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25,000 Miles of Billiards Sketch Comedies

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At least since 1948, when Milton Berle first hosted Texaco Star Theater, television has aired sketch comedy shows. Over the years, and propelled by the success of sketch comedy titans such as Saturday Night Live and Monty Python’s Flying Circus, hundreds of shows have followed.  

Van Hammersly

“Van Hammersly” – Mr. Show

While they’re concentrated in certain geographic markets, such as the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, sketch comedy shows are a global television genre. Early progenitors arose in the Netherlands (Van Kooten en De Bie) and Mexico (Los Supergenios de la Mesa Cuadrada); more recent incarnations are everywhere, including Malaysia (Senario), Philippines (Lokomoko), Brazil (Hermes & Renato), and Indonesia (Extravaganza).

Given the global popularity of sketch comedy, it was only a hop, skip, and a jump to explore its intersection with another global phenomenon: billiards, of course.  The sampling below is hardly the genre’s best (e.g., “The Hustler of Money” or “Van Hammersly” from Mr. Show) or comprehensive (as I have intentionally omitted England, since I recently wrote about British sketch comedy during snooker’s golden era), but it does represent 25,000 miles of billiards sketch comedies from around the world. Chalk up and enjoy!

Key & Peele – “Pussy on the Chain Wax” (USA)

Circled around an in-home billiards table, four friends begin a game of pool with the opening break. As Jordan Peele’s character lines up to take his shot, Keegan-Michael Key’s character recounts a recent fight he got into. There’s some friendly disputing of the facts, to which Key clarifies that he put the “pussy on the chain wax.” Two of the friends echo their support with laughs, hand slaps, and shoulder bumps. But, Jordan’s character is more suspect – not of the fight details, but of the authenticity of his friend’s phrase. Is “pussy on the chain wax” even a “thing”?1

This 2013 segment from the series’ third season is pitch-perfect, gut-busting fun. In this case, the phrase is absurd. Peele’s linguistic challenge is logical; he even Googles the phrase to find no matches. But, as the background piano fades in, Key shares his true plight: “I lost my job. My girlfriend left me…I just wanted to have a little fund with my friends today” and can’t understand why the origin of the phrase matters. Caught off guard by the rawness of his friend’s emotions, Peele unwinds his crusade without skipping a beat and joins in the brotastic bonhomie. Cue the choir: it’s time to put the “pussy on the chain wax!”  The sketch is available to watch here.

Pussy on the Chain Wax

SCTV – “Melonville Snooker Championship” (Canada)

Second City Television, a Canadian sketch comedy series which ran from 1976 to 1984, featured an all-star cast of rising Canucks, including John Candy, Eugene Levy, Rick Moranis, and Catherine O’hara.  Many of the sketches were side-splittingly funny; unfortunately, the 1978 segment “Melonville Snooker Championship” was not one of them. 

 

The sketch focuses on a snooker championship, pitting Lenny “Golden Arm” Bouchard (John Candy) against “The Greek Hustler” Alki Stereopolis (Joe Flaherty), at Dwayne & Tino’s Bowling and Billiards bar.2 Both players are a far cry from the formal, polished gentlemen of English snooker.  But, the real grater is announcer Lou Jaffe (Eugene Levy), whose nasal, singsongy voice and random exclamations continue to interrupt the match and ultimately lead to fisticuffs between the two players. 

Full Frontal – “Parko’s Good Sports: Snooker” (Australia)

On the positive, Full Frontal, the Australian sketch comedy series that ran from 1993 to 1997, introduced us to Eric Bana, who eventually stepped away from the funnyman role to headline Hollywood blockbusters, such as Troy, Hulk, and Munich.

But Full Frontal also included the the incredibly unhumorous segment “Parko’s Good Sports: Snooker,” which has our Good Sports host interviewing Milo Kerrigan, a punch-drunk ex-boxer (played by Shaun Micallef) about snooker, a “quiet game requiring a delicate touch and a lot of finesse.” The gag is that Milo is hardly delicate (or coherent). He garbles and babbles; he hits balls off the table and wears the rack on his head; he launches his cue stick into the wall – twice. The one thing he doesn’t do is act remotely funny, which makes me hard-pressed to understand why he was one of Full Frontal’s most popular characters. 

Comedy Central Stand-Up, Asia! – “Mini Billiards” (Singapore)

With a big heart and a small billiards table, the “Mini Billiards” sketch from Comedy Central Stand-Up, Asia! has just enough humor and originality to keep viewers smiling and engaged. The sketch pits GB Labrador, a Pinoy stand-up comedian, against Eliot Chang, an NY-based comedian, in a game of billiards that is played on a desktop table less than a foot long. 

Capitalizing on the popularity of billiards in the Philippines, Mr. Labrador embraces his nationality and declares, “Billiards is our game.” The two comedians then alternate taking shots, which seems much harder for Mr. Chang, who is “not used to small balls.” 

The players’ quips are rather feeble (especially when Mr. Chang invokes Harry Potter), but the editors score humor points with some clever sound and visual effects. And, Mr. Labrador gets in a good laugh when he rebuffs Mr. Chang’s plea for mercy by telling him that he “already has a wealthy country.” 

Chewin’ the Fat: “Ford and Greg on the Couch” (Scotland)

Chewin’ the Fat was a Scottish sketch comedy series that aired 30 episodes of guffaws between 1999 and 2002. In the season’s first episode, one of the segments takes us behind the scenes of the Snooker Semi-Finals at the Crucible to view some of the “lighter moments that have made this tournament so entertaining.”

Yet another sketch lampooning the formality of snooker, this wordless episode is a pastiche of boys behaving badly set to a ragtime soundtrack. The players drop their drawers, pick their wedgies, pick their noses, dance on tables, chalk their faces, give one another piggybacks, mock, jeer, cackle, and act like asses. 

Perhaps the Scots had grown bored with snooker. Their national champion, Stephen Hendry, was so good he won seven world titles in the 1990s. But, otherwise I’m struggling to find the mirth in this puerile send-up. The sketch is available to watch here, starting at 20:18. 

Top Lista Nadrealista – [name of segment unknown] (Yugoslavia)

Historians will recall that in 1991 Slovenia and Croatia became the first republics to declare independence from the former Yugoslavia. Around that same time, Top Lista Nadrealista, a Yugoslav sketch comedy show that ran from 1984 to 1991, aired a segment showing two Belgian members of the European Community Monitoring Mission in Bosnia trying to incite a Bosnian Muslim and a Serb, lifelong friends, to start fighting one another during a game of pool at a Sarajevo bar.

The episode is available to watch below, but only in Serbian without subtitles, so I can’t comment on the humor. But, as in Melonville, billiards begets bedlam.

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  1. Teasing the question whether art imitates life, or life imitates art, “pussy on the chain wax” is now a real phrase in Urban Dictionary.
  2. Largely wasted in this sketch, Mr. Candy returned to billiards in 1984, when he starred in one of the best billiards sketch comedies ever, “The Hustler” from the series The New Show.

 

That Mitchell and Webb Look – “Snooker Commentators”

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“Well that was a lucky chance for young Mark Deacon, but as usual, he approaches the table with – how does one put it – a face like a slapped ass.” — Peter DeCoursey

Mitchell and WebbWhen it comes to snooker commentary, Ted Wilkes and Peter DeCoursey are in a class by themselves. Exactly what class is another question.  The two retired players, perpetually drinking, chain-smoking, and sweating in their airless cramped radio booth, spend the bulk of their on-air time talking insensitively about the players and sharing inappropriate stories, such as Mark Deacon’s attempts at suicide, or – how shall I put it – “bids for oblivion.”

Of course, that’s the comic genius of David Mitchell and Robert Webb, who respectively play Ted and Peter on each “Snooker Commentators” segment of their British sketch comedy That Mitchell and Webb Look.

Mitchell and WebbThe comedians’ dipsomaniacal duo first appeared on the radio show That Mitchell and Webb Sound. Then, in 2006, the ex-snooker-shooting sots, along with numerous other sketch characters, moved to television, where That Mitchell and Webb Look eventually won a BAFTA aware for “Best Comedy Programme or Series.”

Though That Mitchell and Webb Look ran for four seasons between 2006 and 2010, I could only locate a handful of “Snooker Commentator” sketches, all from the first season.  Always kicking off with Ted’s catch phrase, “Oh, that’s a bad miss,” and one of the duo bringing in the evening’s potables, the first episode starts with the pair mocking past-his-prime snooker player Harry Vaughn and the final episode ends with Ted and Peter revealing the secret snooker lyrics behind Chris de Burgh’s career-launching anthem, “The Lady in Red.” (Never seen you looking so shiny as you did tonight | Never seen your baize so tight |You are amazing.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_Sp8AsbMVk

In the real world of snooker, with its genteel traditions, it would be unimaginable to have commentators as boorish as Ted and Peter. However, snooker commentary has not been irreproachable. In 2016, the snooker commentator John Virgo said during the semi-finals of the World Snooker Championship, “I wanted to watch a bit of racing this afternoon. I’ll be lucky to watch some f****** Match of the Day.” Apparently, he thought his microphone was off.

Similarly, the former cueman Willie Thorne was commentating in 2017 during the first day of the Betfred World Championship when he said to his co-host Peter Edbon (in reference to the struggling match player Anthony McGill), “When you ‘go’ here though Pete, it is a f****** nightmare this place.”

But, these vulgar verbal bloopers are rather mild compared to gaffes uttered by sports announcers across the Channel here in the U.S.

For example, Jimmy ‘The Greek’ Snyder said to a reporter in 1988, “The black is a better athlete to begin with because he’s been bred to be that way…This goes back all the way to the Civil War when the slave owner would breed his big black to his big woman so that he could have a big black kid.” CBS fired him immediately.

Or, how about ESPN commentator Mark Madden, who said in 2008, “I’m very disappointed to hear Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts is near death because of a brain tumor…I always hoped Senator Kennedy would live long enough to be assassinated”?  And then there is Fox Sports baseball commentator Steve ‘Psycho’ Lyons, who blasted outfielder Shawn Green for skipping a game because of the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur. Lyons said, “He’s not even a practicing Jew. He didn’t marry a Jewish girl…And from what I understand, he never had a bar mitzvah, which is unfortunate because he doesn’t get the money.”

And these sleazebags are not even the worse of the lot. Remember Marv Albert, who sodomized a woman and then forced her to perform oral sex, all while supposedly wearing white panties and a garter belt? Sean Salisbury was an NFL analyst for ESPN when it became public that he sent pictures of his private parts to ESPN female employees. Seven-time Pro Bowl player Warren Sapp joined the NFL Network as a commentator only to have his contract quickly terminated after he was arrested on suspicion of soliciting and assaulting a prostitute.

Finally, there is the all-time king of scuzz, local New Orleans sportscaster Vince Marinello, who murdered his ex-wife in 2006.  He shot her twice in the head. His cover-up was so poor that at his house the police found a “to-do” list related to the murder, along with records of him purchasing the type of bullets used for the murder.

So, Ted and Peter may not be most polished pair, but compared to some of their real-world counterparts, I’m quite willing to overlook the occasional stein, or six, of ale.

Mr. Show – “Van Hammersly”

American History. Science.  Mathematics. Taught by the wrong educator, these can be dry subjects. But, what if you could learn about these subjects in an exciting, entertaining format from a world-wide billiards champion using nothing more than a pool table, balls, and cues?

That would be genius!  Or, if not genius, than downright, gut-busting, absurd.

Van HammerslySuch was the premise of the 1996 “Van Hammersly” sketch from Season 2, Episode 4, of the Emmy-nominated HBO comedy series Mr. Show, starring and hosted by Bob Odenkirk and David Cross.

Across the 30 episodes that aired between November 1995 and December 1998, Mr. Show lampooned everything from traditionalism to capitalism to organized religion with hilarious sketches that earned the show the 3rd greatest sketch comedy TV show of all time, according to Rolling Stone.[1]

Today, most people associate Mr. Odenkirk with the dubious, silver-tongued lawyer Saul Goodman from Breaking Bad and its spin-off Better Call Saul.  But, long before assuming the role of the smooth-talking attorney, Mr. Odenkirk portrayed a plethora of memorable characters on Mr. Show, including Van Hammersly, a cheeseball billiards champ hawking a line of educational video cassettes that are equivalent to earning your GED.  You can watch the full “Van Hammersly” sketch here.

The 150-second faux infomercial is must-see TV.  “Van Hammersly” begins with an introduction his first videocassette, “I Oughta Be in Pictures,” which “showcases his incredible talent and passion for the golden age of film.”  Featuring billiards balls named after Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart (“Judy, Judy, Judy”)[2] and the Three Stooges, Van Hammersly engages with, and then pockets, the balls as they interact at a 1952 Hollywood Awards show.

In the second video, we’re “off to the races as Van recounts the running of the 1974 Kentucky Derby the only way he knows how – with a pool table!”  Shooting each ball (horse) into a pocket, Van Hammersley details the race, rattling off with gusto a series of fictional equines:  Mr. Fasthorse, Papa’s Delicate Condition, Kystallnacht, Batman: The Horse, Nice ‘N’ Sticky, Stinkfinger, If Mandy Patinkin Was a Horse, and (“bringing up the rear”), Ol’ Felcher.[3]

Van HammerslyOther videos in Van’s series detail the history of mass transportation; science; mathematics; American history (“And that’s when Lincoln said [sinking the ball] don’t dis my homies.”); Renaissance painting, oceanography, corn futures, belly dancing; December 7th, 1941; billiards, rock lyrics, and many, many more!

Whether because of the memorable nut-job one-liners, the signature physical gestures, or the ludicrous concept, “Van Hammersly” often ranks among the most popular of the 157 Mr. Show sketches.[4]

And yet, ironically, the concept of teaching academic subjects through billiards is neither fictitious nor far-fetched.  Many probably remember watching in elementary school the 27-minute educational vignette Donald in Mathmagic Land that explains math angles to Donald Duck through a game of three-cushion billiards.  In a similar vein (though very poorly executed), the Australian Commonwealth Unit commissioned a series of educational “message films” in 1972. One such short film was “The Billiard Room” which lamely tried to teach the adult learning process through a game of snooker.

More recently, the National Film Board of Canada aired the “Let’s Play Long Billiards” episode of their Discover Science television series in which they explain the effects of colliding forces through a massive game of billiards. And in January 2015, the Science Channel’s wonderful series Outrageous Acts of Science featured billiards trick shot artist Florian “Venom” Kohler in an episode of “Fact or Faked” which asked real scientists to explain the science behind his improbable shots.

Maybe “Van Hammersly” is not so preposterous after all.  Anyone up for a billiards lesson on Zombies in Popular Media? Patternmaking for Dog Garments? Queer Musicology? Science from Superheroes?[5]

[1]        “40 Greatest Sketch-Comedy TV Shows of All Time,” Rolling Stone, March 27, 2015.

[2]    The best part is while the origin of the “Judy, Judy, Judy” line is murky, it is always attributed to Cary Grant, not Humphrey Bogart. http://www.carygrant.net/articles/judy.htm

[3]       Still don’t get the pun?  Look it up. #NSFW.

[4]      http://www.vulture.com/2015/11/every-mr-show-sketch-ranked.html

[5]       Yes, these really are the names of courses currently taught on college campuses. (http://socawlege.com/the-15-most-ridiculous-college-courses-you-wont-believe-are-being-taught/)