On the far side of reality

The participants of Comedy Central’s first reality show aren’t really racist, homophobic, sexist, mean-spirited and perverted. They’re just drawn that way.

The basic-cable network devoted to humor joins the reality rat race Wednesday at 10:30 p.m. with its premiere of “Drawn Together,” the first animated reality series.

Come again?

Eight cartoon-character types we all know well -- or at least we thought we did -- live together and are filmed as, the show’s publicity says, “they stop being real and start getting animated.” Which means they argue, curse, hook up, drink, get high and reveal themselves in touching (wink) confessions.

Created by Matt Silverstein and Dave Jeser, who have been palling around since the 10th grade, “Drawn Together” may look warm and fuzzy, but it’s an X-rated spoof that attempts something tricky: parodying a genre that was self-parodying from the start. In a sense, it’s a new reality for reality TV as the genre has come of age. No longer the brash, edgy upstart, reality TV has moved to the middle, and in the process, forgotten how to tap into the humor and pathos of its own absurdity. This is where “Drawn Together” comes in, targeting reality’s creeping self-importance. The series starts out like “The Real World” and then makes fun of just about every popular reality show on network television, including “Big Brother,” “Survivor,” “The Bachelorette” and “The Apprentice.”

“The only things we watch on TV are reality shows, animation, or ‘Six Feet Under,’ ” says Jeser, 31. “So we really wanted to do something that was cartoony, reality TV and gay. On our show, everybody is gay at one point or another.”

The animated housemates include: Princess Clara, the racist, elitist beauty who turns out to have monstrous genitalia; Captain Hero, the vain, cluelessly misogynistic superhero; Ling-Ling, an Asian battle monster who secretes a special chemical; Spanky Ham, a crude Internet download who marks his territory like a dog; Toot Braunstein, a 1920s sex symbol, drawn in black and white and with zaftig proportions, inspired by Betty Boop; Wooldoor Sockbat, an annoying but winsome whatchamacallit; Xandir, a video game warrior who has no idea that he is gay; and Foxxy Love, a smart, sexy, tambourine-wielding African American crime-solver.

“They are archetypes, but at the same time they are all insane,” says Jack Plotnick (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Girls Be Girls”), who voices the complicated Xandir. “They’re very much like reality show characters. You can’t believe what people do and say on reality shows, and it’s the same here.... There is no agenda. Everyone is crucified.”

“Sure, we have our issues, but this is a house drawn together with love,” explains Toot Braunstein in the fifth episode.

The first episode has not aired, but there is already an appetite building for this cast of equal-opportunity offenders, all of whom are hand-drawn and given life by Rough Draft animation studio, which produced “Futurama.” (“I thought those people picked banjos, not fights,” Princess Clara said of her black roommate; “We’ll always have Paris, which is what we said when I smashed his penis with a lead model of the Eiffel Tower,” Foxxy Love says of her S&M; tryst with Captain Hero.) More than 2 million people have downloaded the premiere’s three-minute clip from Comedy Central’s website.

“And that doesn’t account for all of the people who forward it to their friends,” says Lauren Corrao, the network’s senior vice president of original programming, who developed “The Real World” on MTV. “The thing they did so successfully, which isn’t always so easy, is that at the same time they are doing satire, they’ve created characters you want to watch week to week. It’s not just about the parody.”

Their piece of the ‘Rock’

For Silverstein, 32, and Jeser, life itself seems like a parody. The longtime best friends conceived the animated reality show after an agent suggested they give broadcast networks a try, and that exercise failed to yield them steady employment or health insurance. Or even the respect of their peers.

“We were on “3rd Rock [From the Sun]” in its last season, but to be honest, if the show had gone on, I don’t think we would have been asked back,” Silverstein said and laughed.

Jeser expounded: “On our first day, they gave us a script to read and we’re supposed to come in there with jokes. We had pages of jokes. We tried the first joke and it lay there dead. Then the next joke came up, I think it was a hymen joke, and nothing. So an executive producer leaned back and asked us if we had seen the show. To be fair, we hadn’t. We had to keep quiet after that. We soon figured out that network television was not going to change because of us.”

In fact, Silverstein points out, “The only shows that have been successful for us have been Jimmy Kimmel’s shows.” Silverstein and Jeser have worked on “The Man Show” and “Crank Yankers,” both co-created by Kimmel. They also were writers and producers on “Andy Richter Controls the Universe,” “Action” and “Greg the Bunny.”

“Matt used to cheat off me in physics, and now I cheat off him in his career,” Jeser said. Since high school, the buddies have shared many memorable moments, like the time in 1997 when they found themselves unable to afford presents for their girlfriends’ birthdays. So they did what most young, broke men in Manhattan would: They posed almost nude in front of each other to make their own calendars.

That project was going well until Jeser’s conservative Jewish father walked into his bedroom and found Silverstein lying in his bed, wearing only a G-string and glitter, and Jeser behind the camera in a bathrobe. Silverstein wound up marrying the girlfriend in question, and now they have a baby boy. Jeser said his girlfriend dumped him, “so I stole the calendar back because I didn’t think she deserved it.”

“Comedy Central has their hands full with them,” Kimmel says of his proteges. “I suspect nobody has gotten away with what they’re going to get away with on commercial cable. If we learned anything on ‘Crank Yankers,’ it’s that you can’t show a penis on Comedy Central. But you can show a puppet penis. I think their new show is going to make ‘South Park’ seem quaint. These guys could do a show for Nickelodeon and it would be funny. They wouldn’t be happy, but it would be funny.”

On “Drawn Together,” Silverstein and Jeser poke fun at a wide range of societal issues, such as safe sex, homosexuality, bulimia and racism. “We’re very angry at this part of the body,” says Silverstein, pointing to his pelvic region.

Shooting at everything

Some episodes include Disney-esque musical numbers with lyrics that are guaranteed to make many blush. “How cool is this? We’ve only been here a day and already I find myself in a three-way,” Captain Hero croons in the hot tub as he watches Foxxy Love and Princess Clara French-kissing during the pilot episode. The creators even spoof public-service announcements by having Toot, whose weight fluctuates as much as Oprah’s, stop in the middle of one episode to declare: “In this episode, we dealt poorly with eating disorders.”

“I don’t think anyone will get hurt because the show makes fun of everyone,” says Cree Summer, the actress behind the voice of the sassy, confident Foxxy Love. “Humanity is hysterical, and I laugh out loud when I get these scripts. Nothing is sacred, and everything is sacred.”

Some things, it turns out, definitely are. Comedy Central has decided not to air one of the show’s episodes out of respect to the late Christopher Reeve. In the episode, Captain Hero uses his powers to do something bad, so he loses them and winds up in a wheelchair, fighting to walk again.

“The timing is not right for that,” Corrao says. “We’ll air seven this season and see if we can make some changes to it and save it for next season.”

That is, of course, if there is a next season. The creators promise a cliffhanger involving a helicopter crash that -- especially if, say, the ratings tank -- could bring an untimely end to the lives of these reality-show contestants. “It’s a cartoon,” Jeser says. “We can do anything we want. We have inexplicable humor. Like it’s inexplicable that we are doing this show.”

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Animation with attitude

In a first-ever unveiling of a reality series cast before the show premieres, the creators of “Drawn Together” dared to be different by allowing The Times to get up close and personal with the cast:

CAPTAIN HERO Age: 25 Occupation: Superhero Hometown: Planet Zebulon

TOOT BRAUNSTEIN Age: 24 Occupation: Pinup gal/sex symbol Hometown: Tootsville

SPANKY HAM Age: 28 Occupation: Crass Internet download

Hometown: Internet

PRINCESS CLARA Age: 21 Occupation: Princess Hometown: The kingdom of Ariansburg

LING-LING Age: 273 Battle Point Occupation: Asian battle monster/actor/model Hometown: North Oriental

FOXXY LOVE Age: 23 Occupation: Mystery-solving musician Hometown: Foxxy Love is from all over, you can’t pin her down.

WOOLDOOR SOCKBAT Age: 6 and up Occupation: Fun-/child-lover Hometown: Third star to the left and keep going ...

XANDIR Age: 19 Occupation: Video game adventurer

Hometown: The Enchanted level of Clo-Set