Steel yourself for the Bizarro version of ‘Sesame Street’

You quite possibly do not know that it’s time for a second season of “Wonder Showzen,” beginning tonight at 9:30 on MTV2. Even if you are aware of the show -- or perhaps especially if you’re aware of it -- you may be surprised that it’s back, for it is obscene, blasphemous, scatological, scabrous, gross, gruesome, unpleasant, unpatriotic, distasteful, exploitative, violent, bloody, juvenile, puerile, perverse, pustulant and undoubtedly bad-smelling. I do not mean that necessarily as a criticism.

It’s indicative of how wide and deep the television world has become that such a thing can air at all; one almost feels proud of the medium, in a half-ashamed kind of way. The show became a cult and, here and there, a critical hit last year, with replays on Comedy Central -- a corporate cousin under the vast Viacom sun -- and downloads available through iTunes. This week, the first eight-episode season became available on DVD.

The simplest way to describe “Wonder Showzen,” a meaningless title that sounds like German but isn’t, is as a parody of “Sesame Street” and of well-meaning educational television in general. There are Muppety puppets and talking numerals and cartoons, and real children who interact with the puppets, speak to the camera and conduct roving-reporter interviews.

It looks and sounds right, but everything in it is wrong. The letter N is just out of rehab; the letter P is haunted by the ghost of her liposuctioned fat. (“I’m Pretty now, I’m Perfect, and I’m going to be a Pop Princess.”) The cartoons offer such instructive lessons as “Don’t litter or else God will tear your face off and feed it to a goat.” Guest appearances by Christopher Meloni (in an anti-cooties PSA), Amy Sedaris (as a story lady) and Dick Gregory (as the sun) give it a slight air of respectability, but it is air that dissipates fast.

A warning runs at the top of every episode: “ ‘Wonder Showzen’ contains offensive, despicable content that is too controversial and too awesome for actual children. The stark, ugly, profound truths ‘Wonder Showzen’ exposes may be soul crushing to the weak of spirit. If you allow a child to watch this show, you are a bad parent or guardian.”

It’s a joke and it’s no joke. Created by Vernon Chatman and John Lee, members of the New York art-music-video collective NFFT, “Wonder Showzen” erases the fine line between stupid and clever. (Chatman created and gives voice to the “South Park” character Towelie, the stoner talking towel, so he is clearly familiar with that line.)

At times, one is hard put to say whether the show has an actual political viewpoint or is just puckishly provocative in the guise of social criticism. When child reporter Trevor asks a beauty pageant contestant, “Would you kick a pony in the face to end world hunger?,” it’s a meaningless question, but it is, in its nasty way, funny.

Targets include racism, religion, capitalism, false canons of beauty, authority in general (and especially the police) and the ephemerality of freedom in a society too sleepy to know it’s being enslaved. The show does not only murder sacred cows, it tortures them first, eats them raw and throws them up. And then makes a cartoon about it.

Its regular puppet cast includes Chauncey, a sort of yellow feather boa in a top hat and string tie who is more or less the group leader; Wordsworth, a red felt thing with glasses and an exposed brain; Sthugar, the female puppet, pink with a single sharp tooth; and Him, a brown pod with hair. There is a box with a lot of eyes that reads the news. And there is Clarence, a reptilian blue puppet with pingpong ball eyes who conducts space-invading man-on-the-street interviews, whose purpose seems to be to annoy people into hurting him. Tonight’s episode makes that explicit as he presents “A Movie About People Who Don’t Want to Be in the Movie.”

There is much use made of recontextualized found footage -- of dead animals, starving people, sick children, friendly policemen and food processing (“Those chickens are almost as battered as my mommy”). But the strongest, funniest and most disturbing segments are the ones that involve the children, who are themselves recontextualized and, among other things, made to speak adult answers to such questions as “Why is America No. 1?” (“Our pay to play legal system,” “Our version of history will prove us right”); “When is it OK to lie?” (“to appease the masses”); “What is your greatest wish?” (“I want my innocence back,” “I just want to punch God in the face”); “What is love?” (“a neurochemical con job”); and “Where do babies come from?” (“lack of identity”). A little girl in a trench coat is sent down to Wall Street to ask workers, “Who did you exploit today?” and “Where will you hide when the revolution comes?”

Of course, all children in show business are exploited to some degree; even the most apparently benign sitcom can twist childhood out of recognition. And most kids in the ordinary world are made to repeat things they don’t necessarily believe or can’t understand.

What’s original here, if that’s the word, is the degree to which the material is pushed. (The last half of the final episode from last season, titled “Patience,” is essentially the first half run backward -- a television first, I am pretty sure.)

We have seen more than our share of demented puppets and gory cartoons. A line like “Remember, kids, egalitarian communes breed dissonance” could have come straight from the pages of the National Lampoon, and the mix of kid stuff and adult anomie is all over Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim.

Even the ironic use of children has its precedents: in “Annie Hall,” in which Woody Allen’s elementary school classmates speak as the adults they’ll grow up to become (“I used to be a heroin addict, now I’m a methadone addict,” “I’m into leather”), in the monster.com “When I grow up” ad, in which kids mock-cheerfully face a cruel future. But these things reach a new level of relentlessness here.

I think it’s funny. But I wonder.

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‘Wonder Showzen’

Where: MTV2

When: 9:30 tonight

Rating: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children younger than 7)