TV REVIEW : Hey, What’s Wrong With a Little Idiotic Stealing Among Friends?

Remember when MTV used to air reruns of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”? . . . And now for something completely similar.

Alex Winter (half of the “Bill and Ted” movie duo) and Tom Stern are the directors and principal actors of “The Idiot Box,” a half-hour show mixing brief comedy segments with alternative music videos that will air Saturdays at 11 p.m. on MTV, beginning tonight. Its brand of humor is entirely derivative and juvenile, and occasionally a little amusing.

Their debt to the surreal merry pranksters of ‘70s England is more than blatant. In the premiere episode, a berserk man with a migraine headache shows up in the second skit--a spoof of aspirin comparison commercials--then rampages through most of the other bits as well.

Even more obviously, in next week’s show, a bearded God keeps dropping anvils on random characters throughout the episode. It’s wacky! It’s irreverent! It’s borderline theft!

And can a skit called “Stan Harding, Rock Accountant” be anything but loving, albeit inept, homage to Winter’s and Stern’s CPA-bashing British heroes?

But “Idiot Box” is even more parts “SCTV” than Python, and--luckily--more successful emulating the former than the latter.

The first show’s opening is a dumb, sicko “GoodFellas” parody, complete with knife-squishing-in-the-belly sound effects. Just as idiotic but better are some of the bits in the second episode, such as the tragic police drama “Lockjaw” (“He’s one tough cop who never got a tetanus shot”); the sci-fi movie “Damn These Eyes” (an on-the-mark spoof of “The Man with the X-Ray Eyes,” where the hero is doomed to having visible dotted lines between his peepers and his viewing field), and “Eddie the Flying Gimp from Outer Space,” a malevolent parody of a typical Nick at Night ‘60s sitcom that at least has hilarious graphics.

Most sketches are characterized by faintly funny premises leading to no punch-line whatsoever. (Which is also a fair description of “Saturday Night Live” nowadays.) You don’t have to be 15, into grossness, have no attention span and no awareness of the show’s influences to get a kick out of “Idiot Box,” but it helps.