All Politics is Lo-Brow

“MXC,� Spike’s cult comedy that repurposes a particularly sadistic Japanese game show – you know the kind, those that are offered bizarre and context-free on YouTube – and fills it with breathless wordplay (much of it risqué, though you have to be quick to catch a lot of it), goes political tonight. Well, sort of.

In “The White House Vs. the World,� AKA “a diplomatic quagmire,� the Administration squares off against its critics, in games involving running across stones in a swamp, running through walls that are only occasionally run-throughable, trying to steal second base on a baseball diamond that’s more muck than sod and riding a mechanical bullfrog while shooting a watergun at a floating rubber bat. (If the YouTube clips don’t make much sense out of context, this show doesn’t make much sense even given a context.)

Naturally, tonight’s installment is not really political, just an opportunity to ladle on even more puns. Hence, contestants are named Condescenda Rice, Jenna Ann-Hauser Bush and Paul Wolfoblitzer; Donald Rumsfeld’s pun is so tasteless it’s probably best not to mention it here. When Colon Pound takes a tumble, he’s referred to as “the White House Fall guy.� Of Jack Girtha, it’s observed, “He shoots that gun as wildly as he does his mouth off.�

As usual, there are lots and lots of puns and even more incredibly cheap jokes. Sometimes you wish that writers Paul Abeyta, Peter Kaikko and Larry Strawther would take the comedic high road just a smidgen more often, but the show is so utterly dense with material that that’s clearly just not possible. So sit back, relax and enjoy what must be 40 “bucking� jokes in the five-minute bullfrog-riding sequence, inevitably entitled “Buck Off.�

- “MXC,� 12:30 a.m. tonight (actually, Saturday morning); Spike.