.

When he tries to apply that same tactic to paid film critics, however, Heckler hits a speed bump. He confronts some critics -- including high-profile cases such as Richard Roeper -- and reads them some of the harsh things they said about the poor comic. Some of these excerpts are scathing but nowhere near brutal, while others cross every boundary of taste you could imagine. One critic in particular, who appears on G4's Attack of the Show with Kennedy, throws out disgusting lines that are not criticism by any standard but simply base insults.

Then the criticized get their say. Just as a number of the comics responding to hecklers in clips were unfunny and even sexist and racist (though no one deserves to be yelled at in the middle of a show), many of the filmmakers and actors weighing in on film criticism produce some awful schlock. All the makers of lame teen comedies point out that 12-year-olds thought the movie was hilarious, ergo the film succeeded. The goal of any film is to entertain, yes, but how can anyone say such a thing with matter-of-fact pride? Joel Schumacher complains that people tore apart his Batman films, saying that they were just "comic book movies." That mindset is exactly why those films were so bad (and it's not like he has audience appreciation to fall back on there; everyone hated Batman & Robin), and why Christopher Nolan's Batman was such a revelation. Even Jon Lovitz, who voiced the lead in the animated series The Critic, gets in an absurd rebuttal when he confidently asserts that he wouldn't get a job coaching the Lakers just because he's been to all the games for 20 years -- no Jon, but you could damn sure get a job writing about them, now couldn't you? And let's not even go into Kennedy's antics of reading scathing reviews of his cinematic hallmarks Son of the Mask and Malibu's Most Wanted as if the critic had laid into Orson Welles (he even asks Roeper why he loves all of Ang Lee's films but doesn't have fun with Son of the Mask).

The Internet's influence takes up a great deal of the film's running length, yet no one ever really investigates the nature of the information superhighway and its ability to give everyone a voice. Lewis Black and some others say some sage things about the toxic effect of anonymity, yet the connections between this new mindset and contemporary criticism are tenuous at best and forced at worst. Had it been trimmed down to about 20 minutes, this final segment would have been better even if it only vaguely addressed the Internet's power. Nevertheless, it does offer up golden quotes from Carrie Fisher and a reviewer for CHUD.com, who explodes in the film's best rant (in a film interviewing comics, no less!) when critic Leonard Maltin blanket insults all internet critics.

While the heckler segment contains too much open sexism and bad comebacks, it kept me completely engaged, because everyone hates a heckler. I would have admired its take on critics too, had it not been so simplistic and one-sided. Then again, the movie actually gives some critics the chance to explain themselves, which is something actual film criticism doesn't allow; the only way for a filmmaker to really get back at a critic is to make his next film that much better -- or beat them up in a boxing match; your choice, really. In the end, though, I couldn't help but laugh at all of these supposedly edgy comics and teen-targeted auteurs dismissing critics and hecklers even as they devoted a feature-length film to complaining about how mean they can be. The richest irony is that Kennedy's web site contains numerous pull-quotes from critics who gave the film positive reviews. I thought you didn't care what they said, Jamie?

Year One

Year One, Harold Ramis’ new, inaccurately titled comedy, suggests the pairing of the neurotic, sensitive straight man and the fat, loud-mouthed schlub is as old as history itself. Perhaps that’s why Jack Black and Michael Cera are playing to types so rigid they might as well be cast in stone.

If you’ve watched the trailer for the film – and you doubtlessly have, as it was everywhere – then you already know the plot: Black’s Zed and Cera’s Oh (get it?) live in a village in what is certainly not the first year of human existence, a village apparently in the Garden of Eden even though it’s clearly not, and they pine for Maya (Olivia Wilde) and Eema (Juno Temple), respectively.

One day, Zed eats the forbidden fruit, and soon the two friends set out to explore the world as they pledge to return as heroes to win their loves. Along the way they stumble from one Bible story to another: they meet Cain (David Cross) as he slays his brother (Paul Rudd) before stumbling across Abraham (Hank Azaria) just before he sacrifices his son Isaac (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). Eventually they make their way to Sodom, where the people all inexplicably speak with British accents.

After suffering through the lame hunter-gatherer jokes and the lazy Biblical references for 40 minutes, I confess I had high hopes for Sodom, which is a sad reflection of mindset at the time. Maybe in that den of unadulterated sin Ramis could at last unleash and really go for the blasphemous jugular, I thought. But no, it biggest payoff is a line like "You know what the best part of Sodom is? The sodomy," which might have been funny the hands of an anti-comic like Norm MacDonald. Delivered the uncomfortable David Cross – who has a look on his face the entire film that suggests he agreed to be in it as a fan of Ramis without reading the script – however, only accentuates its laziness.

Anyone going into this film expecting even a hint of the Ramis of old is in for a rude awakening, which is all the more bewildering given the wealth of comic talent both in front of and behind the camera. Ramis wrote the script with two Office scribes, and he collected a cast chock-full of comic heavyweights to back him up. Even if the leads are stuck in a rut, they're bankable comedy players, and David Cross is one of the finest comics of this generation.

With all that talent, how could he come up with this? Keep in mind: Harold Ramis is the person most responsible for the rise of chaos and revelry in comedy. He introduced raunch to the mainstream with his script for Animal House and his partnerships with Bill Murray represent, for many, the standard of cynical, skewed comedy. Judd Apatow in particular owes his career to Ramis, which might explain why he would finance such a terrible script. Then again, maybe it exerted the same strange influence over him as it apparently did the others.

It doesn’t help that Cera and Black are playing their old shtick: Cera is ironically detached, while Black doesn’t read his lines so much as boisterously proclaim them like a drunken William Shatner. Occasionally, he simply devolves into noises and funny faces. Why not just jangle keys for us, too? I miss the days when Jack Black had a handle on his manic energy, when he funneled it into an unassuming man who could suddenly burst into a rage over the most trivial of subjects. That character was funny in High Fidelity, even the over-the-top School of Rock. Now, he's just as sad self-parody, shouting these terrible lines in the hops that he'll make them amusing (he received his master's degree at the Dane Cook School of Comedy).

And as shoddy as the script is, Ramis’ direction fares no better: for some reason, he devotes most of the shots of this epically scaled comedy to close-ups, as if he was desperate to get a reaction, any reaction, out of the bored actors. He's never been the greatest director in the world, but he knew a thing or two about placement and how to set up for a joke. I saw short films made by high-schoolers at a school festival that had a better sense of direction that a man with 30 years of experience.

I take notes when I go to the theater, obviously so I don't have to remember every little thing when I get back home to write. But after about the halfway mark of this film, my scribbles devolved into such chaos as and entire page with the word "Why?" pasted all over it. I offered theories as to why and how Ramis could have fallen so far; the sanest of the bunch simply reads, "Have aliens killed Harold Ramis and worn his flesh to undermine the comedic bedrock of America to weaken us for eventual invasion? (possible)." Several pages I tore up on the way out, for fear that their content might be incriminating in some states. At no point did I manage to convince myself that a single moment was funny.

Year One is clearly shooting to be a piece of satirical blasphemy à la Monty Python’s Life of Brian, but it can’t even hit the simpler parody of History of the World Part I: it’s filled to the ceiling of its PG-13 rating with sodomy, circumcision and gay jokes – Olvier Platt’s turn as a high priest makes Ken Jeong’s mincing mobster from The Hangover look like a character from The Wire – yet Ramis is just wary enough of incurring any protests that he plays it frustratingly safe. You can't half-ass blasphemy: if you're going to mock the Bible's inconsistencies and absurdities, you better be ready to go all-out, not to turn them into sad, repetitive gags.

Yes, for all its gross-out gags, the only bold aspect of the entire film was the decision to include a blooper reel, as the thought of watching the crew having a good time with this after torturing us for 97 minutes is just insulting. At least the cast has the decency to look as bored in these candid moments as they do in the final product. It is truly the Paris Hilton sex tape of blooper reels.

In his now-legendary review for North, Roger Ebert listed director Rob Reiner's previous achievements as "incantations" against that infamous turkey. If that offered even a moment's consolation, I strongly suggest that anyone unfortunate enough to spend $10 on this piece of trash repeat "Ghostbusters, Stripes, Animal House, Groundhog Day, Caddyshack" ad nauseam. Better yet, lock arms with your miserable brethren, in the hopes that, collectively, your tribal chanting can drown out the primitive nonsense of this tripe. Make no mistake: Year One is an abominable failure, and the nadir of Ramis’ career. He should be grateful that McG ruined the Terminator franchise just a few weeks ago, as that's the only thing keeping him from having the worst film of the year.

My 30 Favorite Mr. Show Sketches (15-1)

15. Phone Sex (Season 4, Episode 3)

Homoeroticism played a big role in Mr. Show, and when a man who wins some phone sex off a friend's lost bet casually calls the bud up so he can "deliver the goods," the show leaps into the stratosphere. Bob's effeminate sex voice is matched in hilarity only by David's flippant attitude towards it all, and the payoff is gold.

14. The Great Philouza (Season 3, Episode 7)

Combining the bombast of Amadeus with the silliness of marching band, "The Great Philouza" is the kind of sketch a band geek like me can latch onto with relish. David plays the Salieri part, an erudite, studied composer who finds himself upstaged by Bob's even-more-dumbed-down-Mozart Philouza. Unlike Mozart, who at least was a genius under his childish demeanor, Philouza is a gibbering moron who "composes" his tunes by blowing raspberries to a vague tune. David describes Philouza's music in overwrought, agonized prose, damning the God who blessed his rival with the power to move mountains while relegating his hard-learned talents to the shadows. It's Mr. Show's finest single-movie parody, and a better send-up of pretentious artiness than even the Inside The Actor's Studio spoof.

13. Hail Satan (Season 3, Episode 1)

Tom Kenny is by far my favorite of the supporting cast, which is saying something considering the show boasted comics like Paul F. Thompkins, Jack Black and Sarah Silverman. And this sketch is like a six-minute document of why I think the way I do. A merciless deconstruction of televangelism, The Hail Satan Network features incredible performances from Tom, Jill and Bob as the preaching trifecta and David as a child so lazy he must be wheeled around in a chair. When Tom sets off into a frenzy, promising to build David "a devil's house" with TVs for walls and a bathroom in the bed, the sketch's immortality is assured.

12. Wyckyd Sceptre (Season 4, Episode 2)

Where Titannica played up the controversy of metal, Wyckyd Sceptre dealt with the latent homosexuality that the genre hid in plain sight. Possibly based on Rob Halford's coming out around the same time, the skit really goes after 80s metal in general when a band celebrates their platinum-selling album by getting drunk and engaging in gay sex. A tape of the incident surfaces, but the band fails to see the problem: after all, they're just partying. Then the whole thing gets capped with a Spinal Tap-like rocker with thinly-veiled, homoerotic lyrics.

11. Lifeboat (Season 4, Episode 1) [Sketch starts 1:48]

The Jerry Springer Show was always its own parody, but that of course didn't stop all the spoofs. However, when Bob, as the Springer stand-in, decides to take his show on a cruise liner which subsequently sinks, all the Springer goodness is magnified tenfold thanks to a simple location change. Also in the lifeboat with Bob are the redneck who loves his woman but impregnated her mom, both the women, an audience member who has to do all of the hyping himself, and even a super secret black gay lover named Fabian. It also contains my favorite line: "Life is precious, and God and the Bible.

10. Pre-Taped Call-In Show (Season 3, Episode 10)

A special case of "so-simple-it-should-have-been-done-before," the Pre-Taped Call-In Show wound up one of the most inspired moments of the show's run. Watching David break down trying to explain to the people calling in to discuss their topics are actually calling in for last week's show during this week's taping is one of the most madcap things ever.

9. Mom and Pop Porno Shop (Season 2, Episode 2)

As someone looking to transfer into a journalism major, I know all too well the effects of the internet on many industries, but Mr. Show indirectly pointed the way to the future with this brief bit on a mom and pop adult store whose kindly owners run like a place where everybody knows your name. But they must contend with a disinterested son, the scourge of this new digital porn and a realtor who wants to buy their property. And then a God-like figure comes to teach the son a lesson about the beauty of porn. And if you don't laugh when Bob smacks David on the head with a dildo, well, sir, I pity you.

8. The Altered State of Druggachusettes (Season 3, Episode 3)

If you've ever seen tapes of old 70s children's TV or even lived through them, you'll know that they were only a stone's throw away from full on drug humor, and the guys simply decided to give it that one last push over the edge. A full-on acid trip, Druggachusettes is so ingenious I simply can't describe why it's one of the funniest moments in the history of television.

7. Lie Detector (Season 3, Episode 3)

In the DVD commentary, some cast members voice a disapproval with this sketch because it ends with a punchline and "that's not what Mr. Show was about." But I couldn't care less: yes, it may seem like an SNL sketch that was just too blue to make it to air, but it's also a killer old-fashioned sketch-comedy sketch.

6. Spank/Founding Fathers (Season 1, Episode 4)

Few forms of protest are as inane and nonthreatening as flag desecration, and Mr. Show use a mocking sketch of a protestor who defecates on the flag in order to trace the flag's history back to the Founding Fathers (Lincoln is there for no reason, complete with hilariously wrong accent). Their attempts to come-up with a shit-proof flag end up with a wonderful meta-solution: a flag made of poo ("Who would shit on shit?"). Apart from being anarchic and ballsy, it's also the first example of a great link on the show.

5. Recruiters (Season 2, Episode 5)

My all-time favorite documentary is Hoop Dreams, so imagine my delight when Mr. Show took the ruthless preying of basketball recruiters to its extreme. Bob and David play college recruiters targeting kindergartners and getting them while they're young. And as funny as it is when Bob tells a 4-year-old that his college offers a two-year cowboy degree to entice him, there's a knowing subtext that understands how inner city youth are played by these men. Then things pick right back up into pure hialrity when Bob tries to feel a pregnant woman's stomach to test the kick of the fetus.

4. Titannica (Season 3, Episode 10)

Of all the excellent band parodies on Mr. Show, this take on the early-90s paranoia over subliminal messages in heavy metal music remains the finest. Megastars Titannica visit a sick child at the hospital after he attempted suicide after hearing their song "Try Suicide." Then the blanket comes off and, oh, I just can't ruin it for you.

3. The Joke: The Musical (Season 1, Episode 2)

The episode starts with Bob as a Southern Dixiecrat senator telling an offensive joke, then an entire musical grows out of it. Featuring some sly Godspell references and a joke that plays like "The Aristocrats" with a different premise, "The Joke: The Musical" is the first sketch that proved Mr. Show had legs (even more than the excellent "Ronnie Dobbs"). It's dry while at the same time giving in to pure inanity, and the results are extraordinary.

2. Commercials of the Future (Season 1, Episode 2)

Mr. Show gave us plenty of absurd yet plausible ads in their time, but when Bob and David pitch a series of profane commercials to a futuristic mega-conglomerate called Globo-Chem (a recurring entity), the result is a transcendant moment of commentary on censorship that ends up a great excuse to give us the ads "they" really want to show us. And the highlight isn't even one of the commercials: it's the boardroom reactions that clinch it.

1. Monsters of Megaphone (Season 2, Episode 6)

This one sketch is the reason I can't even play at making a "best of" for Mr. Show. There is no way I can objectively argue that this is the greatest sketch in the program's all too brief run, but I simply love it too much to place it anywhere but the no. 1 spot. A dead-on spoof of the sort of pretentious documentaries that PBS runs all the time about old-time musicians forgotten by a world that moved on. Tom Kenny is downright perfect as the old music historian who tells us the tale of Dickie Crickets, the king of megaphone crooning or, as they referred to it back then, "megaphone crooning." Kenny sounds like every single old timer they wheel out for these kind of documentaries, and he alone would cement this as my favorite. Then there's the crooning: Bob and David pose as competing crooners, singing short ditties about the lastest inventions and ultimately fighting against their increasing irrelevancy with the "Monsters of Megaphone" tour, in which they inventing new items just so they could sing about them. Mr. Show excelled with their "historical fictions," and this is the king of them all. If you don't think this is funny, I don't know how I could be friends with you.

My 30 Favorite Mr. Show Sketches (30-16)

Saturday Night Live's stance as the United State's defining sketch comedy show is indisputable, but its long run and ever-shifting cast work against the program as much as they help. But when ex-Ben Stiller Show writers David Cross and Bob Odenkirk took the sketches that weren't allowed on network TV and got a show of their own for HBO, they crafted not only the finest sketch show of its time but possibly the funniest sketch comedy show since Monty Python.

Drawing clearly from that legendary British troupe's style of hyperliterate absurdity, Mr. Show could swing between biting satire, shocking political incorrectness and gleeful silliness in the course of a single sketch. It didn't always work, but their method of eschewing punchlines in favor of loosely strung together non-narratives ensured that you never went more than a sketch or two without laughing. Any list about greatness is of course subjective, but attempting to rank the finest sketches of this brilliant program is next to impossible (case in point: I originally was just going to name 15 sketches and ended up with a top 50 before I realized it was getting out of hand). So here's a painstakingly crafted list of some of my very favorite moments of one of the funniest shows of all time. The numbers are just for show (links added clips of the sketches)

30. Camp Monk Academy (Season 4, Episode 5) (Part 1) (Part 2)

Undoubtedly the greatest strength of Mr. Show was its ability to start a sketch in one direction and end up in some crazy new territory by its end. Things start funnily enough when a slacker heads to Tibet to check up on an old friend, only to find he's the Dalai Lama, but then things spiral until the Buddhist monks square off against the fat kids' camp (who are all white and American for no reason at all), culminating in a rap-off. Who else could mix a parody of Kundun and camp olympiad films like Meatballs and Heavyweights in one sitting? There's even a brief nod to Pretty in Pink at the end.

29. Thrilling Miracles (Season 2, Episode 1)

SNL tends to ride its cast's gift for mimicry and accents in order to inflate sagging quality (at this point they're just using the elections to guarantee four more years on the air), but one of my favorite aspects of Mr. Show was the fact that nobody could pull off a good imitation and, apart from some Southern accents, very few accents were pulled off with any skill. And that's proven in spades as Bob butchers a British accent as an increasingly disturbing infomercial pitch-man shilling "the Super-Pan." Things keep getting stranger and darker until it can't get any more intense, then it ends on a moment of glorious inanity.

28. East vs. West Coast Ventriloquism (Season 3, Episode 3) [sketch starts at 0:35]

The East Cost/West Coast rap feud caused irreparable damange to hip-hop; ignorant detractors continue to dismiss the genre as nothing more than glorification of violence and dangerous, and for a time they got all the evidence they need. But all Bob and David saw in the carnage was some serious schadenfreude, and thus begat this off-the-wall battle between vicious puppets and the bewildered humans who find themselves forced into the fracas. It's all worth it for the roundtable discussion featuring two bemused rappers.

27. The Audition (Season 4, Episode 3)

Anyone who's seen Arrested Development knows that David Cross knows how to make the best fake auditions. Here, he combines auditions with good old "Who's on first?" confusion to thoroughly flummox the casting directors. Can I use this chair?

26. The Fairsley Difference (Season 4, Episode 4)

Mr. Show's fake advertisments could rival SNL's in their convincing brilliance: Mayostard. Cock Ring Warehouse. Siamese Twins. All wonderful, and all quite reluctantly left off the list. But this ad war between an old-time family-run grocery and an undercutting, libelous nationwide chain hilariously captures the sad truth of the effects of chains like Wal-Mart and Kroger on small businesses.

25. The Story of Everest (Season 4, Episode 4)

The Pythonesque influence was stamped all over Mr. Show, but this bit of pure absurdity is one of the purest tributes to the British troupe. When a strapping young lad returns to his home after conquering Everest, he relates his exploits to his overjoyed parents. Then he slips. Then the déja vu creeps in. By the end of it they've crafted the best repeated gag since Sideshow Bob walked through a minefield of upturned rakes.

24. Josh Fenderman (Season 4, Episode 10)

Bob and David barely appear at all in this E! True Hollywood Story/Corey Feldman send-up, but that doesn't stop it from being one of the funniest parodies in the show's history. Fenderman got his start as a lovable kid in a commercial and found himself driven into 80s pop horror by a terrible stage mother. It's a brief but thorough satire of the entertainment industry's effect on its stars, but whenever things get too serious there's a clip of hilarious dancing to lighten the mood. I wish life was like that.

23. I'll Marry Your Stupid Ass (Season 4, Episode 7)

There's nothing more irritating yet hilarious than a drunken argument between two macho doofuses, and Bob and David take it to the extreme. In their best homoerotic-but-not-quite-gay sketch, the two get into a screaming argument in a bar and quickly forget their respective dates in the maelstrom of testerone. Unwillingly to back down and admit defeat, they end up marrying and living a life of tender hatred, death do them part.

22. Three Times One Minus One (Season 2, Episode 2)

A semi-recurring bit, Three Times One Minus One is the be-all, end-all skewering of contemporary R&B as well as a comment on the plagiarism and "softening" of black culture to sell to suburban white America. But you can go ahead and toss all that right out the window, because the greatest fake New Jack swing duo of all time earn their position for a much simpler reason: they prove that wigs and silly costumes are every bit as funny as subversive satire. Few things are as funny as watching David Cross' hairy chest as he sings nonsensical mouth music while Bob (looking about as iconic as any legitimate musician) stands stoically in the background.

21. Toenapper (Season 4, Episode 2)

Oh honestly, just watch this one. It needs no explanation.

20. Indomitable Spirit (Season 3, Episode 4)

Who remembers having to sit through all the "inspirational" guest speakers in school? All of you, of course, because we had to sit through them the entire time we were in school. Every addiction, disease, deformation and injury under the sun got trotted out like a politically correct freak show to tell kids that perseverance (with the usual mention to God) could overcome all. From the opening lines of the presenting teacher, you know that this sketch is going to savage one of the worst aspects of childhood. Indomitable Spirit itself is a band consisting of a guitarist and drummer with no arms, a flautist with only a head, and a woman. It's perfect as is, then a one-armed ex-drummer shows up and the whole thing heads to comedy heaven.

19. Men's Club of Allah/Taint (Season 4, Episode 6)

The brilliant linking of sketches of Mr. Show allowed for long-range satire and madcap nonsense, but these two barely tied-together skits display possibly the most inspired and unpredictable links in the entire run. Starting off as a spoof of Louis Farrakhan, incendiary rhetoric soon morphs into an angry sermon on the importance of rewinding rental tapes. Then the whole thing takes a left turn and becomes a parody of the Adam West Batman. AND THEN the show manages to barely link into something completely different: a spoof of the Larry Flynt biopic that glorifies the area between the scrotum and the anus. All of this in less than ten minutes.

18. Burgundy Loafe (Season 4, Episode 3)

A sketch on the class gap? Did I pop in a British show by mistake? David Cross did a bit in his stand-up about going to a restaurant so fancy and pretentious that they literally served an edible sheet of real gold with their dessert, but he was attacking the borderline obscene selfishness of the wealthy long before. The eponymous six-star restaurant of the sketch is so high society that they don't even lower themselves by including a restroom. Instead, servers place a box under a seat with a hole in the bottom while the customer deposits his "foundation" while he eats. Isn't it nice to see that Bob and David were never so far up their asses that they couldn't turn satire into toilet humor on a dime?

17. Coupon: The Movie (Season 2, Episode 6)

All the hipsters who made up Mr. Show's primary fanbase probably thought this sketch was a vision of the apocalypse. In this frightening world, product placement has become so ingrained into the movie business that, when a movie based entirely on a commercial product tanks, the studios take a case to the Supreme Court and force everyone in America to see the film. Not only does the movie display all the hilarity that the show's shoestring budget inadvertently created, but the sheer dryness of it all makes "Coupon" arguably one of the 5 best sketches of the show, even if I don't love it quite as much.

16. The Bob LaMonta Story (Season 3, Episode 2)

If you're anything like me, seeing the words "Based on a True Story" attached to a movie makes you wince. Bob and David know our pain, and that's why "The Bob LaMonta Story" is so damned good. Not only are the exaggerations of "true story" adaptations played up but the Oscar-baiting exploitation of the mentally challenged gets a nod too. And Bob Odenkirk and Jill Tailey's portrayals of LaMonta's retarded parents aren't half as offensive as, say, I Am Sam.