Originally published at: Revisiting Mad TV's 1999 skit "Pretty White Kids with Problems" | Boing Boing
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The best part of that was the real Lisa Loeb singing the theme.
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This skit nailed it so hard.
MAD TV was kind of a treasure. The first season is supremely awkward because they actually tried to make it “MAD Magazine sketch comedy show” and I’m not sure how popular MAD was at the time still but the crossovers (spy vs spy) were just… meh. And the last season was “help our ratings plz!”
Personally I think MAD TV was overall funnier than SNL because it didn’t have to DO IT LIVE!!!1. Some of the jokes kinda don’t hold up or seem sexist/racist/ableist though. For instance, the “korean guy who can’t speak english” skits were a bit ha ha ha that wouldn’t be funny if a white person wrote it huh. The “disabled restaurant hostess” one was pretty yikes (and also seriously committed physical comedy.) Ms Swan was supposed to be Bjork but was more “white person playing Margaret Cho’s mom in full goblin mode”.
General favorites:
- 3 Minute Meals
- Stuart
- Dot
- Actually any skit with Stephanie Weir
- Mo Collins skits
- The egg cookathon
- The gay bar Ms Swan skit.
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She was and still is, in the few things I’ve seen her in, an absolute delight. From what I’ve been able to find she’s still married to Bob Dassie, which means they’re still WeirDass.
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Will Sasso as Elvis getting more and more insane as he plays him through the years was a favorite. https://youtu.be/F6aH-I6OicM
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Dancing Queen is one of our favorites and any of the Dot sketches but especially the one in the dryer.
With help of Jesus and black magic…
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I don’t think Will Sasso ever got the appreciation he deserved. He’s amazingly funny, but seems like he often gets relegated to physical comedy because he’s “the fat guy”.
He also did an increasingly insane Kenny Rogers, and Randy Newman basically singing the same song just with different lyrics. I thought it was hilarious. His role on the TV show “Mom” was great, also - but kind of the same thing, didn’t quite get the appreciation he deserved, but he demonstrated a lot of range (IMO).
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Mad TV was really a brilliant sketch comedy show. It had a lot of the edginess of In Living Color and a talent pool that would give SCTV a run for its money.
It took a couple seasons for it to find its groove, and obviously some of its content hasn’t aged very well (especially some of the use of black face/yellow face) but there was so much good stuff there.
I really liked Mad TV back in the day. Still a Will Sasso fan.
What is crazy is I just thought about Stuart the other day, and that same day saw the actor who portrayed him on an episode of What We Do in the Shadows.
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