I miss the Comedy Channel

I miss the Comedy Channel


You may not guess it from my current viewing habits, but much of my high-school TV viewing time was taken up by what used to be known as the Comedy Channel. Back then, it actually featured (gasp) stand-up comedy and some rather cheesy original shows. Some of you might remember the old (and not all that good) "other comedy channel" called HA! - the two merged around 1992 into Comedy Central and it just hasn't been the same since then.



I was reminded of this last month when my brother came to visit me and we went to see Brian Regan at the Comedy Connection in Boston. He's probably best described as a cross between Jerry Seinfeld (in that he does observational comedy) and Jim Carrey (in that he takes the observations to the extreme). He's completely clean (no racist jokes, no sexist jokes, no swearing) and really, hilariously funny. The show was so good that I've resolved that I want to get out to comedy clubs more often. My wife, who was raised on more conventional TV and movies, asked me who I would want to go see. The first two names that came to mind were Larry Miller and Bob Nelson. Then revealing my true comedy-saturated past to her, I had to put these people in some sort of context. "Well, the first one is the clerk in the store where Richard Gere and Julia Roberts buy all their clothes in Pretty Woman, and the second one is Arnold Schwarzenegger's partner's boyfriend from Kindergarten Cop. Easy to remember, right?



Hmm. Ok.



When I graduated from college, I taught school for a while in a place that didn't have cable. Yep, no cable and only bad network reception out in the boondocks of Maine...for some reason the population was so sparse where I was that it wasn't profitable for the cable company to actually lay down the lines unless they knew they'd have enough subscribers. So the lines just stopped about five miles on either end of the road running throughour little town because we were that isolated. And so my days without comedy began.



I moved to Massachusetts a year later and had it back for a little while, but then for some reason it wasn't part of the standard cable package and I was once again comedyless. At the time we were too cheap to pay for the next tier of pricing - why do I want to pay $10 a month for one more channel I want to see, when it means I have to flip through The Fungus Network and The Madagascar Movie Channel to get to it? But last year, when they reworked the cable packages, it was all of a sudden magically back...and I just didn't care.



What happened to Comedy Central? I mean, it's not like I'm clamoring for a return of Rich Hall's Onion World, but some stand-up would be nice. Who wants to see reruns of talk shows? How does Late Night with Conan O'Brien qualify as a comedy show? I never found Dave Attell all that funny, let alone Dave Attell walking around at 3 in the morning, and while Dave Chappell was completely snubbed for an Oscar after his work as Achoo in "Robin Hood: Men in Tights", is that really what little it takes to get a show these days? Maybe Wayne's World was eerily prescient...I dunno. (By the way, "prescient" has to be one of my favorite words that I can toss around in writing but I'd never say because I don't really know how to pronounce it. Fun stuff.)



Maybe we need to start HA! up again or something...sorta like MuchMusic taking MTV to task (ok, so that may be overstating it a little bit). I yearn for the days of "Tommy Sledge, Private Eye" or "Night After Night with Allan Havey". Hell, I'd even sit through some of those old 70's stand-up routines by Steve Mittelman or Carol Leifer.



Ok, that's two Carol Leifer references in a week. Better stop now.