A Night of Shorts 6 (The Mads)

Shorts Featured:  "It Must Be the Neighbors," "Telephone Courtesy," "Dating Do's and Don'ts," "Better Use of Leisure Time"

The Shorts

"It Must Be the Neighbors"

The yards all around the neighborhood are in disarray!  Rusted away garbage cans, overgrown lawns, mice everywhere...WHEN WILL THE CARNAGE END!  But the inhabitants of this neighborhood refuse to take responsibility for their own cleanliness, with the almost universal mantra of "It isn't us.  It must be the neighbors."  The only people with the common sense to get off their asses and do yard work are the children of the street...

Children?  Wanting to do chores because their parents don't?  What kind of fantasy nonsense is this?  Lord of the Rings is more reality-based than this short.

The point of It Must Be the Neighbors is to wake up and take responsibility for your own property, which not everyone is willing to do, especially not if your property is a full home.  I just wanted a roof over my head!  I didn't want to take care of it too!  That wasn't part of the deal!  The short wishes for people to take a look around them and figure out what is or isn't in their control and that maybe good habits can domino into other good habits and benefit your entire surroundings.

Or you can blame the neighbors.  That works too.

"Telephone Courtesy"

Please hold while I connect you to your overview of Telephone Courtesy.

::four hours passes::

Hello, thank you for waiting!  This short tells us the importance of good manners over the telephone and how it affects businesses that rely on telephone communication, especially through customer care.  Our story features a boss who has a bad day and starts yelling at his telephone operator over the phone and then wonders what she could do to improve her customer service.  He decides to go to the local phone company for tips and he sets up an effective system of telephone training that effectively tells everyone that they need to smile more.

While good intentions are displayed in showing off poise for customer service, the main problem with Telephone Courtesy is that is skims over the mental stamina of the employees themselves.  It's one thing to just say "Do these things, it's easy!" but it's another to actually execute without having your employees wanting to die on the inside.  The first act of the story is extremely telling, as the boss calls the office irritated and gets angrier at an increasingly flustered receptionist and the short wants us to believe it's her fault.  The short does make statements that there are improvements that had to be made to his business practice to help his employees but chooses to ignore them and instead constantly lectures the employees on how they can improve at being a doormat instead.

While telephone etiquette is explained pretty well, Telephone Courtesy does little to wonder why and is far too concerned with the message of "Do it."

"Dating Do's and Don'ts"

(Note:  This short has no onscreen title.  This is what I'm seeing it referred to online, so I'll just cave into peer pressure and call it this)

A young boy is sent a free ticket to the carnival for a couple.  This means he needs a dun-dun-DUNNNNNNN date!  He and a narrator go through various scenarios on figuring out the best way to choose what woman to take out, how to ask her, and how to end the night.  And if that last scenario doesn't lead straight to the bedroom, you have failed miserably.

This rather innocent short mostly tries to whittle down bad ideas until one gets to the common sense solution.  Despite that, I kind of like the way it's presented though, as it tells the blossoming teens what they shouldn't do in hopes of teaching them what will happen without them learning it the hard way.  And believe me, my awkward ass learned a lot of these the wrong way way back when.  Where were you then, short!

The little question breaks are kind of funny.  "How do you choose a date?"  Well, who the hell do you want to spend time with for one!  "How do you say goodnight?"  If you play your cards right, you don't.  Hehehehe.  But this is for tweens, so we probably shouldn't go there.

"Better Use of Leisure Time"

Why are you letting all your time slip away?  Don't you know a hundred years ago leisure time didn't exist?  Get to putting it to good use, you slacker!  This short teaches you the all the different ways leisure time can be used you your advantage, filling it with hobbies or ways to learn for future goals or maybe just earn a few extra bucks by getting another job when you're...not at work.

If nothing else, this short has taught me that filling my leisure time with this blog is not a good use of my leisure time.  To spite it, I'm going to continue wasting my time on it.

This is a very slight short about how hobbies and activities are fun rather than sitting in your room and eating an apple, but I think this should be apparent.  This short gives the impression that if we don't take initiative and end leisure time right now we'll wind up a bunch of blank drones starring at brick walls.

::thinks of Facebook and Twitter::

OH MY GOD, THEY'RE RIGHT!

The Show

This is the first time I get to sit down and review a Mads show, which I've had several false starts on so far.  Initially I was trying to keep up from the very first stream, but personal issues that wound up being compounded by deaths in the family found my efforts to keep up with the new riffing project mostly unfinished.  I have been watching them as they've come out, usually much later because I work on Tuesday nights and I have to leech off of a friend's wifi whenever I want to download something.  I just hadn't been writing anything about them and when I did get to work on my blog I made a more concentrated effort on finishing my Mystery Science Theater entries before I turned my attention more fully on the other corners of the riffing universe.  Now that's done and weights have been lifted.  I almost started a few months ago with Voyage to the Planet of the Prehistoric Women before my internet completely crashed on me and by the time I got it back up I had completely forgotten I was working on something.

So yeah, that's my excuse.  Feel free to judge me.  2020 and 2021 were not my best years, pandemic or otherwise.

But the Mads have been a fun diversion all throughout the pandemic, and usually the shows I look forward to the most are the Night of Shorts shows, featuring those little slices of earnest learning experiences that have been given a good ribbing by our beloved duo of Frank Conniff and Trace Beaulieu.  It seems fitting that my first successful sit-down with the Mads is one of these shows.  And A Night of Shorts 6 gave me a couple of my favorite shorts I've seen yet, so it's definitely getting a gold star from me.

Stealing the night for me is Telephone Courtesy, which had me throwing my head back and laughing at various points.  I knew I was in for a true treasure as soon as Frank threw out the line "The first Karen!" and it just got better from there as the enthusiastic telephone lesson sets up a series of killer riffs from the dynamic duo.  Dating Do's and Don'ts is another class act, as are most dating related shorts.  The anxiety of teenage dating is always the brunt of some of the best humor from any riffing project.  Leisure Time doesn't quite live up to what came before, as it's very brief and doesn't gather much momentum, however it is funny enough.  Though if this night had ended with either of the prior two shorts we would have ended on a high note.

It Must Be the Neighbors is a bit harder to judge, because it's noted in the aftershow that they had issues with Trace's feed and he missed the entire short.  However the copy that I'm reviewing has been edited from rehearsal material which was specially spliced into the feed for the download version.  I don't know how it played originally so I can't judge that, though the version seen here is pretty good even though it's easily the weakest short of the night.  Frank also notes that one of the shorts featured was previously seen on RiffTrax though it was new to them, and fans will immediately recognize Neighbors as the short he's referring to (it was one of the first Trax shorts way back in 2008).  To be fair, both the Mads and the RiffTrax versions are about equally funny.

Interestingly, the RiffTrax version was in color while the Mads version is in black and white.  I wonder if the Mads got theirs from a different source?

Tonights special guest is John Erler of Master Pancake Theater, a riffing project on Twitch.  Initially I wondered if I had heard of them and my search history shows that I have looked them up before.  I think I deduced they would have been difficult to cover for this blog since they don't really have an archive and stream very frequently so I didn't really have a convenient way of writing about it.  Erler is a funny presence though and I might stop by Master Pancake to check out what they have to offer if I have a free night.  After-show talk starts by discussing actress Hope Summers, who was featured in the Leisure Time short in her first acting credit.  They discuss their favorite movies of 2021, which is dominated by Frank who relates that he loved Spider-Man:  No Way Home, Pig, Don't Look Up, and The Suicide Squad (I personally haven't seen Don't Look Up, but I really like the other three).  They get into a discussion of the careers of the recently departed Betty White and Sidney Poitier and give a respectful shout-out to Bob Saget who passed days before this show streamed.  Frank also has a pent-up rant about the forgotten Columbo spin-off Mrs. Columbo which isn't to be missed.  There is also talk about the films that they've seen on Master Pancake Theater, including what sounds like a fascinating TV pilot called Outlaws, where gunslingers are flung forward in time and start a detective agency.  A quick Wikipedia search shows this did go to series but only lasted 12 episodes.

Another night of shorts in the books, and this was a splendid one at that.  As usual, the four distinct short experiences make this hard to rate but I'll try and average it out.  Telephone Courtesy makes up a good chunk of the runtime and gets the most laughs, so that's a point in its favor.  Dating Do's and Don't is a swell follow-up that keeps the pace flowing.  The other two lag behind but are solid.  Because of those two absolute gutbusters swaying the average, I'm going to give this show high marks.  This is one to see for all fans!

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