
The bold geniuses at Comedy Central, who have long tried to tell us that MAD TV and Scrubs are funny, have dealt a fatal blow to the fledgling genre of sports news comedy shows with the cancellation of both The Onion’s Sportsdome and, much more importantly, Sports Show with Norm MacDonald. The move continues the network’s time-honored tradition of giving up (Strip Mall was funny, jerks), but at least Daniel Tosh will have two more shows to make fun of when cutting to his commercial breaks.
Thankfully, MacDonald has a bit of a sense of humor about his history with cancellations.
Macdonald quipped to EW that he had not been “officially” informed of the bad news, noting, “A Minute with Stan Hooper is still officially on hiatus,” a reference to his short-lived 2003 Fox sitcom. He also said that he was open to hosting a similar-style program (“I like doing a funny show where I don’t have to act and fall in love with a girl”) and talked up “an Internet campaign to save the show, almost like they do with shows about witches and vampires and aliens from outer space…. Maybe I’ll call [the network] and ask them to bring it back. I’ll say, ‘Just bring it back. How much could it hurt television, really?’” (Entertainment Weekly)
I thought Sportsdome was a good idea in theory, but it was much better suited for online clips on the Onion’s website, since a weekly half hour of generic sports humor just wasn’t going to catch Comedy Central’s 10:30 p.m. demographic of stoned college guys. Unfortunately, the same goes for Sports Show, even though it at least gave us timely material.

In case you needed more reasons to hate Tim Tebow, here he is on last night’s edition of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” being affable and talking about how college athletes deserve to ride around on scooters and eat Bloomin’ Onions. Tebow also talks about being the child of missionaries, sponsoring an orphanage, and his predictions for this year’s Denver Broncos (“pretty good”), so basically the worst thing you can say about him here is that his suit doesn’t really fit. I could make fun of him for writing an autobiography (and calling it “Through My Eyes”) at age 23, but I wrote a semi-autobiographical novel when I was 22, and I’m not exactly a storied football star.
Because I can’t reblog entire half hours of Norm MacDonald talking about sports, here’s the “Boom Goes the Dynamite” guy’s web redemption on last night’s episode of “Tosh.0.” When you type it like that it reads like “tosh point oh point.” Anyway, Gus Johnson makes a funny cameo and Tosh(‘s writers) get to rant at length about ESPN personalities. The best part of the entire video is the explanation of where “boom goes the dynamite” comes from, a very human, identifiable story about how happy it makes you when you destroy somebody with a green shell in Mario Kart.
Last night’s season premiere of Tosh.0 (the only show in the entirety of television my girlfriend gets excited to watch) featured everything you’d expect from Tosh: vomiting, jokes about the subservience of women, and that conversation I have in my head on whether he’s Dane Cook’s Nobody (like in Kingdom Hearts) or his Heartless, as Dane Cook is now nobody. It also featured a special bonus: Manny Pacquiao punching Tosh into near-unconsciousness. It’s funny, but keep in mind that the video also includes nearly two minutes of Joe Rogan, so viewer discretion is advised.
