The Fuccons

[Famous Mortimer]

While there's some discussion of Japanese comedy...

The Fuccons started off as a sketch on a brilliantly-named SCTV-style show called "Vermillion Pleasure Night". They're all about 2-3 minutes, and feature a family of American mannequins living in Japan, filmed in various locations (mostly their house, though), with minimal movement, bizarre scenarios and every episode ending with the characters shrieking in laughter.

The mother is indifferent-to-hostile towards their son, while the Dad is mostly supportive, but just a really bad parent. Mikey is relentlessly cheerful. It's not just its concept, though, it's really funny too, so why not watch an episode or two? There are both dubbed and subbed eps on Youtube, and the original Japanese comedians sound extremely subdued compared to the energy of the Americans. But they both work!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W39DOj7kGKc

[letsgobrian]

A lot of my 2005 was spent trying to convince people to watch this under its other title "Oh Mikey".

I think it got recommended to me along with the anime shorts from the Grasshoppa! DVDs after I'd seen the film Mind Game.

[j_u_d_a_s]

So glad someone's mentioned Vermillion Pleasure Night because now I can share one of my favourite ever sketches from it. Cathy's House - https://youtu.be/NUnwFHplBg4
Kind of a flip of The Fuccon family/Oh! Mikey's premise with real folk pretending to be dolls instead of vice versa and a brilliant slice of absurdism.

In many ways, it's a shame that both Cathy's House and The Fuccon family were so ahead of their time. They're the ideal length and format for a webseries on that TikTok the kids have now.

[The Crumb]

Thanks for the tip, I'm really enjoying this. Think I prefer the Japanese dub, the weirdly stilted and formal wording in the subtitles only makes it funnier for me.

[The Crumb]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfxtF1mD5uw

This one's a particularly wild 2 and a half minutes.

[Minami Minegishi]

Wow - these have popped up on Youtube in much better quality than my shitty downloads. Excellent stuff and I also knew this back in the day as Oh Mikey! It's truly bizarre but in a very accessible way - it obvious calls to mind a bunch of American shows but none of them quite nail the weirdness in such a funny and often adorable way.

Many props to this Youtube account for posting so much of it in decent qualtity.