“You get what you get, now don’t throw a fit”-Ancient kindergarten teacher proverb.

I am constantly amused when people attend a Farrelly Brothers film and are SHOCKED to find out that it is filled with bathroom humor and precious little in the way of plot. What do you expect people?  When you go to a Farrelly Brothers film, you know exactly what you are going to get.

Peter and Bobby Farrelly carved out a new niche for comedy in 1998 when they released Something About Mary. The film’s raunchy humor was dubbed “gross-out humor”, and though they have replicated the formula many times, they have never really duplicated the level of success they had with that first film.

It’s doubtful that this will be the film to do that, though it is a nice departure from their usual fare. Don’t worry, you’ll still find male protagonists suffering from man-child syndrome, plenty of tits, dirty jokes, poop humor, and the like. Not that I’m complaining. I’d be disappointed if those things were missing.

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I guess it’s only natural that one of the most successful podcasts out there (and if that sounds like a dubious distinction, the BBC reported that in 2006 The Ricky Gervais Show podcast had received a staggering 8,000,000 downloads) would get its own show…though for reasons I’ll go into in a bit, I’m not entirely sure why.

The new HBO show, which premieres February 19^th but is currently available for free download on iTunes, features flash animations of Office and Extras creators Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant antagonizing their co-host Karl Pilkington for his inane and often outlandish beliefs.

Episode #1 opens with Gervais and Merchant systematically debunking Pilkington’s assertion that technology reached its peak sometime around the turn of the 19^th Century. “What about planes?” Merchant counters, “they let you go on holiday all over the world.” “No,” Pilkington shoots back, “because you go to places where if you don’t get a shot beforehand, you can die.”

Next Pilkington proposes a biological “advance” that would allow older women to have children the moment they died. “Who would take care of them?” Merchant usefully asks.

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