Comedy Channel or Ha!: Which Has the Last Laugh?

When I curled up in the big black chair trying to memorize the back of my parents’ “The 2000 Year Old Man” album, I distinctly remember, my feet not only didn’t touch the floor, they didn’t even reach the edge. I sat in on a Bob and Ray radio program at 15, got through trig in school only by re-enacting the previous episode of Monty Python for an early-to-bed teacher and I’ll still come back from a visit to my folks with another one of their old Jonathan Winters albums, which I’ve stolen while they weren’t looking.

I think, therefore, that I am a comedy connoisseur, and it’s as a comedy connoisseur that I insist--contrary to Rick Du Brow’s implication to the contrary in his Nov. 27 and Dec. 11 columns--that the Comedy Channel may be the greatest resource for humor in the history of mass media.

The Comedy Channel, launched by HBO in November of ‘89, is invariably confused with Ha!, a repeat-choked outfit that MTV unleashed about two months later. A few cable systems have both, most have neither, many have one. Unfortunately, since Ha! also calls itself “The TV Comedy Network,” many viewers of one think they are watching the other.

This is especially depressing to those of us who are unabashed fans of the almost anti-television television of “Night After Night With Allan Havey,” or of the wisecracking strangeness of the almost indescribable “Mystery Science Theatre 3000.” While these Comedy Channel shows occasionally fall into the pits of all humor (“I don’t like it. I don’t get it. Who is that? What else is on?”), they are, at worst, fresh and new and original.

At the same moment that “Mystery Science Theatre 3000” host Joel Hodgson and two robots manage to transform horrible films like “Catalina Caper” into vehicles or incisive jokes about the savings and loan scandals or “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up,” Ha! is airing “CPO Sharkey” reruns.

While on “Night After Night,” the mock-cranky Havey is being challenged by a mildly hostile stage crew to improvise his way out of a dubious routine, or inviting a 14-year-old fan onto the show only to compel him to first fire, then strangle, the program’s assistant producer, Ha! is giving us reruns of a canceled Tim Conway show that Tim Conway probably doesn’t even remember, called “Ace Crawford, Private Eye.”

This is not to imply that the Comedy Channel is one long experimental comedy workshop while Ha! merely runs everything Nick at Nite wouldn’t touch. Of late, Ha! has made moves toward retiring “Candid Camera” by inserting original material into its line-up, shows like “Random Acts of Variety” and a superior British import called “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”

Conversely, the Comedy Channel has recently redoubled its vintage offerings. While Ha! has been rightly praised for running the priceless Sid Caesar routines, the Comedy Channel has been showing extraordinary kinescopes of the Bob and Ray NBC-TV series of the early ‘50s, and will be adding both Monty Python and Ernie Kovacs in January. Edie Adams not only gave the channel her late husband’s masterworks; she presented a reverentially hushed Havey with two of the original masks from Kovacs’ Nairobi Trio.

The comedy connoisseur is also offered a new Alan King interview series, “Inside the Comedy Mind,” and Rich Hall checks in with an almost eerie, environmentally oriented half-hour called “Onion World.” The comedy trio The Higgins Boys & Gruber spends 90 minutes deftly re-creating the experience of sitting in your neighbor’s basement when the bunch of you were 10 or 11 or maybe 33. Havey’s sidekick, Nick Bakay, also anchors with Joe Bolster and Jon Hayman a deliciously vicious parody of sportscasts (including mine), adroitly called “Sports Monster.”

Most importantly, two Comedy Channel shows should already be at the forefront of TV entertainment, if only there were enough people out there to watch them.

It is nearly impossible to explain “Mystery Science Theatre 3000” to those who have not seen it. The premise is ludicrous--a maintenance man in a science laboratory (Oicmonics Institute) is shot into space by two evil scientists who don’t like him very much. He dismantles part of his ship-cum-prison to build a series of robots, and the lot of them are subjected to cruel experiments by the earth-bound lunatics. The cruel experiments? Being forced to sit through the worst movies imaginable, which the viewer watches with them, as if sitting behind them in a darkened theater.

Wrapped in the guise of a kids’ show (Hodgson--the human--regularly reads mail from youngsters who send him drawings of the robots), “MST 3000” contains some of the hippest, deepest satire of the generation.

The other stars-in-hiding populate the nervous world of “Night After Night,” a nightly talk show without many guests, but with the soon-to-be comic heavy-hitters Havey and Bakay, plus an impromptu ensemble cast Havey has created out of the show’s staff, cameramen and even security guards. “Night After Night” is an all-you-can-eat salad bar of humor, wherein some of the lettuce is a little brown and the potato salad looks like somebody’s walked through it, but still you can dine every night with variety and come away stuffed to the point of explosion.

With the networks strangling in sitcoms, the fundamental collision of these two cable channels is the improvisational tomorrow versus the canned-laughter yesterday. If they were to merge, as rumor has suggested for a year, certainly many of Ha!’s better features (Sid Caesar again, perhaps “Car 54”) could still find a home, but for the connoisseur’s money, the hybrid would have to look a lot like the Comedy Channel of the current moment.

“Love, American Style” and “Mork and Mindy” better than “Mystery Science Theater 3000” and “Shag and Bag”? Ha!