Oh my goodness was I excited for “Jon Benjamin has a Van.” It was Jon freakin’ (awesome) Benjamin with his own show! Not only that, but there was a cool van with a mural of him on the side of it. You can’t get much better. This man is Archer. This man is Bob Belcher. He’s Carl. He’s the Master. He was Ben Katz and of course he was the greatest cartoon character of all time: Coach McGuirk. His greatest role of all time though was probably the paramedic in “Not Another Teen Movie.” This gentleman has been making me laugh for a long time. He’s been successfully using one single voice to do a ton of characters and that’s not an easy thing to do. As you can tell by my glowing, I’m a big fan. After I saw the first episode I then remembered an important thing….
Jon gives them something to talk about.
That kind of thing is what Jon Benjamin finds funny. Is that funny? Sure. But if you expect stand-up comedy, seeing someone do this a few times gets old. Sometimes you just want the comedy. When left to his own accord, Benjamin will do something weird instead of funny. That seems to be thriving on Adult Swim, but Comedy Central isn’t the best place for it. His show just ended up being really odd. It relied on awkwardness and ridiculous situations. It just totally let me down. I was still sad to see it got cancelled because I was waiting for it to get better. I think towards the end of the season it was getting there, but sadly we’ll never know.
This for example was a bright spot.
Another issue with the program is that Comedy Central was bogged down with fake news shows. We’ve got the main stays Colbert and Stewart. We had the bombing of “Norm Macdonald’s Sports Show” just prior to the debut of Benjamin’s show, so the weird take on news shows was played out. They were essentially sawing the beaten to death horse in half.
JBHAV managed to get a solid two months out of the world with help from his decent background cast and guest stars. I think Mr. Benjamin works well in an ensemble, so I think that makes sense right? He’s got his news team contained stand-up Leo Allen, weird little Nathan and douchebag extraordinaire Gary Wilmes. I don’t have much to say about them. I’m now reliving the disappointment I had with this show.
I mean, episodes about little people, suicides, weird black Satanists stuff, and Jesus Christ’s pipe just were so lame. The very first episode where Jon tortures his producer Matt Walsh is the high point of the series, then it just tail spins. I like absurdist humor, but this was hardly either. I’m so sad about it. I’m now waiting until Sunday so I can hear Jon Benjamin on “Bob’s Burgers” and love him again. Sigh.
This is just a funny picture
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