Mr. Show: The Complete Fourth Season
Now available.

If, like me, you live in a world where it's perfectly acceptable to just randomly say "because life is precious, and God, and the Bible" all the time, chances are you've already seen the fourth and final season of Mr. Show, the beloved late-'90s HBO sketch-comedy series. If you haven't, you should really go to the video store, because it's finally out on DVD. If you have, you'll agree that season four was the best one by far: the cast and crew, led by Bob Odenkirk and David Cross, had hit its stride; the live sketches are masterful; the surreal links are inspired; and the pre-taped segments achieve glory. The real proof, however, lies in the quotations.

Season four offers the most oft-repeated lines of any single Mr. Show season. These include the aforementioned "Life is precious," as well as, "It's perfectly understandishable"; "All right, CUT THE SHIT!"; "Keep 'em comin', Gleep-Glop"; "Ultimate blooper!"; "Funny that shit up"; "Motherfather, Chinese dentist"; "How could you think that was a stool? IDIOT!"; "I wanna see the taint"; "You are one pussy hair away from eternal hellfire, my friend"; "We're bad wittle kitties and we wuv you"; "You don't know what words mean, do you?"; "Met him? I ate him!"; and of course, the evergreen "Dude, suck that shit."

But as with Monty Python, the memorable lines tend to haze over the greatness. Season four of Mr. Show contains four of the very funniest things ever written and performed on a television show, each of which represents a different aspect of what made the series--whose reputation also tends to obscure the finer points of its genius (also like Python)--so unique. They are "God's Book on Tape," in which Bob Odenkirk portrays the creator of the universe as pompous film producer Robert Evans, narrating his autobiography in the style of The Kid Stays in the Picture (characterization); "Everest," in which Jay Johnston takes 12 of the most inspired backwards pratfalls the world will ever know, pushing the tone of the scene from funny, to silly, to ridiculous, to annoying, to embarrassing, to brilliant (absurdism); "Civil War Re-Enactments," a letter-perfect send-up of Ken Burns' PBS documentary series (parody); and, of course, "Wyckyd Sceptre," in which the members of a hair metal band are too self-absorbed to recognize their own homosexual behavior, even when shown a videotape of them giving each other blow jobs (invention).

Of all these, "Wyckyd Sceptre" is the most obviously brilliant, because of the lengths the sketch is willing to go to satisfy a hip audience's desire to laugh at the culture of machismo in rock, as well as the savage stupidity of celebrity. But if I had to choose one single bit from the entire Mr. Show canon to argue for the series' unique identity (and I can, because I have seen every episode at least 900 times), that bit would have to be "Everest." There may be funnier things in the history of mankind (it's debatable), but there's something inimitable about the sheer absurdity of both the fall itself--a stumbling, splay-armed crash into a wall lined with shelves lined with thimbles, like a trust exercise gone horribly wrong--and its relentless repetition; each flawlessly timed tumble makes you feel like they couldn't possibly justify doing another one. No way. And then they do. And then they do it again. And again. And again. Until all that's left is the sense that you are watching a scene about a man who can't stop falling backwards into a wall full of thimbles, when all he wanted to do was tell his disapproving family about how he just finished climbing Mt. Everest. Kafka's wildest dreams couldn't have come up with a more Kafkaesque scenario.

There's plenty of precedent for each of these styles, but no show that was ever so deft at moving between them as this one. Of course, season four also has some of the series' worst moments ("The Burgundy Loaf," "Monocu," "Marilyn Monster Pizza Parlor"), but the good parts handily outnumber them. It's always hard to know how well sketch-comedy shows will age, and most don't fare too well, especially experimental ones. With the DVD release of this entire series (finally), the ravenous cult of Mr. Show fans can at last shut up and let history decide.

sean@thestranger.com