HARLAND WILLIAMS:
Comedian and actor Harland Williams dares to go where no comedian has gone before, nature. In his new stand up DVD Harland Williams takes his act out to the Mojave Desert to do his routine in front of no one but Mother Nature. With a turtle and crow as his audience, Harland Williams performs his act on top of a mountain top in the desert with no laugh tracks, no panning of the camera to show others laughing so the viewer knows when to laugh, it's just him alone telling his jokes where he puts his comedy out there for the viewer to decide on what's funny and what's not.
FORCE OF NATURE:
I got to hand it to Harland Williams, he does take his act to new levels that could be a big payoff or a flop. If this were a budding comedian I don't think this DVD would have been made. It's just too much of a risk to put the whole comedian routine on the viewer and that's exactly what Force of Nature does. With all other comedy shows we get the camera and the people at the show to kind of lead us when to laugh. It's kind of sad to think about but it's true, as a group we tend to go towards what others feel is funny and fun so we allow that to be funny and fun to us. Harland Williams even explains that at the start of Force of Nature that we will not be getting any prodding to when to laugh. Though we do get a handful of sunflower seeds thrown at the camera when he tells a joke that is iffy on whether or not it's funny but he thinks it is. Which is kind of funny in itself when does do this because it's the same as me going, well I thought it was funny, so in his way for Force of Nature when he thinks it's funny he throws some sunflower seeds around.
The act itself wasn't great, not because of it being done in the Mojave Desert with no one around. I think this actually helps some with his routine, especially when he plays to nature, but it's the routine itself that wasn't that funny. Force of Nature feels more forced to me than it does natural. Harland Williams has a in your face routine anyways and it's one that some might not find that funny, but this felt like he was just there making stuff up. On a stage he has a solid routine that's laid out, planned, and though there might be some adlibbing done in it there's not much. In Force of Nature it seems like he had this idea, got a crew together, then just went out and shot it. It's almost like he was standing there trying to think of something to say and then said it. It's a chaotic set of jokes he's telling that range from him mocking a crow to the random act of humping the ground.
I like Harland Williams, he's a really funny guy, but Force of Nature just wasn't that funny. There are a few jokes in the routine that I laughed at but there wasn't any laughing out loud or laughing till it hurt, not even one tear came out. What I got were some jokes that made me chuckle, a few that had me do the ha yeah that's funny snort laugh or maybe it's a hard breath laugh, whatever you call it it wasn't a belly laugh that sent out noise from my mouth. I did find the crow bits funny but the props where a bit too much. At the start of this I was thinking this was just going to be him standing there doing his routine but when he threw the sunflower seeds and the cinnamon it felt like they where these lame crutches being used in an attempt to seem funny. As I said, this feels forced, there's no real flow to the comedy, it's chunky, it goes from one random topic to another, and the editing was all over the place. This was a hard routine to pull off and though Harland Williams gives a performance that could be seen as funny, I think not having an audience to work off of made him try to be funny rather than just being funny.
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