Lots of Ingredients Make A Comedy Gumbo

A great many creators of comedic endeavors, from film to television to web content, follow the credo, “If this joke doesn’t make you laugh, the next one will.”  It seems that all you need to leave viewers thinking you’re funny is a decent ratio of a couple gems for every couple hours of content.

Take Saturday Night Live. Everyone can easily recall wanting more cowebell, but few remember with as much alacrity those jokes that bombed or the slow pace of the majority of the sketches.

The job of a comedian is to make the audience laugh, and the more jokes you throw at them, the more opportunities you got.  This seems to be the strategy behind Crackle‘s web series Comedy Gumbo.

Created by Payman Benz and Sean Becker of Awkward Pictures and billed as the sketch comedy show for those who don’t have time for a sketch comedy show, Comedy Gumbo does its best to give its audience as many chances to chuckle as one could possibly fit into a six-minute episode.

This plethora of comic inspiration ranges from the silly irreverent (a spot on two-second impression of Dane Cook) to the offensive irreverent (an old man and pre-adolescent girl singing

about the baths they share).

Benz and Becker cast a lot of lines in the series over a wide range of comedy, hoping the audience will bite.  And sometimes the audience does.

Sketches like Silly Gangster (a thugged out version Benz looking, well, silly), Looking out Window, and ShmappleBapp’s (a surreal Applebee’s that belongs in the world of Bunuel), are all funny enough to worthy remembrance. Furthermore, the fake ads for Mleh, a company immersed in diverse products (from cookies to car bars), is always good for a quick chuckle.

Other sketches, unfortunately, might only offend those who possess a sense of humor. Talking with Gramps is not only too long, but falls flat. The recurring character of Guy who doesn’t understand T.V. is tired after the first second, let alone the three or four other times he appeared on the screen.

All in all, however, Comedy Gumbo is full of enough ejoyable moments to warrant your attention if in need of a vapid divergence.  And those couple zingers you’ll see might even help you forget the not-so-funny bits.