Lou and Andy are keystone characters of the British radio turned television hit "Little Britain," a sketch comedy that stars Matt Lucas and David Walliams. Andy (Lucas) is an ill-tempered, mentally challenged young man, and Lou (Walliams) is his patient, clueless friend and caregiver.
They first appeared on television five years ago in Episode 1 of "Little Britain's" first season. Lou had brought Andy to a pool, and while he tried to figure out how to lower the poor ailing guy into the water, Andy got out of the chair, climbed up the diving board, jumped in, swam across the pool and was back in the chair before Lou turned around. The joke is, Andy can walk just fine.
In Episode 1 of "Little Britain USA," which premieres at 10:30 Sunday night on HBO, we meet Lou and Andy as they are beginning a visit to the U.S. While clueless Lou is checking into their motel, Andy is once again drawn to a pool. Only this time he doesn't jump in it, he pees in it. And not just in it, all over the poor woman who happens to be swimming there.
That scene is, in a nutshell, the trajectory "Little Britain" has taken since its British debut. Where once its wildly diverse sketches were politically incorrect glimpses into different facets of British life -- such as Vicky Pollard, the hilariously incoherent working-class teen, and Emily Howard, just an old-fashioned transvestite gal in denial -- now they are firmly rooted in genital humor, an endless fascination with homosexuality and fat jokes, often in the same sketch. "Little Britain USA" adds some new American characters to the Lucas/Walliams repertoire, but the hard-R gross-out humor remains the same.
So if you are a fan of, say, "Little Britain" in Season 3, you will probably like "Little Britain USA." As for the uninitiated, well, I suppose it all comes down to a person's fondness for penis jokes. Because they are everywhere, those penis jokes: in the skits about the petulantly gay prime minister and his attempts to "seduce" the American president, or the one with a law enforcement officer whose erection grows ever larger as he shows off his gun collection, or the bikini-line-trimming friendship between steroid-maimed locker-room buddies.
Not every joke is phallocentric. Breasts are fair game too -- such as the dangling anatomy of Bubbles, a gambling addict who literally loses everything at the cruise ship casino, and the miraculous milk production of the prim and proper mum who is still nursing her infantile thirtysomething son.
