Droll British wit fills up ‘Hollow Men’

It can feel as if every time you turn Comedy Central on it’s got a “MADtv” rerun going, or maybe an old “Saturday Night Live.” The branded cable home of comedy (or is that the cable home of branded comedy?) has had, over the years, a somewhat fickle relationship with new sketch series, introducing to U.S. television audiences the Canadian sketch troupe Kids in the Hall or, in more recent years, the New York-based Upright Citizens Brigade, whose run on the network lasted a too-short three seasons.

Really, “MADtv” and “SNL,” bought in syndication, are Comedy Central’s ongoing homage to sketch, although every now and then the network will pick up a new outfit to show that it’s still in the discovery business. So here come four guys from England named David Armand, Nick Tanner, Rupert Russell and Sam Spedding. They call themselves the Hollow Men. Blessedly, they do not do improv.

The show is pretty droll, in that understated, British-sense-of-humor way, the sketches quick and cheeky (“Packed with a minimum of 12 comedy segments per episode,” the press release states). The raunch factor prohibits me from detailing a great many of the jokes, but you get a sense of the group’s zaniness in one sketch, set in a courtroom, that has a lawyer objecting to a witness’ testimony, followed by another objection by the lawyer’s lawyer, which precipitates an objection from the lawyer’s lawyer’s lawyer, and on and on until the courtroom is breaking into the song-and-dance number “Everyone’s a Lawyer.”

The Hollow Men are veterans of the annual Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland that has launched the likes, more recently, of Eddie Izzard. The gods of Monty Python appear to be smiling down on them. Like Python, the Hollow Men have fun with absurdist wordplay too. The show doesn’t bend toward the celebrity insta-moment of the week. Its segments take place in otherwise random, modern-day settings -- the guys at a poker game, the guys at a high school reunion, the guy cryogenically frozen. The lasciviousness of men’s magazines gets a send-up in a sketch in which the magazine Old Men in Sandals is deemed a genius idea, and another running bit features an antiques appraiser of actual human beings.

These are the sorts of sketches you’ll see at the end of “SNL” these days, the ones that have nothing to do with Paris Hilton or Martha Stewart or whichever celebrity’s made news that week. So there’s always room for a sketch series that takes a more timeless approach. “The Hollow Men” certainly doesn’t shrink from the juvenilia, but the outfit generally understands how to take an idea to its silliest extreme and exit, stage left or right. And if it isn’t easy to distinguish one from another (four white guys, brown hair) this has a kind of calming effect on the comedy; the men seem anonymous enough to let the ideas shine through.

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‘The Hollow Men’

Where: Comedy Central

When: 10:30 p.m.

Rating: TV-14 L (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14, with advisory for language)

David Armand...self

Nick Tanner...self

Rupert Russell...self

Sam Spedding...self

Executive producer, Scott Tomlinson. Writers, David Armand, Nick Tanner, Rupert Russell and Sam Spedding.