Surprisingly, this is not my probably-annual nod to my favorite Christmas special. I'm talkin' about Bob Odenkirk's new show, The Birthday Boys. You know I was a Mr. Show fan (Odenkirk's old show with the great David Cross), right? Well, at least I know Brian knows that, since he got me into it many years ago. But now that that's established, if you like MS, you should have no problem liking TBB. I've only seen two episodes so far, but one had me laughing the whole way through, and the other put Kim and I into that rare jewel, the "can't stop laughing" moment. I really should be keeping track of those. We had to pause the show and just let ourselves "laugh out" before we could start it up again. At which point we finished up, and rewound (do we just say "reversed" at this point as there's no actual winding?) to watch the scene again.

And doing something over and over--that's what Odenkirk humor is all about. If you can pull that off, where you're running with a joke for a solid half-hour and the audience just keeps wanting more, you're doing it right. But only to the people who like it. Everybody else gets annoyed and insists you stop or they'll leave. I say if you have a funny concept, do it until there's one person left laughing at it.

I don't want to give anything away by mentioning all the specific skits, but just try the episode "All Your Favorites Are Back." You should know right away whether or not you're on board with this show. It's actually on U-Tube but you have to pay 2 bucks for the episode. If you have cable, it's on Eye Eff See.

And Comedy Bang! Bang!, which comes on before TBB and which I've talked about here before, is still going strong. Getting stronger, e-vonnn.