the only way a hard-working MTV producer on a mission to attract young eyeballs could: “Can Other Cody do it, too?”
Cody said, “No, but I bet I could teach him.”
Kelly said, “Perfect.”
The host of this show would be Kevin Farley, Chris’s brother and a very funny actor in his own right, who was currently starring as the Justin Jeffre of MTV’s parody boy band “2Gether.” (Kevin has since turned his attention to conservative comedy, having recently appeared as a combination of Michael Moore and Ebenezer Scrooge in the alleged comedy An American Carol. His swerve rightward may well have been precipitated by the events of this day, which, again, may God have mercy on you if you read that far.) Kevin had never hosted anything before, and this show was going to have a lot of moving parts. I was going to be the show’s announcer.
More thought than you would imagine went into the production of a show called Dude, This Sucks. Each act would have to build, and each one would have to incorporate music. It was not enough for a kid to juggle balls; he would have to juggle two, then three, then five balls, to the strains of “Mambo No. 5,” and his act would be called something like, “Flying Bega Balls.” Acts needed to feel current, fresh, outrageous.
And so it was decided that the sight of Cody and Other Cody shooting water out of their anuses and hitting a target was insufficient on its own. There would also need to be staging, and it would need to match the boldness of the act itself. It would go like this: two people on stage would be roasting marshmallows over a campfire. There would be a sign a few feet away from them that would say, in large letters, NO OPEN FLAMES. Cody and Other Cody would make their entrance in park ranger uniforms with tear-away bottoms, shake an admonishing finger at the rule-flouting campers, and then they would tear away the bottoms of their uniforms and extinguish the fire with the water that they had brought onstage inside their bodies. This would be set to the Bloodhound Gang hit “Fire Water Burn.” The act would be called “The Shower Rangers.”
Now, I was only peripherally involved with Dude, This Sucks, but when I saw the description of this act in the show’s breakdown, I thought, “Oh, this cannot be.” I asked a producer whether I had really just read what I had just read. “I know, right?” she said with pride. “That’s our opener.”
The whole production department was in Big Bear for Snowed In, and this show was the last thing we were shooting, so everyone was hanging out backstage. Shortly before the show started, I caught the eye of a higher-up person in production, and I asked him whether we were actually going to do what we were actually going to do. He said, “Can you believe it?” I agreed that I could not.
I believe I had a reputation as a little bit of a pill back then, and I absolutely deserved it. I would write e-mails complaining about spelling errors in the lyric crawl on Say What? Karaoke. I would physically correct grammar issues on cue cards. I have never complained about the size of my dressing room, but you will not confuse “your” with “you’re” while I have anything to say about it. (Even if it’s on a teleprompter and nobody will see it but me, I’ll know.) So when another even higher-up executive swung through backstage and I simply pointed at the “Shower Rangers” entry on the show’s breakdown with an incredulous look on my face, that production executive did not engage. He simply gave a thumbs up. This was going to happen.
Dude, This Sucks opened with all of the acts parading through the crowd and into a holding area stage left. As the show progressed, Kevin was to call them one by one, and each would try their best to impress a judging panel of early 2001’s hottest young celebrities (I can’t remember who, but imagine people like Jesse Metcalfe from Passions, Samm Levine from Freaks and Geeks, and model Jaime King; again, very soon you will understand why nobody has rushed forward to attach their name to this show). Cody and Other Cody were front and center in the stage-left holding area, ready to do their bit for forest safety with a special secret that only they and we knew about.
Like, really