“Do the dignified thing and send grandpa off with a party.”
There have been some modest changes afoot in this second season of Nick Swardson’s Pretend Time. The biggest one is that Nick is doing more standup in between sketch pieces. While it’s decent stuff for the most part, it’s noticeably weaker in my view than the typically daring feats of comedic mastery on display during the sketch bits.
And in terms of the sketches, Pretend Time excels at really bizarre, semi-disgusting, and very hilarious infomercial parodies. Handy Man 3000, for example, opens with an earnest-till-it-hurts narrator asking, “Ever try to masturbate in public but couldn’t get away with it?” (And, as an aside, your reaction to that one line – a la the piranhas litmus test that I posed last season – may be a good barometer of whether or not Pretend Time is for you.) In short, the Handy Man 3000 is a weird pregnancy-like suit for men with fake appendage attachment so as to free up a hand to allow men to, well, you know while in public. The animation of what’s going on inside the Hand Man 3000 suit is pulled straight out of a Prilosec -type commercial that we’ve all seen hundreds of times… except not quite like this. And the perfect tag on the bit is Nick Swardson, in full Handy Man 3000-garb, seeing a fellow Handy Man giving him a friendly wave from across the street.
And in another achievement in pushing right up to the line of really bad taste while still delivering a delicious blast of hilarity is a commercial for “Pinata your body!” Not only does it come through with a catchy ditty, but it advertises some sort of bizarro-world mortuary/party service that intones us to… “Do the dignified thing and send grandpa off with a party. “Just watch him die, bring him here, and then we’ll gut him and replace those guts with some candy!” And then, just because, “custom” versions are introduced, such as those for dead people who are not so fondly remembered (“I filled you full of shit, because you don’t deserve candy,” an angry man says as we see him kicking a corpse/pinata).
And that’s where Pretend Time achieves a level somewhere close to brilliance (and I don’t use that word lightly): taking an original and screwball concept – stuffing corpses with candy to make them party pinata in this case – and executing it exceptionally well.
Of course, as with any sketch/variety show, not everything is going to work out quite as well. The opening sketch involving a Sodoku-worshipping nerd and his dog Vanilla (and have to love that right there) is fairly ambitious and ends up being pretty amusing (let’s just say that Vanilla gets his final revenge, smothering Captain Soduku with a pillow after a lengthy human-animal game of intrigue).
The one sketch that really didn’t work for me was yet another infomercial-y bit for Pump Punch, which is a punching bag product that has something to do with working out “gay rage” in the privacy of your home. Yeah… it got a little too out there, even for me.
It’s noteworthy that this episode did not include any recurring characters as I recall, opting instead to lean on original sketch characters and Nick’s standup. While I love Swardson, I’d vote for a little less standup in favor of bringing back everyone’s favorite amorous machine, Gay Robot.
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.