#108 – Two and a Half Men
18 03 2010This show is in no way funny. This comedy is a misnomer. This programme is the harbinger of Armageddon. This is the Show Bogans Like. Somewhere, in a dungeon in California, a team of demonic showbiz suits sat down and plotted the destruction of television. Two and a Half Men emerged. The combination of Charlie Sheen – the man who married Denise Richards and entered rehab – with an annoying child and an equally annoying adult could focus the bogan’s self-love by having it assume that Charlie Sheen represents it, and the annoying characters non-bogans.
Offering a heady mix of gratuitous (implied – PG rating) sex, attractive women and fierce misogyny, the bogan’s trigger points are sufficiently charged. This entire show is built up around the cliché that women will reward you for treating them like dirt. Female bogans enjoy this show. The bogan male may try to replicate Charlie Sheen’s character’s success in real life, but lacking even Sheen’s hackneyed wit and addled charm, it will only find positive results at the very, very damaged end of the spectrum.
That this show – riddled with women who are either annoying mothers, obese quasi-lesbians or smoking hot idiots simply begging to fall victim to the bogan’s (read: Charlie Sheen’s) wiles – is one of the most popular on TV goes to show just how many bogans there are. They could be your friend. They could be your neighbour, your teacher or your accountant. They’re out there, watching Two and a Half Men.
The presence of a neurotic and ugly, but vaguely intelligent character in Charlie’s brother provides the perfect impetus for the bogan to wallow in its own hallucinatory world of self-denial. It can now comfortably draw an informed conclusion that unless one is sexist, alcoholic, insensitive, and half-successful, they cannot conceivably pull chicks. Pull them deftly, like a Pamplona bull hooking a drunken tourist.
There is not even any need for comedy – the evil suits realised that the bogan, Pavlovian stereotype that it is, will laugh merely when it is suggested that it is supposed to. Instead of funny or witty dialogue, a deafening laugh track of hyperventilating Nitrous Oxide victims is thrust onto the eardrums of any who dare un-mute their television.
The show’s dialogue unrepentantly veers between sexual innuendos, hot chicks and a kid making sexual innuendos, to the rapturous applause of the bogan. The very existence of the ‘half man’ (a fine example of the half-baked comedy that plagues the show) joking about menstruation, promiscuity, swearing and other ‘adult’ issues, makes the bogan terribly excited. How hilarious, it thinks, that a child should not only be aware of such mind-bogglingly complex matters, but also have the ability to turn it into jokes. The show’s popularity is further aided by the fact that it is shown on Channel 9. Repeatedly. More times than Australian Extreme Police Customs Security Force Australia.
Now watch, if you dare, the excruciating, comedy free, laugh track-dominated turd that is Two and a Half Men.
