INNER TUBING

#SheenasHouse: Jersey Shore at Sheena’s House

Sheena’s House is a new show with an unfortunate title that is broadcast prior to Jersey Shore on MTV Canada. It is hosted by Sheena Snively, whose official bio goes something like this:

As host of JERSEY SHORE AT SHEENA’S HOUSE, the always outrageous Sheena Snively and her wild family hold nothing back when picking apart the antics on episodes of JERSEY SHORE. Joining Sheena at the helm of the JERSEY SHORE tribunal is her boisterous and unconventional family including her parents, her husband, her sister, her adorable six-month old nephew, her brother in-law and his girlfriend.

Like Tom Green, Sheena is a graduate of a community college broadcasting program. She started out doing comedy on YouTube, and through some kind of magic (hard work? smarts?) now has a regular television show on cable TV. Impressive!

The show involves Sheena hanging out with her old-school Ontarian family (think Bob and Doug), hanging out in a wood-panelled basement, cracking jokes while watching Jersey Shore. As with any good family sitcom, incest jokes are a mainstay. Everyone in the family has signed up for this, they all know they’re on television, playing themselves, and they all want the show to succeed in its pursuit of hilarity. For example, during a friendly family dogpile between Sheena’s brothers, one of them mutters sotto voce “you better get incest and gay at the same time.” Editing plays an important part in the comedy, and a typical technique is to pick up on a subtle interaction like this and repeat it ad nauseum to highlight it, then keep repeating it until it’s disturbing, and repeat it some more until it’s funny again. The clip is cut and repeated, again and again, with some easy Final Cut effects thrown in the later iterations for good measure.

I showed a clip to an artist friend, whose immediate reaction was “the editing is like a Ryan Trecartin video.”  But after watching Jersey Shore it seemed like maybe the editing was more like, well, Jersey Shore. If the two shows at first seem like an incongruous match, after a while they start to make sense. They’re both reality shows, although the Jersey Shore cast never really gets to leave the set.  They’re both about families within a very specific cultural geography, and if it seems like the Snivelly’s are more in-on-the-joke, it’s probably a good thing to remember that they’re making maybe 1/50th of the money the Guidos are pulling in. Anyhow, good one, Sheena! Who says TV is dead? This is a fun show made by a smart, funny woman who knows how to operate in the current mass-media climate.

Ah, who cares, I can barely watch anything that’s not Battle Castle these days.

-posted by Zeesy

Regarding the Pain of Others: Kenny Hotz’ Triumph of the Will

If you live in Toronto, it’s possible you’ve seen Kenny Hotz around. He always looks hungover and tired and fat. If you are a young woman working in the service industry, he has hit on you. Not just hit on you. He has openly propositioned you for sex. It was a joke, but he means it. He does this all the time, which is why he is occasionally successful. It helps that he is kind of a celebrity, it increases the “good-story” value.

Hotz, star of Kenny vs. Spenny, is smart enough to know all this. He is the kind of personality type who would make a very successful CEO, if he wasn’t such a masochist. But he is, which is why he is in the business known as “show”. In Kenny Hotz’ Triumph of the Will, the official claim is that “Although he is driven by a personal and higher moral agenda, viewers can expect his tactics to be unconventional and unpredictable.” This is maybe half believable, in that his agenda is highly personal.

The pilot episode, “Rags to Bitches”, sees Kenny deposited naked and penniless in the desert outside Las Vegas, where he has 3 days to live the American Dream. He accomplishes his goal through theft, confidence and, sure, why not, sheer will. He is arrested, but only after he has amassed a significant amount of cash and gone crazy, “Vegas-style.” He can bail himself out, because this is Vegas, baby, and while you may not have the right to get drunk and dance in the middle of traffic, you do have the right to pay your way out of a night in jail. The episode ends with his drunken tribute to the grandfather he never knew, who arrived as an immigrant and became a success, without stealing anything from anyone. Kenny is ashamed, not at what he has become, but what he knows in his heart he has always been.

You can watch pretty much the whole series on YouTube, which means that while they haven’t quite locked their licensing down, there is a higher potential for the people of the world to discover the Kenny Hotz persona. I am not sure of the economics of this for Action (a Showcase subsidiary), but the payout of that kind of distribution is exactly what Hotz is after.

The truth is that Hotz is a performer, of a kind very particular to the here and now. There is no division between Kenny Hotz the man and Kenny Hotz the character. His friends and family are as much a part of the act as he is. Life is the performance, and if the cameras are rolling then there is all the more reason to undertake the cruel, mocking, hilarious activities he has been thinking about forever or for the past 30 seconds. Download the app.

To say there is no morality wouldn’t be fair. Hotz’ is a satirist, and this new show is his best effort yet to expose and undermine the hypocrisies and pieties of nice, normal people (I am particularly excited to watch episode 6, Children of Abraham, where Hotz attempts to raise funds for a mosque through the Jewish community). While he still gets off on achieving success at the expense of another, the context is focused back onto our shit world, where most people’s gain comes at someone else’s loss.

In summary: Kenny Hotz’s Triumph of the Will is funny and you will laugh, especially if you like laughing at how sad and miserable the world can be. Laughing at the pain of others, laughing at yourself.

-posted by Zeesy