Some years ago, I fired off a brief shoutout to booze-swilling, whore-banging superspy Sterling Archer, the dysfunctional lacrosse-playing preppie superbrat lead of the ligne claire F/X adult cartoon series that bears his name. Well, seven years later, I’m still laughing. Sterling’s eased off the whores, more’s the pity, but he can still chug Harvey’s Bristol Cream straight from the bottle, like a real man should.
Sterling continues to labor beneath the load of his Upper East Side diva mom Malory, his (reluctant) main squeeze/ultimate fighting machine/gorgeous black chick Lana Caine and a host of others, including his own kid (via Lana, of course),1 though, for some reason, he’s now an LA-based private dick instead of running spy ops out of Manhattan. But never mind. What’s cool–well, what’s really cool–is a recent, grotesquely gratuitous reference to the lamentable rather than lamented early thirties comedy team of Bert Wheeler and Bob Woolsey. I stumbled across Bert n’ Bob a long time ago–so long ago that DVDs were still a thing–had just become a thing, as a matter of fact–in the painfully bad Dixiana, a musical whose only selling point for me was the presence of Bill Robinson, said presence proving to be both very brief and deeply disappointing.
Well, the point is, Bert n’ Bob were terrible. In my review for the Bright Lights Film Journal, linked above, I call Bert a “second-rate Billy Chrystal” and Bob a “fourth-rate W. C. Fields”. So to hear these forgotten dogs tagged in the year of our lord 2017, impressive!
Afterwords
Archer is now in its eighth season, but since I don’t see them in “real time” I’m only up to seven. The clip above does not include the reference to W&W but rather is a fairly inside piece for Archer addicts. There are many of these floating around YouTube.
Serious film historian David Boxwell easily topped my brief rabbit punch to Bert n’ Bob with an extended take on their oeuvre for Bright Lights here. The truly disturbing news is that almost all of their films are now out on DVD, along with several books extolling their virtues! I did not see this coming!2
- Like many TV babies, Archer, Jr., after being heavily featured in season six, disappeared entirely in season seven. They grow up so fast, and stop being adorable when they do. ↩︎
- You can, of course, also check out Bert n’ Bob on Youtube, including a full-length version of their rare (I’m guessing, because it’s totally racist?) So This Is Africa. ↩︎
