To all of you who binge watch episodes of Parks and Recreation or Brooklyn Nine-Nine like I do, it may be time for our comedy to get a swift kick in the gut. Both are excellent shows and I would never bash something that people find funny, but Adult Swim is producing comedy on some strange new frontiers. Just when I gave up hope on television comedies, something so weird and original comes along that it turns everything on its head. I could explain it to death but it’s better for you to watch the first (and presumed only) episode of Too Many Cooks.
Yes, that’s eleven minutes of a theme song, and one of the funniest things I’ve seen in years. As an experiment Adult Swim premiered this show at 4:30 AM and it instantly went viral. Too Many Cooks is impossibly strange, but it is an evolution of comedy. This progression can only really be seen on networks like Cartoon Network and specifically Adult Swim. Comedy is a living, breathing medium that constantly needs to change, push the envelope, and grow. If you don’t find this video funny that’s a personal preference matter, but it may also mean that comedy has “passed you by”. This Dadastic view on comedy has been running rampant on Adult Swim for years, and through shows like Too Many Cooks you can see how anti-humor and humor can be blended into one perfect video that is full of laughs and skin-crawling insanity, while still spoofing every single TV theme song from 1980 through today!
I hope that Too Many Cooks brings back this attitude to Adult Swim. I’ve been a fan of the networks stranger efforts over the past decade with shows like Aqua Teen Hunger Force and SeaLab 2021. I always felt that shows like Family Guy and Robot Chicken just continued to tell the same pop-reference-laden cheap pops, where some of the darker and stranger shows represented real, creative humor. I hope that Too Many Cooks latches on and it’s cultural phenomenon pushes the envelope further. No other networks would have been willing to take the potential risk on a show like Too Many Cooks. The future of comedy has been dormant on Adult Swim for years and they appear to be the only network with the ability to venture into the weird. This is the future of laughs folks and Adult Swim is ON it! In the meantime try to get the theme song out of your head! Oh and here’s Smarf.
GET CHOMPED