Dog Bites Man
Comedy Central
10:30 tonight
You've got to hand it to Comedy Central. It was a master stroke enlisting Chapman University polisci professor Fred Smoller to provide free publicity for this fake news show created by Dan Mazer of Da Ali G Show fame. Dog Bites Man uses a mix of improvisation, scripted comedy and reality TVisms to follow the staffers at fictional news station KHBX of Spokane, Wash. Smoller—for those who missed Theo Douglas' story in the Weekly and those that followed in the LA Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as blogs here and there and ev– ery–where—got “duped” on camera by the “KHBX news team” and threw such a “hissy fit” that the “episode” he's in won't ever be “aired.” Yeah, sure cagey ol' Smolley got duped. As if! Folks, you can't PAY for pre-publicity like that. Seriously, you can't: we tried whoring out our pre-publicitying bod to the highest bidders and no one bit. But we'll find out if Dog Bites bites tonight, when it makes it world premiere. Don't know if Smoller will be watching or sunning in Cabo with his “settlement,” but we'll certainly give it a go. Not only does the show have Upright Citizens Brigade vet Matt Walsh going for it, it has Zach Galifianakis, who plays the KHBX cameraman. Anyone who has seen Galifianakis on a comedy club stage, in Patton Oswalt's Comedians of Comedy or in Wonder Showzen's Hee-Haw lampoon job Horse Apples knows he's one of the funniest guys going these days. Repeats June 8 at 12:30 a.m. And 7:30 N 10:30 p.m.; June 9 at 12:30 a.m.; June 11 at 3:30 a.m.; June 12 at 12:30 N 2:30 a.m.; and June 13 at 10 p.m.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.