The Soup: TV’s Funniest Show!

E!’s The Soup is the funniest show on television. I have long thought that E!’s pop-culture skewering clip show was worthy of such high praise, in part because its producers and crew accomplish so much with so little. Working with a handful of video clips and a low budget, they generate funnier product on a more consistent basis than almost anyone else on television. I often find The Soup to be more satisfying than late-night comedy staples Late Show with David Letterman, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel Live, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, not to mention Mad TV and Saturday Night Live, and some weeks it makes me laugh more than any of the situation comedies on network schedules.

As they say in Hollywood, The Soup always delivers “the funny.” (Yes, writers in Hollywood actually talk that way. No wonder they’re having problems.)

Suddenly, The Soup—a non-union show unaffected by the WGA strike—is standing tall as the only topical comedy program of note that is continuing to deliver outrageously funny originals on its usual schedule. (A new episode debuts every Friday night at 10 p.m. ET and then goes into rerun rotation through the following week.)

Okay, I suppose I should mention that E! currently produces another original series that pokes fun at popular culture (among other topics), the talk show Chelsea Lately starring comedienne Chelsea Handler. It is, like The Soup, a non-union show, and it runs weeknights at 11:30 p.m., where it is now an alternative to all those talk show reruns on the networks. Handler can be quite amusing, but IMHO her show doesn’t deliver “the funny” as consistently as The Soup, so I’m sticking with my statement that The Soup stands alone.

This week E! premiered the first of six year-in-review spin-off specials titled The Soup Presents that deliver just as much “funny” as the mother show. (New specials will debut on Monday nights through December 17th.) That’s all well and good, because awesome Soup host Joel McHale and the inmates in his asylum deserve all the network time they can get. But if I ruled the world, or at least the scheduling division at E!, I would do whatever is necessary to begin running original installments of The Soup weeknights at 11:30 p.m. ET (with repeats in primetime), if only on a temporary basis. (Chelsea Lately could move forward to 11 p.m. or back to 12 a.m. to accommodate it, giving E! a potent late-night presence.) Daily production might be a tall order for what is essentially a clip show with a few visual gags sprinkled on top. But with unscripted series poised to take over television the producers of The Soup should be in good shape, since reality shows provide the raw material for most of their funniest bits.