TV REVIEWS : Viewer Mail an Outlet for Gross Comedy

We’ve had shows featuring viewer mail before, but MTV’s new half-hour “You Wrote It, You Watch It” (premiering today at 11 a.m.) is nothing but.

In this umpteenth variation on sur-reality television, young viewers are asked to write in about their weirdest experiences, which are then dramatized in a fashion that mixes the typical quick-cut MTV montage with “Saturday Night Live”-style sick yuks. There’s also a healthy dollop of David Letterman in this enterprise, of course. The quasi-sketch comedy here grossly exaggerates the incidents recounted in the letters, not just a little like those “Writers’ Embellishment” bits on “Late Night.”

Today’s opening episode focuses on “the strangest person I ever met” and provides a sample of just how uneven the show will be. On the lowest-common-denominator side, cutup host Jon Stewart and crew offer us graphic re-enactments of viewer tales of a school kid who wraps masses of mucus around his head, a fat uncle who passes gas when poked in the stomach and a college guy who gets drunk at a party and accidentally makes out with a dog. (“To you it was a one-night stand, but in dog years, you guys had been going out a week,” Stewart points out to the real-life pooch smoocher, who makes an in-studio cameo for his 15 seconds of infamy.)

If this sounds absolutely irredeemable, the show does have its share of genuine guilty laughs, like the opening dramatization of a guy who sedates bees and puts them on little leashes, or the nutso punk rocker whose incongruous gift of a kitten proves the ultimate shock to his girlfriend. The crowning sketch--an exaggerated riff on the quintessentially insulting first date from hell--is on a par with the better recent “SNL” skits.

Next week’s iffier second episode focuses on weird school stories, like the legend of the wacky professor who left his fly open. Attention, dog lovers, uncle punchers and students of excretory humor through the ages: “You Wrote It, You Watch It” airs on MTV Saturdays at 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. and Sundays at 11:30 a.m. and 5 p.m.