"Showzen" people

March 22, 2006 | What would you do if a microphone-toting grade-schooler in a trench coat approached you at ground zero and asked you to share your 9/11 memories -- but insisted that you do so while wearing one of those Groucho Marx funny-nose-and-glasses get-ups? What if you were visiting the Statue of Liberty and a pigtailed little girl asked you -- while the cameras were rolling -- if she had the "freedom to smack you in the face right now"? What if she then hauled off and slapped you?

Welcome to "Wonder Showzen," the MTV2 series that does for childhood innocence what "Chappelle's Show" did for racial sensitivity. It's a pitch-perfect (and pitch-black) parody of a kids show in which puppets, cartoons, industrial films and adorable child actors collide in what feels like a riot (in both senses) rippling through Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. The result is often deeply offensive -- and painfully funny.

"The idealized world of children's television doesn't address murder, doesn't address racism, doesn't address hatred," says series co-creator John Lee. "We have to play with those things so that we're not an actual kids show." Driving that point home, the show's opening credits warn, "'Wonder Showzen' contains offensive, despicable content that is too controversial and too awesome for actual children. The stark, ugly, profound truths 'Wonder Showzen' exposes may be soul crushing to the weak of spirit. If you allow a child to watch this show, you are a bad parent or guardian." If that's not clear enough, images of exploited children like a knife-thrower's cherubic target and John-John Kennedy saluting his father's casket roll under the show's taunting theme song, which cries, "Change the channel for kids."

The "stark, ugly, profound truths" are presented in episodes as delicious as arsenic cookies, bearing innocent titles like "Birth," "Space" and "Nature," yet featuring cartoons like "D.O.G. O.B.G.Y.N.," about a dog who scratches out a living delivering babies, and live-action segments like "Beat Kids," in which seriously cute, trench-coated child reporters buttonhole clueless adults with questions like, "When the revolution comes, where will you hide?" (This one was posed to moneyed white guys on Wall Street, who were also asked, "Who did you exploit today?" and offered a napkin to wipe the blood off their hands.)

And then there's Clarence, a cueball-headed blue puppet interviewer whose contempt for his subjects makes Bill O'Reilly look like Byron Allen. In one episode, Clarence chases joggers demanding, "What are you running from?" and in another, he visits Harlem to ask residents about what riles them.

"Wonder Showzen" has been a hit with critics. Time and Entertainment Weekly both put it on their best of 2005 lists, and Salon critic Heather Havrilesky proclaimed: "I love the sickos who created 'Wonder Showzen' with all my heart, and all you sickos out there will, too."

But for other people, the show simply hits a nerve. The Anti-Defamation League took offense at a segment featuring a little boy in a Hitler outfit. (That threw a Seattle Post-Intelligencer headline "Rejoice in Our Liberty and Heil 'Wonder Showzen'" into a whole new light.) That bit got the "Health" episode pulled from subsequent airings. Making for some truly strange bedfellows, white supremacists have also complained about the show on various message boards, puzzling over the show's racial humor.

Whatever you think about "Wonder Showzen" (the first season arrives on DVD on March 28; the second season begins March 31), chances are you don't know much about its creators, a New York art collective called PFFR. "Wonder Showzen" is just the poisoned tip of the PFFR spear. The group (pronounced "Pea-Eff-Are," the middle "F" inexplicably silent) has had gallery shows of drawings and videos, produced a documentary on Christian puppeteers called "Hands of God," and released CDs featuring dissonant synth-heavy pop songs with names like "Japoney Appoe," perfect for easy listening on Guantànamo. The "Showzen" creators also wrote the script for an avant-garde porn film called "Final Flesh" that features eggs, meat and a jar of neglected children's tears.

PFFR's arty C.V. seems more appropriate for a biennale than for Viacom's mass-market youth culture machine, which may be why "Wonder Showzen" is anything but the usual MTV (or MTV2) show. (Full disclosure: I have worked for Viacom in the past, though never for MTV or MTV2.) Each episode feels like a puckish, conceptual prank on the viewer -- not to mention on the network crazy enough to air bits like the last 15 minutes of the "Patience" episode, which consists of the show's first half run backward. As Lee, who created and writes the show with Vernon Chatman, explains, "We've always said that our goal is to destroy MTV."

Next page: A little boy dressed up as Hitler?