Y’know, there was a time before streaming became ubiquitous, that I used to watch two TV shows faithfully on my old ExpressVu dish: Dennis Miller Live and Politically Incorrect. Those two shows, for most of my compatriates, were a bit too hip for the room, but I never missed them.
I forget what happened to Maher, but at one point he got hammered by cancel-culture before there was such a thing. I don’t remember what he said or what he did exactly, but he kind of disappeared for a while and dropped off my radar. I didn’t know very much about Adam Carolla at the time.
I sort of got reacquainted with Maher when he released Religulous, which I actually saw at a theatre, if you can imagine that. That was 2008 – I highly doubt a film like that would see the light of day in 2022.
But, more recently, when I was living in the Arctic, just a few years ago, I had several favourite shows that I watched on Spike (which later was acquired by the Paramount Network who promptly and totally fucked it all up); Bar Rescue and Cops, for example, and Adam Carolla’s show Catch A Contractor. I guess before he became a celebrity of sorts, Adam was a contractor/renovator, and by all accounts, a damn good one. How/why he made the jump, I have no idea.
Anyway, the premise of that show, in case you never saw it was this: Adam and his sidekick, “Skip”, also a contractor, would find people (usually young families) that had been totally fucked over by contactors that left them with an unholy mess of an unfinished reno job and then absconded with the money. Some of these renos were not only shoddy and shitty, but often dangerous – live hanging wires, missing load-bearing walls, this kind of thing.
So, Adam and Skip (with the help of Skip’s private investigator wife) would stage these elaborate traps involving hunting these dirtchutes down and asking them to “quote on a reno”. They would rent a house, set up a back room full of engineers, producers, and video cameras everywhere in the house to film the festivities. When these douchebags showed up to “quote” on the “job”, Adam and Skip would suddenly appear out of nowhere and confront these cumtwangs about the shitty renovations that they had abandoned. It was a really interesting show. Quite often, these confrontations almost came to blows as our boys uneashed relentless attacks on the “contractors”, complete with photos of the botched jobs, fake contracts, cancelled cheques, etc. Usually the victims would arrive on scene also and the thing would get really hairy.
Long story short, Adam and Skip would give these fuckwads three choices:
1.) Go back and complete the renovations properly, under their supervision.
2.) Return all the money. Every penny.
3.) See them in court.
Anyway, hijinks ensued of course, and what usually wound up happening is that the boys would ultimately finish the reno themselves, and the results were often astonishing. As great a comedian as Carolla is, it seems he was an even better general contractor. It was a really, really good show. And Adam’s deadpan verbal assaults on these assholes were the best part; they didn’t stand a chance.
When Paramount took over Spike (which was already kind of a shambles), they decided it would be really smart to insert about 30 minutes of mind-numbing advertising per hour, or so it seemed. The same three commercials repeated, over and over, ad nauseam, to the point where I simply couldn’t watch it any more. Which was really a shame, because Adam created a new show on Paramount later on, called Adam Carolla and Friends Build Stuff Live, which was probably awesome, but for me, a boycott is a boycott; I was never going back.
Anyway, thank you for the clip. Those two sitting there bantering over drinks and doobies remind me of you and I Mart, at the studio, late at night after about 60 beers. Off you go.
monabonejackon 