Comedy Central’s new standup series isn’t your typical dude-with-a-mic-telling-jokes show. Mash Up is better: It’s comedy specially made for the internet masses.
Each show starts with the basics — a comedian telling a joke to an audience — but then cuts to a re-enactment of the incident the comic is relaying, complete with sight gags, pratfalls and anything else that makes the riff funny. If that sounds familiar, it should: The format comes from a (now defunct) site called Blerds.com (short for “blogging nerds”) that made viral videos in that same vein. The creators of Mash Up, including host T.J. Miller, came from the Chicago comedy crew that made those previous clips.
“We’re all sort of watching another type of comedy emerge, which is just even shorter form and it’s OK if it’s low-fidelity,” Miller, who audiences may remember as “Hud” in Cloverfield, said in an interview with Wired. “We pay attention to that and we like the idea of doing something that appeals to that audience.”
In addition to Miller, the show features fellow Chicago comedy crew members Hannibal Buress, Sean Flannery, C.J. Sullivan and Blergs.com director Jordan Vogt-Roberts. Cut together with 8-bit introductions of each segment (Miller blames the “nerdcore influence” on Vogt-Roberts), Mash Up also features, well, mashups in the form of word puns turned into sketches (for example “S.W.A.T-o-Tune” and a police-shoot-out-meets-R&B-sing-off called “Bad BOYZ II MEN in Black,” below).
The show’s life on Comedy Central follows a well-received special the channel aired last year called Mash Up that birthed the general style of the new half-hour series.
“At first we started and just sort of envisioned the idea of mashing sketch comedy into stand-up, just smashing those two hard and letting the fragments fall and be a show,” Miller said. “And Comedy Central rightly caught on to the idea that if you introduce other comics and let them be in these visualizations, you’ve got a pretty interesting stand-up show.”
Mash Up premieres Tuesday night (technically 12:30 a.m. Wednesday/11:30 p.m. Central Tuesday) on Comedy Central.
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