Reasons to Pray for the End of the World: "Manswers"

Manswers is a program that airs on Spike TV that airs late nights on Wednesdays.  It is set up as a comical advice show for guys (akin to The Man Show) and may also be one of the most insulting things I have ever seen, intellectually and otherwise.  Let's take a look.

A couple of weeks ago, my friends and I were celebrating another friend's birthday.  After an eventful night of barhopping, we returned drunk and wired to the apartment and decided to see what was on television so as to unwind.  Given that the NYU cable plan offers a pretty pitiful selection of channels, and given that it was probably 2 or 3 in the morning, we settled on some show on Spike (AKA the CSI 24/7 network) called Manswers, lured in by its title and our relative intoxication.  I keep bringing up said intoxication, which may be considered poor form, but trust me, it is the only way I can actually justify having sat through the entirety of this program.  I almost did not write this article because it would mean I had to watch that brain poison again.  My point is that this show is so exceptionally terrible that being fall down drunk is only a drop in the bucket of prerequisites one would need to find this show bearable, let alone enjoyable.

I'm honestly not even sure where to start here, given the pervasiveness of awful throughout.  The narrator (Matt Short) is the first thing ANYONE unfortunate enough to watch this program will notice, however, so we might as well get that out of the way.  To put it succinctly, this asshole narrates the program in a manner akin to the voice actor for Sonic the Hedgehog on cocaine, infused with the libido of a 15 year old.  He practically screams every word of the show, and to describe his vocabulary as juvenile is unfair to middle schoolers everywhere.  I swear to god, I have never heard what I presume to be a grown man use the word "boobies" so many times in a 20 minute span (15 times by my count in the one episode I have polluting my Tivo).  And the context under which it is brought up? Can women's cleavage be used to screw in a light bulb.  Yes, you heard me right.  This is just one of the hard hitting issues tackled by the good folks at Manswers.  Some other topics (with the actual answers):

• What's the surefire way to add 9 years to your life? Polyamory, or as that asshole Matt Short screams 3 times in the span of a one minute segment: "SCREWING!!!!!!!"
• Why should you not get a handjob from a British chick? They wash their hands the least (how do you measure that reliably, anyway?) and therefore have hands that are "COVERED IN POO!!!!!" (you cannot make this shit up)
• How can you tell if a girl is going to be a screamer in the sack? you can't really... is anyone really dissuaded by this?  Has the thought "well, this girl wants to sleep with me, but what if she's loud?" ever crossed anyone's mind?

  Now, there are plenty of reasons any woman would take offense at this show, or at the very least be annoyed and disinterested.  I won't go into that, as it should be pretty obvious.  No, what I find to be insanity is that apparently, a market for this show exists to the point that is has run for 3 seasons and counting.  The show that brought us episodes dealing with such topics as "Life-saving farts", "how can you harness the power of your piss?" and "how much bigger have boobs gotten in the last 15 years?" is currently still being produced.  For us guys.  The notion that I am in the target audience for this (most episodes are TV-MA and air late enough at night that it's reasonable to assume such) is terrifying.  The notion that there are any guys out there that feel that this show would speak to them is appalling.  And this is coming from the guy who writes a column called "Trick Whoopin'" (which is looking for submissions! all inquiries can go to trickwhoopin@gmail.com).

I know I'm making a mountain out of a molehill here.  Obviously I have the right to not watch it (which I exercise on a daily basis) and it airs on a network that, let's face it, nobody watches anyway.  All I know is that when I watched it, my sensibilities as a decent and semi-intelligent human being were rocked to their core.  Just the notion that this show is out there, and that people watch AND enjoy it, is beyond my comprehension.  Perhaps I should just let those people be though, as their higher-functioning is probably insubstantial enough that they could do any real damage, but on the other hand, the fact that some form of intellectual natural selection didn't kill this show in its infancy tells me it may already be too late.  I don't know if any of those 2012 apocalypse theories are true or not, but if it meant the cleansing of Manswers and its audience from the universe, well, let's just say I'd dread the end of existence just a little less.