Robert Smigel's TV Funhouse used to be the show that aired on Comedy Central immediately following South Park. Although I think Smigel's cartoons can become tedious, I will confess to having seen an episode of Funhouse that had me struggling to breathe through spasms of laughter. There was a great Behind-the-Music-style portrait of George Washington that reduced Washington's life to the Presidency, a bear attack, and a drug addiction. When Joe Walsh shared his first-hand knowledge of Washington's drug addiction and the fact that he was "out of control," the guitarist's deadpan delivery had me coughing and sputtering. And Smigel finished me off with a sketch called "Safety Team," in which children demonstrated the importance of keeping wet fingers away from electrical sockets by thrusting their wet fingers at electrical sockets--but always staying at least three inches from the sockets.

For weeks now, Comedy Central has been preparing viewers for the pilot of That's My Bush by endlessly repeating that the show is the product of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park. I have seen episodes of South Park that are funny, but I have also seen episodes that are flat-out dumb, episodes that try (and fail dismally) to have comic shock value. I took the position that it was a mistake for Parker and Stone to tackle That's My Bush because it seemed to me that they were having a hard enough time keeping one show funny. The last thing they needed, in my opinion, was to try to produce another half hour of raunchy comedy each week.

Based on the first episode of That's My Bush, I have abandoned my position. That's My Bush does not at all rely on the same kind of humor that we associate with South Park. It is as outrageous as South Park (i.e. not really all that outrageous if you really bother to think about it), but far more surreal. It's the kind of humor that I associate with the "I Dream of Mallory" sequence from Natural Born Killers, the kind of humor that we see whenever Bart and Lisa point at The Itchy and Scratchy Show and laugh. The running gag of That's My Bush, in other words, is to make fun of what seems to pass for comedy in our society.

Remarkably, we got all the way through the first episode without a single joke about how stupid it is for us to laugh at footage of men getting hit in the crotch or of people's pants falling down on America's Funniest Home Videos. The target of That's My Bush is more insidious. Parker and Stone go after the nastiness in our society that we crush under laugh tracks and smiles and pronounce humor. Ralph Cramden's "One of these days, Alice--pow!--right in the kisser" is exposed for the not-very-funny threat that it always has been when President Bush delivers his catchphrase, "One of these days, Laura, I'm gonna punch you in the face" (with the audience chiming in to shout the last part of the line).

Parker and Stone go after more than hackneyed catchphrases, though. They take on all the old standbys of situation comedy: the meddlesome maid, the obtrusive neighbor, the ditzy blond. And instead of breathing life into such characters by giving them fresh lines, the show takes the approach of trying to kill such characters off once and for all by reducing their standard lines to risibly unfunny chestnuts. When the neighbor, Larry (presumably named after the downstairs neighbor on Three's Company, but modeled on all sitcom neighbor characters, particularly the Joe Leisure character in Married With Children) bursts into the White House, he tells the president that there is snu on the White House lawn.

George: What's snu?
Larry: Not much. What's new with you?
Forced laughter from the audience.

Every single time the semi-tolerated, omni-despised neighbor pays a visit, he has to deliver an unfunny joke that reiterates how unwanted his company is. We've been doing it for decades on sitcoms. Parker and Stone have decided to make the jokes of the neighbor so stale and the laughter of the audience so forced as to prompt us to evaluate our tolerance for such characters. The same sadistic meta-humor happens with the maid, modelled on Alice from The Brady Bunch, but played to perfection by Marsha Wallace (whose role as Carol the secretary on Newhart turns out not to have been all that different from Alice's).

Most importantly, however, the show resists the impulse to turn itself into a running critique on Bush's politics and policies. The first episode concerns abortion, but at no point does Bush or the script come down one way or another on the issue. A political crisis is seen as nothing more than a wacky component of life that Bush has to deal with, along with his obtrusive neighbor and his meddlesome maid. George Bush is the same as Ralph Cramden, except that instead of coming up with get-rich-quick schemes that turn sour, he screws up at work by foolishly attempting to have a romantic dinner with his wife at the same time that he is supposed to be attending a meeting with the leaders on both sides of the abortion issue.

I'm not sure that any sitcom premise is more tired than that of trying to have dinner with two different sets of people at the same time. The unrelentingly hackneyed quality of That's My Bush made the pilot episode something of a joy to watch. It's a show for anyone who has ever wondered why people watch shows like Married With Children. And its answer appears to be that Americans are so stupid that they will laugh at anything so long as the studio audience appears to be laughing. That's My Bush, in other words, is a worthy comedic cause. Right now I can't say whether it can actually manage to be funny week in and week out. But it certainly made it over the early hurdles in fine form.

It's not at all the mindless anti-Bush rant that I expected. And apparently it's never going to be. "What we are going to do is make everyone love George Bush," said Parker in an interview. "The whole point of a sitcom is taking a character and forcing you to love that character."

It may look as if Parker and Stone want to punish America for accepting George Bush, but I suspect that what they're really punishing us for is the patience we exhibited for Al Bundy.

Recommended: Yes

Average Program Rating: TV MA -- mature audiences only