Review: Daniel Tosh, Tosh.O

Comedy Central is quickly becoming the K-Tel Records of things humorous. If you’re too young to remember, K-Tel made a lucrative business of finding the cheapest master tapes available for popular music, slapping 20 of them together and selling it on television. Sometimes, true gems could be found lurking in the grooves of such albums (and later, compact discs) but for the most part what they were peddling were tracks best described by the phrase let’s use the other take.

Now that I’ve said that, let’s talk about surfer bro and comedian Daniel Tosh, and his new venture - Tosh.0 - on Comedy Central.

Tosh has made a name for himself touring the giggle circuit, and if I had to pick just two words to describe his forte, they would be clever and fast. He does relatively well in clubs near universities and less well in venues where the consumer age exceeds 50; you have to be a bit street-smart and know a bit of the current lingo to catch some of his punchlines.

The Tosh style is rapid, irreverent, and fairly campy; I’ll avoid delving into his sexuality, but his mannerisms run between lightly metrosexual (mostly) punctuated with bursts of moderately queeny which stop just short of you go, girl!

And he’s just plain fun to watch. He’s very natural onstage or in front of the camera, and he’s very easy on the eyes as well - he’s fit, trim, and actually quite handsome.

Truthfully, I have few bones to pick with Tosh.0, other than, like most of Comedy Central’s recent offerings, it’s rather lightweight and shows obvious signs of a lack of committment.

Tosh.0 describes itself as a “one a one-man crusade to take the Internet to task” but misses that mark a bit. Most of the material is related to things found on the web, but few are actually displayed and most of those are displayed in a small simulated television which is blue-screened adjacent to Tosh.

It’s almost as if Talk Soup got drunk one night, and fucked one of my favorite public access shows (VLog TV) and had an illegitimate “kid.0″

However, it’s a show worth keeping an eye on. Any man who describes himself as intensely sarcastic and has a dog named Fidel Castro is bound to put forth a gem or two given the chance.

I watched the first two episodes and I’m looking forward to the third; inspite of its flaws, its an entertaining show and has potential.

The deciding factor will be whether Comedy Central sees the potential of Tosh.0 instead of just another of its half-hour slot-fillers.

~ pagemonkey