An old roommate of mine—this spectacularly housebound, Notes From the Underground sociopath—had a favorite quip: “People think it’s easy doing nothing,” he’d say, then pause, surveying the assortment of overflowing ashtrays that filled his coffee table. Selecting the nearest feasible target, he’d gingerly flip an ash off his cigarette, usually managing to avoid a minor avalanche, then sit back, concluding: “But it’s only easy at first.” A frustrating guy to say the least. He’d emigrated from Bulgaria in his teens, and though after several silent years he had burst into a fluent-but-mumbly, Beatles-accented English, he seemed permanently alienated by the linguistic isolation. But if you could tune into his disaffected shaggy-dog monologues, you’d be rewarded with deadpan twists whose comic force was directly tied to the overlong setups and willful lulls in delivery. And if you listened long enough, you’d begin to see larger patterns, until you realized his whole shtick, down to the most offhand detail, was a ridiculously practiced, nihilistic vaudeville.
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For the most part reviewers have shrugged it off one of two ways: “I don’t get it” or “I can’t explain.” The Reader’s J.R. Jones charitably called it more “arch silliness than actual humor.” Though that’s sort of a tomato/tomahto distinction, I do know what he means, and it points to the particular kind of anticomedy Willis and Maiellaro practice, descended like other subbreeds from Andy Kaufman’s trailblazing experiments in the field. But while most of Uncle Andy’s nephews—squirm comics like Larry David and Sacha Baron Cohen—trade in awkward silences, Willis and Maiellaro prefer a purer form of silence—dead air, a specialty of the Adult Swim franchise.
The Aqua Teen characters debuted in the “Baffler Meal” episode as a trio of talking fast-food items whose full-throttle obnoxiousness and acid-casualty patter left even the SG principals thunderstruck. Remodeled for a series of their own—think Tracey Ullman-era Simpsons versus the golden age stuff—the narcissistic milk shake, childlike meatball, and responsible box of fries were allegedly a crime-fighting team. The opening and closing credits, set to an ass-kicking Schoolly D cut, promised action-packed capers—but none ever materialized. Instead the story swiftly devolved into endless bad-roommate drama, stoked by visits from dumb-ass aliens transparently summoned to fill the narrative void. With plots driven by incidental disputes, distractions, and a procession of ineffectual guest villains, Aqua Teen soon revealed itself to be character driven—if any driving was going on at all.
Framed as a succession of contradictory, bullshit origin myths told in flashback, the “plot” rides the MacGuffin of a psychotic exercise machine, also Godzilla-size, that’s bent on world destruction. Faintly rabbitlike and propelled by a cheery gay-disco workout song, its both a stand-alone comic inversion and a generally recognizable reference—Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, anyone?—but the show’s rich tradition of overhyped action and self-destructing payoff makes it that much funnier. As the Aqua Teens’ most annoying alien foils come out of the woodwork, traveling back and forth in time to prevent the invention of the so-called Insane-O-Flex—or steal it, or something—the story spirals nowhere, tangling the histories of team and machine into a hopeless knot. The sheer perversity of this antinarrative has its own appeal. But the way it threatens to resolve long-standing mysteries (which it doesn’t) with appearances by characters long proved unreliable (e.g., the Cybernetic Ghost of Christmas Past, whose stories always begin “Thousands of years ago into the future . . .”) is all about cumulative absurdity.
Written and directed by Matt Maiellaro and Dave Willis
With Maiellaro, willis, Carey Means, Dana snyder, Andy Merrill, Mike Schatz, C. Martin Croker, and Neil Peart
