Tuesday, September 04, 2018

One Man's Trash

As a big "How Did This Get Made?" fan, I was interested when Jason Mantzoukas plugged an episode of The Chris Gethard Show on which he and Paul Scheer appeared.  Specifically, Mantzoukas made the particular plea that someone should put the episode on YouTube since it was so singularly funny that it should reach as wide an audience as possible.  This advice was clearly taken, as I instantly found it on YouTube, and proceeded to watch a very entertaining hour of TV.  Now, the episode was from 2016, and the video was posted by the actual Chris Gethard Show itself, and the HDTGM episode with Jason's plug was just from the last couple of weeks, so I'm not really sure of why he chose right now to bring up "One Man's Trash," other than it maybe just occurred to him how awesome this 43 minutes of television is.

The premise is simple.  There's a dumpster on the stage.  Gethard (the host of this live, and very off-the-wall talk show) has Scheer and Mantzoukas as the guests, and the entire show is based around people guessing what the special object is inside said dumpster.  The guesses come from fans who call and Skype into the live broadcast, and also from Paul and Jason themselves for a time.  Gethard simply answers yes or no to the questions, with perhaps a hint or two along the way.  At certain points, certain people are allowed to peek into the dumpster to view the object, which changes the nature of the show considerably.

The twist, you see, is that if nobody correctly guessed, the dumpster wasn't going to be opened.  I actually didn't pick up on this detail while watching, though it was stressed as a critical point of this great article about the episode by Uproxx's Andrew Husband.  Frankly, I love the idea that this could've led to the same dumpster and object being used in a future show for another round of guessing.  Honestly, I feel like this could be an actual recurring show --- just add in some funny improvisors, have a new content of the dumpster every week, and you're on the air for a Gunsmoke-esque length of time.

I will, obviously, not dream of telling you what the actual object is (the fact that the object is revealed is my only spoiler).  Here's the episode if you want to watch for yourself, and honestly people, don't jump ahead in the video or read the comments section.  The episode is absolutely worth your full time.

Ok, one other minor spoiler: I can't believe nobody made a cheeky guess of Oscar The Grouch. 

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