From its inception, cable channel Comedy Central has willfully cultivated a following amongst the recreational hippie lettuce crowd, both through word and deed. In this regard, then, this DVD was a long time coming. A great little grab-bag compilation title,
Comedy Central's Home Grown collects a handful of full episodes of some of its series, throws them together with sketches from past shows like
Drawn Together and
Chappelle's Show, and rounds things out with twisted
Animation Show shorts and other fare like "Spiders on Drugs."
The material here is partitioned into "buds" (full episodes), "stems" (sketches) and "seeds" (a random assortment of green-friendly fare). The former fare consists of episodes of
Strangers with Candy,
TV Funhouse,
Reno 911!,
The Sarah Silverman Program and
Root of All Evil. Of these,
Silverman's "Face Wars" is probably the best, and legitimately edgiest;
it finds her donning black-face to better understand the plight of African-Americans, and her two gay pals Brian Posehn and Steve Agee grappling with some potent medical marijuana after their personal dealer gets busted. Silverman's good with dirty-talk shock value ("Did you eat a fart?" she asks her sister's cop boyfriend), but she also pushes envelopes with the best of them, as shown here.
TV Funhouse seems like a low-rent, less gleefully subversive version of Pee-wee's Playhouse, from 20 years earlier, with only black-and-white claymation segments really soaring. Comedian Lewis Black's
Root of All Evil, a sort of comedic oral-argument litigant showdown, pits weed against beer, to amusing effect.
The other odds and ends offer up their own hit-and-miss amusement as well. Of the three puppet-fronted
Crank Yankers segments, the four-minute "Badonkadonk," in which
a guy tries to place a dirty ad in the Village Voice, is easily the best. Other bits include sketches from
Viva Variety,
Drawn Together,
Chappelle's Show (no Prince basketball stories, alas) and more. The most truly zonked inclusion, however, is a 25-minute episode of the PBS series
The Joy of Painting, with
Afroed, sing-song-voiced host Bob Ross. It's easy to imagine the belongings of someone's roommate getting ruined by fingerpaint after this.
Housed in a white Amray case and presented on a single disc with a picture of an apple bong on the front,
Comedy Central's Home Grown is of course presented in 1.33:1 full screen, with a Dolby digital audio track to handle the meager aural demands of the material herein. Special mention should be made of the lengths gone to in order to preserve the (cough, cough) "inspiration" of this collection; in addition to the aforementioned sectional groupings,
the DVD's menu screen gently undulate, creating a sensation of dazed wonderment if one stares long enough (or has the right accouterments, one presumes). The back cover of the disc also contains the following consumer advisory: best served with nachos and Funyuns.
To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here.
B+ (Collection) B+ (Disc) 
