Drawn to the Sketch

Spoof meets truth as 'Mr. Show' hits the road

by MATT PEIKEN
St. Paul Pioneer Press, September 27, 2002©

In an early episode of HBO's defunct sketch-comedy series "Mr. Show With Bob & David," David Cross plays a performance artist about to defecate on an American flag, only to come up constipated.

That sketch blends without interruption into a time trip, where the founding fathers (and a wiseacre Abe Lincoln) design an American flag that, through its distinct pattern of colors, stripes and stars, renders "ye olde performance artists" incapable of bowel movements. In the next sketch, the performance artist returns, this time in a courtroom, where he's suing the flag for restricting his freedom of speech.

The sequence illustrates how, during its four seasons, "Mr. Show" reigned as one of the most consistently funny sketch comedy programs in television.

Bob Odenkirk and David Cross aren't surprised to see their popularity spike since their show's cancellation, after the 1998 season. A DVD of the first two seasons, released this summer, has sold more than 100,000 copies, and the duo's first sketch-comedy stage tour, "Hooray for America," is selling out multiple performances in New York City, Chicago and San Francisco. The show passes through Minneapolis on Sunday.

"It makes me a little mad at the people who doubted us," Odenkirk says, naming HBO and tour promoters Clear Channel among them. "In a lot of ways, it's like 'Monty Python.' People in America didn't see it until it was over. Then it became this cult thing, and that's what's happening with us."

Sketch comedy was stale ("Saturday Night Live") and sophomoric (Fox's "MADtv") when "Mr. Show" debuted. Odenkirk and Cross, who met as writers on "The Ben Stiller Show," reinvigorated the medium.

Their satirical sketches fed from one to the next without breaks and dug beneath obvious targets to bare raw, laugh-out-loud truths about pop culture, politics, religion, business and social strictures. There were moments of tripe -- flat ideas ran long and were poor segues for follow-up sketches. But as Cross mentions in a "Mr. Show" episode, a certain percentage of "rat feces" is bound to wind up in a sketch comedy program.

"A lot of sketch-comedy writers just want to make people laugh but don't feel this same desire we do to say, 'Here's what I think,' " Odenkirk says. "You have to want to get across a certain point of view, which is what I think good stand-up comics do, but sketch comedy allows you to do that with several different voices and go a lot of different places."

"Hooray for America " isn't a sendup of contemporary patriotism. Rather, it's a 5-year-old screenplay Odenkirk and Cross have converted into the anchor of their stage tour.

Cross plays an actor hired by the world-dominating Globo-Chem Corp. (a "Mr. Show" fixture) to run for president of the United States . Threaded around this plotline and dissection of the American political process are scenes touching on corporate economic scandals, American foreign policy and mentally impaired inmates on death row, among rekindled "Mr. Show" sketches.

On the duo's Web site (bobanddavid.com), Odenkirk and Cross say their goal for this tour is to "tell a story that will make you laugh more than you cry, teach, then preach, and grab you by the crotch until you believe in apple pie again."

The tour is certain to raise their profiles. Until now, Odenkirk and Cross have been largely cast in blink-and-you'll-miss movie and TV roles. They've penned several screenplays together and individually, few of them produced and none distributed. They're also perhaps the only people to write and star in a movie they don't want released.

"Run Ronnie Run" is based on "Mr. Show" character Ronnie Dobbs, a scrawny, long-haired piece of trash played by Cross, with the distinction of ranking as the most-arrested man in the history of the television show "Cops." Cross and Odenkirk aren't happy with the final cut, but with no creative control, they're trying to move, mentally, to other projects -- only some of them together.

Their comic chemistry stems, in large part, from their personal contrasts.

Cross performs stand-up comedy sets with independent rock bands. Odenkirk has a wife and two daughters. Odenkirk looked with reverence on the anniversary memorials of Sept. 11. Such commemorations "make me nauseous," Cross said, joking he would instead spend the anniversary date attending a memorial of Afghanistan citizens killed by American troops.

"We have very different takes and very spirited discussions on a lot of things," Cross says. "But we both read the news and gravitate to the same issues, and we tend to approach things from an intellectual and emotional place. And if we still can't agree on how to do something, we cry until one of us gets his way."