'Ugly Americans,'
living up to its name
Comedy Central show is mostly adolescent humor
By Tom Conroy
Mar 17, 2010
There’s no reason an adult cartoon can’t work. The problem is that most animation that is supposedly aimed at grownups is really meant for adolescents.
Comedy Central’s series “Ugly Americans,” premiering tonight at 10:30 p.m., occasionally rises to actual wit, but too much of the humor relies on either gross-out violence or boundary-testing sex jokes. That may be enough for the younger viewers who’ve helped make Adult Swim a success, but most adults will quickly tire of the show.
“Ugly Americans” does have a viable, well-developed premise (although it could be accused of imitating both HBO’s “True Blood” and Fox’s “Alien Nation”): The series is set in an alternative New York City in which various horror, sci-fi and fantasy creatures live alongside regular people. Mark (voiced by Matt Oberg) is a young man who works in the Department of Integration, helping both human and nonhuman newcomers.
Mark’s roommate, Randall (Kurt Metzger), is a zombie. “You know that time when you’ve just moved to the city,” Mark says in voice-over, “and you take the first apartment you find on Craigslist with some dude you never expected?”
Mark is having an office romance with his boss, Callie (Natasha Leggero), who is literally a demon from hell. It turns out that hell is a giant mall with stores like Demon Marcus and Blood, Bath and Beyond. (The latter pun appeared years ago on “The Simpsons,” a show for which David M. Stern, an “Ugly Americans” executive producer, used to work.)
Although “Ugly Americans” throws a lot of jokes at the wall, often in easy-to-miss visuals, relatively few of them stick. But the satire of government bureaucracy and of America’s varied responses to the aliens among us is relatively smart.
When a national-security type tortures a squid-like alien by holding it out of water, it yells, “Airboarding is illegal!”
More often, the show settles for sick jokes. A parody of the violence in “Gangs of New York” quickly goes from funny to queasy.
The sex humor is both juvenile and icky. In a singles bar, Randall and Mark check out a girl who has multiple breasts and whose face is located in her crotch. She unzips her jeans to blow them a kiss.
When the jealous Callie shows up and drags Mark off, Randall says, “Fine, more facegina for me.”
The animation is rudimentary and rather ugly, but both “The Simpsons” and “South Park” have shown that a show can get away with that. Both of those shows have also proved that a cartoon can make adults laugh while testing the limits of good taste if it’s clever enough and has a point of view.
There’s enough evidence of intelligence in “Ugly Americans” to suggest that it could work its premise to far better effect. Sadly, it seems the producers are going to continue to try to win ugly.
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