So I've finally finished Atlas Shrugged and my opinion is...

Children's Hospital and the Quick Comedy Question

Rob Coddry as Dr Blake Downs in Adult Swim's Children's Hospital

Recently, I’ve started watching the excellent TV comedy series Children’s Hospital. Ostensibly a spoof of the Hospital drama genre (ER, Grey’s Anatomy, you know the drill), it branches out rather quickly into being a wilfully silly exercise in absurdity and ripping apart the conventions of genre TV. There’s a doctor who was a cop who quit after 9/11. There’s a nurse who falls in love with her patient - who happens to be a 6-year-old with advanced ageing disease. There’s a doctor who tries to use the healing power of laughter, with results that aren’t quite so funny for the patients. Basically, it’s hilarious, and it’s yet another feather in the cap of the most inventive, creative comedy network going. 

Watching this show, I’ve come to realise that Adult Swim is probably my favourite comedy channel right now. I’ve always tended to like their shows, right from the days that they produced cheap off-beat surrealist animation - I can still remember stumbing across Aqua Teen Hunger Force on CNX (RIP) and having my puny teenage mind blown. I remember then watching Space Ghost: Coast to Coast and loving its sense of nostalgia-distortion (I even managed to fit my love of this into an essay at Uni). I remember watching Xavier: Renegade Angel for the first time and not being entirely sure what I’d just seen, and being simultaneously amazed and appalled by what followed. I’ve also greatly enjoyed their expansion into live action programming, be it the wilfully obtuse surrealism of Tim and Eric Awesome Show or the caustically absurd naturalism of Delocated, probably the best comedy that not enough people I know have watched. Children’s Hospital is the latest in a long list of programmes that have rocked my world.

Adult Swim appear to have a very appealing mantra: we’ll give you a very tiny budget in return for also giving you creative freedom. Obviously this system requires either extremely passionate workers or comedians who don’t have to worry about money per se, but it certainly must have a significant level of appeal considering the sheer quantity of the American alternative comedy scene who have been in their various shows. Sure, getting the monies is good, but getting to fulfil your comedic vision on your terms is something that rarely comes around. It almost certainly helps that the shorts are so short.

I’ve stated it before, but I’ll state it again: we all learned the wrong lessons from The Fast Show. Everybody seemed to think that overly-repetitive catchphrase comedy was the way forward. In fact, the only way that this was really inventive in The Fast Show was the way they would run it into the ground and completely overdo it (although they would be inventive in their callbacks, crossover of characters and their misuse and misappropriation of characters). What we should have been paying attention to was what could be achieved with comedy in short bursts. The clue was in the title.