Somewhere between Saturday Night Live and The Whitest Kids You Know came The Kids In The Hall, a sketch comedy troupe that devoted itself to lunacy, random non-sequiturs and lots and lots of cross-dressing. Featuring names that we at least kind of know to this day like Dave Foley and Kevin McDonald, The Kids In The Hall spanned six seasons, and brought out two movies.  And the folks out at A&E sent over the entire six season box set, The Kids In The Hall: The Complete Series, for me to review. And it’s almost every inch a delight.

The Kids In The Hall: The Complete Series brings together just about everything The Kids In The Hall ever did. All the greatest moments like “I’m Crushing Your Head” guy, to the Flying Pig who entertains people in life’s many lines, even down to Skoora the Gentle Shark. Don’t hate him…he hates himself.  You’ll get an endless amount of short comedy sketches, and most of them hilarious.

Stop and wrap your head around that for a minute. We’re talking about fully forty five hours of prime comedy. Sure, not all of it is going to be great stuff. Some of it will be almost aggressively stupid. But I spent a whole lot of time laughing at the wide array of comic joy to be had here.

The sketches are relatively simple, and for the most part effective largely due to their simplicity. Nothing really sticks around long enough to wear out its welcome, which is a plus, so they’re constantly keeping a flow of comic joy coming. Each sketch lasts, on average, somewhere around four minutes, with some smaller ones tossed in to thin out the mix and keep each episode around twenty four minutes.

And really, it’s hilarious. There’s so much of it here, and somewhere between eighty to ninety percent of it is just hilarious. The humor isn’t even all that topical, which means it’s just as funny today as it was back in 1989 when it first emerged.  That’s especially surprising in sketch comedy, as often, it depends on current events and the like for its humor. The Kids In The Hall, meanwhile, tended to draw humor from the relatively absurd, which generated many of the classic characters, along with other strange phenomenon like Salty Ham. About the only thing you won’t get here, and this is actually something of a big loss, is their first feature-length movie, Brain Candy. Brain Candy was good stuff, and it’s a shame that it’s not here.

And the Screenhead Ten Scale recognizes The Kids In The Hall by giving The Kids In The Hall: The Complete Series a nine out of ten, recognizing its numerous successes yet acknowledging that it’s not perfect. But it’s very, very close.

The folks out at A&E have sent me out yet another massive collection of video joy to review for you folks today, nothing less than Benny Hill: The Complete Megaset.

Now, just in case you need some background, Benny Hill was one of the biggest comic acts in Great Britain back in the sixties. In fact, he was so big that his strange sketch comedy show went on for fully twenty years, 1969 through 1989. And as such, there are a great whopping lot of episodes here, each comprising a series of sketches numbering, if the box is to be believed (and I figure if you can’t believe a DVD box about the contents of the DVD, well, who can you believe?), fully five hundred and eighty five sketches.

Stop and think about that for a minute–Benny Hill: The Complete Megaset boasts fully five hundred eighty five sketches, forty eight hours (and twenty minutes!) of total runtime, and I’ll tell you this, they’re a riot. Okay, admittedly, there’s some mildly unpleasant racial humor that depends on stereotypes (like Hill’s portrayal of a Chinese man who “pray the frute at the royar parradium”, but then, this was back in the sixties and things like that were perfectly fine then), but it’s still pretty funny when you consider it in the light in which it was made.

And it’s not just comedy, either; you’ll also get a good dose of music here, from both a wide variety of musical acts and from Benny himself, who will inject plenty of comedy into his music, giving you a two-sided look at quality comedy.

Watching the show change over the years is also something of a treat, and though you’ll almost certainly have a preference one way or another, I think it’s pretty safe to say that this may well be one of the funniest collections of sketch comedy ever released.

The Screenhead Ten Scale can’t stop laughing long enough to issue a score, so I’m going to have to step in. This is a ten out of ten, pure and simple, well worth the time you’ll put into watching it. Benny Hill: The Complete Megaset is fantastic, nothing but.

Say what you will about Eddie Murphy–that he’s hilarious, that he’s so incredibly unprofessional that he continually laughs at his own jokes, that doing family fare exclusively has left his career a neutered wreck–but the man’s got a huge retrospective of funny moments, and most of them are right here on Saturday Night Live: The Best of Eddie Murphy. The folks out at Lions Gate sent me a copy to review, and indeed, the best of Eddie Murphy is probably right here. Because after this, it just goes downhill from here.

It’s hard to compare Eddie Murphy’s recent career, where he pretty much plays a beleaguered dad in every movie he does, with his earlier career (which you’ll find a good chunk of on Saturday Night Live: The Best of Eddie Murphy), where he plays pimps with infomercials and Buckwheat. But there’s still so much sheer audacity to his work that it’s hard to ignore it. And of course, there’s so much silliness involved in the audacity (I once heard that audacity was the last refuge of the absurd, and that’s a perfect metaphor for this entire DVD) that it’s hard not to laugh along.

And even when he screws up, live as the title would imply, he’s quick to recover with snappy cover. For instance, his “Black History Minute” features a couple of noteworthy flubs, and all it takes to bury them in gales of laughter from the audience is a little faux-angry barking.

Speaking of which, getting the audience involved in the proceedings is one of Murphy’s great strength–check him out in Little Richard Simmons, as he gets the audience up and clapping along.

Be careful, though, as some of the references will be somewhat dated. Murphy’s Jesse Jackson sketch depends on you remembering the famous flap in which Jesse Jackson referred to New York City as “Hymietown”–and don’t flame me, that’s both a quote and a historical reference. And you’ll have to remember Reagan’s assassination attempt also to get the full value from later Buckwheat sketches.

But despite the historical content, and the really old references, there’s still plenty of great laughs here, and terrific moments. One of the most hilarious and horrifying poems–Cill My Landlord (and that’s how it’s actually spelled)–I’ve ever heard came from Eddie Murphy, and I took a literature class in college.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands Saturday Night Live: The Best of Eddie Murphy an eight out of ten for packing an hour and forty minutes of funny into one disc. Sure, some of it is a bit dated, and some of it is really obscure, but it’s usually a riot.

So the folks out at Lions Gate sent me a copy of the Best of Saturday Night Live–Tracy Morgan.  And I’ll tell you this much…I’ve never been so baffled by a DVD.  Oh sure, I got lots of laughs, but they were the confused, vaguely uncomfortable sort of laughs that can only be generated by people acting like utter loons.

Anyway, this one is pretty much exactly what it says on the box, the best sketches of Saturday Night Live that featured Tracy Morgan. And Tracy Morgan will show you in no uncertain terms why he may well have been the biggest lump of sheer raw lunacy ever to hit Saturday Night Live, and why it was probably a good thing to put him in charge of Scare Tactics on SyFy.

Seriously, this is just puzzling stuff.  It’ll often be hilarious, but at the same time, it’ll be funny mostly because it’s so wildly unexpected.  I watched Aunt Jemima’s husband, Uncle Jemima, sell something called “mash liquor” while he hallucinated a flock of birds and butterflies. I saw a homeless man try to sell a musical script from his home in the sewer.

I watched a man with a sixth grade education present a show about animals.

That may well have been the single strangest thing of the evening.

I’ll tell you this…this would be a pretty good rental, but buying this one is probably a bad idea.  You’ll need two, maybe three watches to get past the superabundance of moments that make you just clap a head to your forehead in astonishment and say, what the hell did I just watch?  Past that, you’re going to lose a lot of the replay value, because by then, the sheer outlandishness of the footage is going to get tired.

Even after a first viewing, some parts of it will be more tiresome than others.   Like the “ex-porn stars” bit that was really just the same joke over and over again, a lot like Saturday Night Live in general.

But there will even be a dose of added value here, with some extra footage like an audition tape for Tracy Morgan, as well as some outtakes and other bonus footage.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale is left to hand out a rating, and it hands out a six out of ten for a thoroughly outlandish, funny good time with added value that will really only be funny a couple times before it just loses everything until you forget the jokes.  Then it’ll likely be funny again.

So the folks out at Lions Gate sent me one of their growing number of DVD titles, The Best of Will Ferrell, celebrating some of the best sketches that Will Ferrell was involved in back in his Saturday Night Live days.  And thankfully, these are plenty of laugh-inducing bits, and sometimes, plenty of that awkward comedy that Ferrell made famous.

There’s no real plot synopsis here, if for no other reason that there’s no real plot here.  You’ll be getting a series of sketches that Ferrell made famous, including his George W. Bush impression, his Roxbury sketches, the “cowbell” sketch that’s actually made it to meme status, and plenty more.

See, back in the late nineties, the Farley-Spade era had pretty much disintegrated thanks to Chris Farley’s phenomenally drugged-out death.  And we were all starting to wonder what would replace it.

Will Ferrell was that replacement.

With Chris Kattan generally serving as his straightman, Ferrell went on to produce several years of exciting bits and big laughs, then moving on to do movies, many of which weren’t that funny.  But anyway, his Saturday Night Live years were some fantastically funny stuff, and you’ll see a lot of that here.

Most of the bits they chose, gratefully, are indeed pretty funny.  They’ve thrown in a couple of those great Saturday Night Live commercial parodies and a few montages of rapid-fire lesser Ferrell bits.  Sometimes, not even the actors can keep from laughing, and that has something of an alternating effect.  Sometimes it’s distracting, and sometimes it actually ends up making you laugh too.  At least, that’s what I got out of it.

And as an added bonus, you’ll also get a terrific history lesson about life in the late nineties.  From Sisqo’s Thong Song to pre-9 / 11 George Dubya, you’ll get a good long look at a lot of the things that made up the nineties into the early 2000s.  No, Celebrity Jeopardy wasn’t quite as easy as Saturday Night Live made it out to be, but it wasn’t too far off.

This ends up making Saturday Night Live: The Best of Will Ferrell a fantastic combination of factors–a nostalgia frenzy for everyone who saw this stuff once way back when, a history lesson for those who haven’t, and an abundance of laughs for both, it may not be perfect, but it’s probably as close to the best of anything as Saturday Night Live can get.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale gives Saturday Night Live: The Best of Will Ferrell an eight out of ten for accomplishing a whole lot of different goals at the same time.

Monty Python fans rejoice!  After years of protracted hand-wringing and much deliberation, iTunes has launched the Monty Python iTunes Store including five of the comedy troupe’s films (including Monty Python and the Holy Grail ) as well as all 45 episodes of their comedy sketch show Monty Python’s Flying Circus, available for purchase.

Along with Holy Grail are other Python classics, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life and Monty Python’s Life of Brian, plus their 1982 live performance Monty Python: Live At The Hollywood Bowl and Terry Gilliam’s Jabberwocky, the medieval comedy.  The Flying Circus television series is available in several variations.