Three and a Half Torches (Out of Five)
Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, a new comedy-fantasy series debuting this Thursday on Comedy Central (10 PM/9 C), might be set in a medieval time of wizards and warlords — but it has a very modern sensibility, and an equally modern sense of humor.
When Krod Mandoon, the title character and a self-proclaimed freedom fighter, is giving his band of companions “notes” after particularly disappointing battle, the hapless wizard complains of a “hostile work environment.”
“We’re freedom fighters!” says an exasperated Krod. “All of our work environments are hostile!”
In short, Krod is part fantasy satire, and part office workplace comedy, but with simply a different kind of office.
Thursday’s one-hour pilot has moments of genuinely inspired lunacy, much like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the classic movie comedy that this project most closely resembles.
In a joke whose sensibility seems to come straight from Monty Python, when the evil Chancellor Dongalor threatens to kill one villager every minute until Krod comes out of hiding, one of the villagers rightfully asks, “How will you mark the time to a minute? Even our most accurate sun-dials are approximate at best.”
Krod – whose full name, we learn in one scene, is the appropriately ridiculous “Krodford J. Mandoon” – is played by Sean Maguire, the actor who played the lead in the 300 spoof Meet the Spartans. He has a very easy-going charm. (Read our interview with him here.)
And the British comedian Matt Lucas, as the series vain, clueless Dongalor, has the Python’s droll deadpan down pat.
That said, much of the show’s humor is of the pun and pratfall sort. The emperor is “Emperor Zanus”. Emperor’s anus? A horse-buggerer is named “Horse Draper.” Horse raper? There is much walking into walls and posts — gags that the willing cast mostly pulls off.
Alas, the show does have two thoroughly false notes. Bruce, a gay guy who joins Krod’s band, is a fey stereotype obsessed with sex and fashion, and has thick faux-Latin accent. Meanwhile, Anika, Krod’s sexually liberated pagan girlfriend, seems to exist merely to give Krod something to fret about.
As part of a pagan ritual, Anika agrees to have sex with 300 men. When she decides to call it off in mid-gang-bang, Bruce happily takes over.
It’s not that I was terribly offended by these jokes — the show makes its raciness clear from the outset.
It was just disappointing that a show written by a heterosexual man has the two non-heterosexual male characters — virtually the only two non-heterosexual male characters — obsessed with, and defined by, sex.
Which I suppose is how a lot of straight men think of women and gay guys. But this is the one part of the show that seemed decidedly retro to me: not contemporary or irreverent at all, and definitely not like the sly, subversive Month Python crew. Rather, they seemed like something straight out of a 1980s sex comedy, Revenge of the Nerds.
Still, this is a show worth watching.
The series is a co-production between Comedy Central and the BBC, which will air slightly longer episodes later this month.
Excellent ideas here, have emailed my mum so expect a big reply!!
Oh, Lordy, a lotta ads for this one…
This is true. And, as usual, they’ve taken some of the best jokes and spoiled the surprise. “It’ll take more than one arrow to kill the greatest general who ever lived!”