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Comedy Bang! Bang! Episode 96: “Aubrey Plaza Wears a Velvet Off-the-Shoulder Gown With Flowers in Her Hair”
over 4 years ago – Sun, Apr 19, 2020 at 07:05:29 PM

Episode 96: “Aubrey Plaza Wears a Velvet Off-the-Shoulder Gown With Flowers in Her Hair”

Original Air Date: June 17, 2016

“Aubrey Plaza Wears a Velvet Off-the-Shoulder Gown With Flowers in Her Hair” is the first time travel-themed episode of the fifth season of Comedy Bang! Bang! But it is not the last. On the cult classic’s second to last episode, "Reggie Watts Wears a Purple and Yellow Quilted Sweatshirt”, Comedy Bang! Bang! once again explores the comic possibilities of traveling through time with special guest Reggie Watts.

The show’s two time travel-themed fifth season episodes represent two more time travel episodes than most non-time-travel-themed shows manage in their entire runs. Heck, Bonanza was on the air for fourteen seasons and 431 episodes without the Cartwrights visiting the past or future even a single time.

But it is most assuredly not unprecedented for a wickedly conceptual comedy to dabble in time travel. In the wildly influential second season of Get a Life, Chris Peterson traveled back in time in a Charlie Kaufman-penned episode and our good friend Al traveled back in time for decidedly silly reasons in both The Weird Al Show and “Everything You Know Is Wrong.”

So Al and Scott are certainly in good, familiar company in traveling back in time in search of laughs. “Aubrey Plaza Wears a Velvet Off-the-Shoulder Gown With Flowers in Her Hair” opens with Scott and Al visiting a television museum where they are disheartened to learn that Comedy Bang! Bang! is not popular enough to be recognized as important to television history.

Then a museum guard who turns out to be Merlin the Magician in disguise played by an impish, twinkly-eyed Fred Willard sends Scott and Al back in time to the days of Camelot to teach them some lessons.

Scott and Al end up in the court of boisterous and jovial King Arthur (Dave Foley) and Queen Guinevere (Candace Brown), monarchs in need of japes and merriment, two things these time-travelers are uniquely qualified to provide. Scott finds himself in the surreal, enviable position of being able to entertain King Arthur with a form of entertainment no one had ever experienced before: the talk show. Through the magic of time travel, Scott becomes the world’s first talk show host and Al, by extension, becomes the world’s first band leader, after trading in his keyboard for old-time instruments like lutes and flutes and whatnot.

Of course you can’t have a talk show with interesting people to talk to or a way to monetize the enterprise so Scott and Al’s talk show has commercials for era-appropriate products and guests like Aubrey of the Plaza (Aubrey Plaza), a saucy wench who tries to seduce Scott with unsubtle come-ons like “I will have sex with you.” The second guest, Sir Lancelot (Nate Cordrry) proves an even randier guest; being a reckless and arrogant soul, he can’t stop alluding to having sex with Guinevere in front of her husband, who also happens to be the most powerful man in the land.

At first Scott and Al are overjoyed by their newfound popularity, as well as the coins of the realm and fair maidens that come with it. Since they have the only talk show in human history at that point they don’t need to worry about competition.

Al and Scott eventually discover a rather huge downside to their predicament: the King is a fickle fellow, and once he tires of his jesters and their tomfoolery, they are summarily executed.

A quickly bored King Arthur forces Scott and Al to fight to the death for his amusement when the museum guard Fred Willard plays returns, this time in his true form as the wizard Merlin, who has been sending LOTS of people back in time to learn lessons, not just Scott and Al.

Alas, while Merlin can send people back in time, he cannot send them forward, although he can keep them from aging, so instead of traveling back to the future Scott and Al simply wait out the fourteen hundred years separating the age of Camelot from their own time. To pass the time and save the Jews, Scott and Al vow to kill, in his infancy, the genocidal German madman whose name is synonymous with pure evil, Franz Gunther, even though Merlin warns them that time has a way of course-correcting, and if they kill the monster who started World War II he’ll just be replaced by someone similar.

Even though Hitler’s name is never mentioned the episode concludes with a trippy and inspired riff on the old “Kill Hitler as a baby” time travel trope while suggesting that everything on the show leading up to this time travel occurred in an alternate timeline that Scott and Al changed, but not as much as they liked, by murdering poor Franz as an infant, only to have Hitler spring up in his place.

If the time travel elements of “Aubrey Plaza Wears a Velvet Off-the-Shoulder Gown With Flowers in Her Hair” don’t seem to make much sense or hold up under scrutiny that’s for a very good reason: they’re intentionally convoluted and nonsensical. In fact there’s a gag in the second time travel episode that maps out some, but not all, of the many inconsistencies and gaffes in the show’s five year run.

In lines reverberating with meta-textual resonance, Scott observes of the modest popularity of his television empire, “Being obscure isn’t that bad! When no one’s watching you, no one cares what you do! But if you’re popular then you have to pander to stay popular and everyone wants to chop off your head for the slightest little thing.”

In its fifth season, and also all the seasons leading up to it, Comedy Bang! Bang! experimented and took chances like no one was watching and it could consequently do whatever it wanted creatively.

There’s a purity and a freedom that comes with not worrying about ratings or popularity or getting picked up for another season. The fifth season of Comedy Bang! Bang! luxuriates in that freedom, in no small part because it knew, going in, that there would be no six season (or a movie, to put things in Community terms) and consequently no point in playing it safe.

Comedy Bang! Bang! Episode 95: “T-Pain Wears Shredded Jeans and a Printed Shirt”
over 4 years ago – Thu, Apr 16, 2020 at 02:56:43 PM

Episode 95: “T-Pain Wears Shredded Jeans and a Printed Shirt”

Original airdate: June 17, 2016

Even before I finally wrote watched it a few years back, I was weirdly fascinated bordering on obsessed with the 1996 Harold Ramis non-classic cloning comedy Multiplicity. For years, whenever I was feeling particularly overworked or stressed out I’d find myself returning to the thought, “Man, I wish I was Michael Keaton in Multiplicity and I could just make clones of myself who could do this work for me.”

I must not be alone in thinking often about Ramis’ wildly disappointing flop because in 2002 Multiplicity inspired a Treehouse of Horror segment on The Simpsons and in 2016 Scott and Al made an episode of Comedy Bang! Bang! spoofing Multiplicity, with a little The Fly thrown in.

The episode begins with Al noticing that Scott seems even more depressed than usual. Scott concedes that he’s bummed because he can’t pick up a heavily discounted blu-ray copy of The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and host the show at the same time.

That’s when Dr. Dee Nancy Ay, a woman a cloning company informs him that’s not necessarily true. “Scott, you’ve heard of Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullens Jr, right? So why not two yous!”, she inquires brightly. The good doctor is talking U2 and Two Yous with Scott, so she is most assuredly speaking his language.

Dr. Ay goes on to explain that through wizard magic it is now possible to create clones to help with errands and chores and other busywork. Scott decides clones are just what he needs to accomplish unimportant tasks like laundry, signing posters and buying The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel at a heavily discounted priceso he happily volunteers to be duplicated.

Scott’s clone is EXACTLY like him—a carbon copy man, as it were—except for the many ways in which he’s different. His hair is different, as is his clothing, and he has a British accent for some reason, not unlike how Michael Keaton’s clones in Multiplicity were exact duplicates except that they were all substantially different.

One clone just isn’t enough, however, so soon Scott is creating even more clones to help out. Celebrity guest T-Pain even has a go at cloning although a fly enters the chamber with him and ends up producing a half-fly, half-human monster Scott jokes may be a monstrosity and an insult to the Lord of creation, but is also “pretty fly.” Al does not chime in, but you can tell from his expression that all the goyim of Celebrity Bang! Bang! think he’s pretty fly for a rap guy.

Yes, I know that T-Pain is primarily an R&B singer but he started out as a rapper (as evidenced by the title of his debut album, 2005’s Rappa Ternt Sanga)so please, let me have that terrible wordplay. This is, after all, the self-indulgent vanity project version of the book, so I am definitely keeping in at least half of the terrible puns instead of cutting them out.

Speaking of conceptually appropriate “Weird Al” Yankovic songs, during a commercial promoting cloning, Dr. Dee Nancy Ay boasts that her business will have satisfied customers saying, “I think I’m a clone now”, to which Al indignantly replies “Hey, that’s my line!”

Al also takes center stage in a parody of food travelogue shows called Real Food that begins with Al in an upscale eatery talking up mushroom croquettes before uttering the show’s title and instantly being transported, through the magic of editing, to a steakhouse that is then posited as real food.

Real Food captures the exact look and sound of the foodie shows it’s spoofing as Al’s conception of “real food” grows more and more bizarre that it becomes less a conventional catchphrase than a form of madness.

Al keeps repeating the phrase “real food” until it loses all meaning. By the end of the commercial it has become a scream of pure insanity.

When Al howls about such surreal, inedible combinations as “a tooth in a thimble”, a “Wii-remote drizzled with beer”, “an Arizona State sweatshirt with salt sprinkled on it” and “an episode of Taxi plugged into a plate of hair” all representing “real food” he has lost all sight of what constitutes either food or reality before things end more or where they began, at the upscale restaurant.

As with Real Food, the clone subplot of "T-Pain Wears Shredded Jeans and a Printed Shirt” just keeps getting sillier and sillier and more exquisitely, deliberately ridiculous. We learn deep into the episode that the Scott Aukerman who has been hosting the show from the second season on is himself a clone that the original Aukerman commissioned so that he could devote all of his time to playing games and hosting podcasts.

The episode ends with Scott using and abusing his clones to achieve his dream of creating a barbershop quartet in his image. Scott speaks for all of us when he asks a disturbed as well as intrigued Al, “Who hasn’t dreamed of having a barbershop quartet made up of people who look exactly like them singing songs with their name replacing the actual lyrics?”

Just as Al turned the rusty tin of The Phantom Menace’s convoluted plot into the comic gold of “The Saga Begins”, this performs a similarly impressive act of creative alchemy, transforming the premise of Multiplicity, one of the most under-achieving comedies of the past thirty years, into twenty-two minutes of sublime science-fiction silliness.

Episode 94: "Tegan and Sara Wear Leather Jackets and Skinny Jeans” Original airdate: June 10, 2016
over 4 years ago – Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 03:06:57 PM

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Comedy Bang! Bang! Episode 92: “The Lonely Island Wear Dark Pants and Eyeglasses”
over 4 years ago – Sun, Apr 12, 2020 at 10:20:07 AM

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Comedy Bang! Bang! Season 5, Episode 3: “Tony Hale Wears a Blue Flannel Shirt and Fuchsia Sneakers”
over 4 years ago – Sun, Apr 12, 2020 at 09:54:49 AM

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