IMCT dream special:
I had this dream a few nights ago starring Wolt and eumaas...both of whom I have never actually met in life, save for a static-garbled 30 second phone call with Gene while shepherding extremely drunk Flex and Boddington through Cambridge a year ago. They were middle-aged business partners running a Borsch Belt weekend resort and comedy club in the Catskills. Only it took place after the apocalypse where the population of the continental U.S. had been reduced to fewer than a widely-scattered 10 million, most large cities had been totally irradiated, and the economy had collapsed back into a largely hunter-agrarian state with only small pockets of still-functioning modernity. And this was simultaneously a TV show. With the Talking Heads' "Nothing But Flowers" as the theme song. And the show was staged exactly like
Newhart meets
The Odd Couple...with throwback production values, guest stars, and joke-writing. Because apparently those small pockets of functioning modernity that remained after the destruction of civilization all defaulted to a 1983-level CBS primetime cultural baseline.
Apparently the background is that once they fled their irradiated homes and destroyed families, Gene and Jon hatched a plan to fulfill a lifelong dream by fixing up an abandoned resort to cater to the pockets of civilization still scattered around the burnt-out hulk of New York City who no longer had any weekend entertainment options after toiling all week in the ore mines...except for driving up to the Catskills to watch some salty Yiddish comedy! That was the
Newhart part. The comic tension between self-loathing dramaturg and radical Marxist trying to keep a bed/breakfast/comedy club operating in a post-capitalist fallen world was the
Odd Couple part. The Oscar and Felix elements were evenly distributed...so they were both kinda slobs about some stuff and fuddy-duddies about other stuff. All of the regular array of obscure character catchphrases were in full display, cued to the laugh track.
Doc, presumably escaping the missile strike on Ottawa by the skin of his teeth, played the George Utley handyman character...wearing the same fuzzy hat as Tom Poston but also that
Cut The Crap T-shirt. Except instead of being always-bumbling and not doing his job he was always inciting contrarian debates and not doing his job. Jenny and Mimi were there as resident town socialites, and Flex was the ceremonial mayor who had nothing to do at his job because society was lawless so he just spent all his time slipping dick pics to people. Kory was also there too on the regular cast, but I don't recall if there was a horrible recurring pizza gag or not weaving him into the ensemble. Lot of other board members were regular recurring guests filling out the canon. There was surprisingly subdued and infrequent Hoy presence, which I found kinda weird at first. But then I remember thinking (this is in the middle of the dream I'm thinking this) that the show might've been a spinoff from
That's Our Hoy that picks up events from where its
Dinosaurs-like series finale left off, so that explained why Matey only had a couple spotty story arcs in Season 1 and was given a sort of detached senior presence on the cast. The limeys, who I presume all sailed over on garbage rafts pasted together with a pulpy glue made from expired salad creme after their island sank in the middle of the North Sea, were all uncultured hillfolk characters exactly like the Darryls who randomly waltzed into town doing incomprehensible Limey things as comic props...but all dressed identically like the Darryls. Nobody from the town ever ventured into the hills past town limits because there was an unseen yeti or cannibal monster that preyed on the limey Darryls for food, and the townfolk felt the separation was fair trade for keeping their population in-check. This may have been an oblique self-reference of some sort, even though I never personally appeared or was directly mentioned in the series. I think there might've also been elements of the Bigfoot thread in that, because I've kinda been thinking about that a lot lately.
The show had two main sight gags. Whenever a special guest star...like Tim Conway or Dyan Cannon...came up the desolate road into town looking for a good matza soup and some side-splitting mother-in-law jokes, they always roared into the driveway
Road Warrior-style riding the hood of a driverless big rig (to an applause line from the studio audience). Maybe that was another oblique self-reference to incorporate the KILLvan...I don't know. And the special guest stars always seemed to just "happen upon" this quaint little resort while roaming aimlessly around the kudzu-overgrown Hudson countryside searching longingly for other human interaction. Also, the only form of accepted legal-tender currency in this hellworld was 2 lb. ring-like slabs of inert Uranium-238 confiscated from the abandoned mines in the Forbidden Zones, so when guests reached in their pocket to pay for their rooms or drinks the currency always made a giant thud on the concierge desk that made the picture frame on the wall fall down and Wolt make a frowny-face over the laugh track.
Most of the plots revolved around the foibles of running a country cottage around wacky characters, peppered with caustic debates between our two protagonists on radical Marxism and the subtle art of joke-timing. With lots of references to Wolt and eummy's after-hours side project of building a New World Order out of the ashes of a depraved fallen society woven from the frail tendrils of society's remaining accumulated knowledge...except they never make any progress on that because every week there's some wacky distraction to tend to with running the resort. And Gene was always changing around what Laws of Science the new society would be taught, so they just kind of went around in circles on that which made Wolt really pissy. There were lots of off-camera references to what the limey hillfolk were doing whenever one of the Darryls showed up to "oi maTe!", and whatever Nigel or Clive accompanied them on their journey into town but got eaten by the cannibal yeti on the walk over (
). And a LOT of food put-downs whenever they visited. Like, a real lot.
So...basically most of it was just the same shit we always talk about, framed through the madness that was Jon & Gene's collective midlife crisis and the end result of the destruction of the human race currently underway (that would be the Dictator forum content!). With lots of off-color Jewish jokes more appropriate for a 9:00pm timeslot.
I need help, don't I?