Last week in an interview, Olde English was asked who our influences are.  Instead of listing some of our actual influences like Stella, or the Upright Citizens Brigade, I went off on a bizarre tangent about MadTV and Sugar Ray.  I’m not sure why— I think I was trying to make a broader point about videos vs. live sketches— but I thought I’d take this opportunity to state, for the record: Hey, guys, MadTV wasn’t all bad.

Case in point— the above parody of Scrubs.  In three minutes, they nail everything that bugs me about that show— the self-conscious cartoonishness, the overbearing narration, the awkwardly crammed in sentimentality.  And they’re able to do it by aping the format of the show itself— they couldn’t do all the quick cuts, goofy sound effects, and musical montages if MadTV were a live show.

I have never met anyone who has openly admitted to enjoying MadTV, but I used to watch both it and Saturday Night Live back when I was in middle school, and sketch for sketch, joke for joke, I always preferred the manic energy of MadTV to the overstuffed, self-satisfied Colin Quinn-fest that was SNL at the time.  I was always particularly impressed by MadTV’s pop-culture parodies— how they’d hone in on an artist’s quirks and blow them up, like Gwen Stefani’s Asian fetish in this video:

The video is fast-paced and layered with jokes, and it has an infectious energy that makes me want to watch it again as soon as it’s over.  To a teenager who didn’t get cable— who didn’t know about Kids in the Hall or Mr. Show or the State— there were two sketch shows on TV, and one had the benefit of pre-taped bits and fast-paced editing, and one just had live sketches.

Of course, before MadTV, there was the Ben Stiller Show, and Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and countless other groups with filmed sketches that I didn’t know about at the time.  And in the last few years, Saturday Night Live has started making music videos and pre-taped sketches of their own, to undeniable success.  Meanwhile, shows like Human Giant and Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job brilliantly push the boundaries of what you can do with video (Human Giant’s director/editor Jason Woliner is as essential as the other more visible members of the group).

So, no, they didn’t do it first, and they didn’t do it best, BUT if you ask me what made me know when I was a kid that I wanted to make funny videos when I grew up, the answer is MadTV.

-Raphael