The Venture Bros: Escape to the House of Mummies, Part II

The boys continue to warp and shatter the structures and expectations of form.  It was funny enough that they put a fake “previously on The Venture Bros.” at the top of the show, but then they put a fake “next week on The Venture Bros.” at the end.  So we’re apparently watching the second act of a three-part episode, what would in normal circumstances be released on DVD as The Venture Bros. Movie.

What makes this monkeying with structure great, of course, is the way it frees up the writers’ creativity.  Why bother explaining how the boys got into the room with the spikes, or how Dean’s head got removed, or how Edgar Allen Poe got roped into this mess — that was all explained in Part I.  And how will they get away from the bad guys, what will happen to the second Brock, how will Dean’s head get put back, all that will be explained in Part III.  Right now, we’ve got the tumultuous, everything-in-motion Part II.

Of course, all that motion and calamity is the “B-story” this week.  In the foreground is Rusty’s childish contest with Dr. Orpheus.  The science/religion conflict that sparked in Episode 1 explodes into flames here, continuing Season 2’s theme of taking background ideas from Season 1 and making them the foreground here.  Rusty abandons his family and tortures his friends, Dr. Orpheus fools his daughter and puts her into a coma, all for the sake of this contest.  The goal of the contest?  “Who can be the smallest,” of course, again, making the metaphoric literal.  And when they both lose, they only do so because they both win!  They’re both the smallest men!

And while it’s true that Orpheus is a know-it-all, I too felt the urge to correct the deity when he made the mistake of confusing Argos and Cerberus.

I once wrote for a comedy show, and the sketches for the show were developed as though the show were taking place in the late nineteenth century and were being written for the vaudeville stage.  The producers insisted that each sketch must have a premise, development of the premise, a satisfying conclusion to the premise (called “the payoff”) and then a final “switcheroo” that they called “The Button.”  This strict adherence to 100-year-old comedy rules helped ensure that every idea the writers had would eventually be turned from something everyone thought was funny to something no one thought was funny.  After a few weeks of observing just how deadening this process was, I raised my hand in a meeting and said “I’m sorry, didn’t Monty Python prove, twenty-fiveyears ago, that you don’t need any of this crap?  Why can’t we just think of funny ideas, keep them going for as long as they’re funny, then cut away when they’re not funny any more?  Won’t that make the show fresher, more unpredictable, cut out all this dead time, and keep all the sketches from feeling exactly alike?”

It was questions like this that have kept me from working in television comedy for the past ten years.

So it’s good to see The Venture Bros., in its second season, being so voracious in its appetite to expand the boundaries of the possible in television.