To be honest, that's what I was worried I might be in for: a lecture, not a laugh. As it turns out, The Big Gay Sketch Show can't seem to avoid the former entirely. One particular sketch involves a cranky old lady waiting in a nail salon lobby. She makes rude comments, and makes an ignorant fool of herself, but the message comes across a little too strong. The sketch becomes more of a life lesson type of thing (guys can get manicures, it's ok, and so on) than a fun sketch for adults. In a later sketch, the old lady seems to have calmed down and accepted things, but it's still a bit uncomfortable.
For the most part, the rest of the series is pretty free from that sort of thing. If you're wondering about the general tone of things (since this show is supposedly so big and gay), it's generally that the gay thing is not a big deal, but you probably realized that going into this thing. So unlike a lot of pop-culture humor where the joke is about gay people, this show is about gay people telling jokes. Some sketches don't even touch on the subject at all. For example, there is a guitar-playing hippie duo in a couple of sketches where they sing pretty clever songs about current events and have the whole thing turn into bizarre silliness by the end of it.
Enough of all that then, the real question is how funny this all is. And again, I have trouble saying that this is a consistently funny show. The main problem here is that it relies on comedy staples a bit more than it tries to innovate. A lot of the sketches that I thought were going to be hilarious were just simple parodies with gay people thrown in. And then a lot of what I thought was going to be hilarious turned out to be mediocre or just confusing. Take the random meteorologist skit, for example. While it's going for the wacky Monty Python style random violence, it just doesn't seem to work. And while Tranny 911 sounded like it was going to be hilarious, it seems like they were afraid of going too far with the sketch, which didn't really seem to help as they had already crossed plenty of lines. Another confusing choice was the Racheal Ray mockery. I understand taking a celebrity who seems a bit too pure and honest and taking them down a notch. But the imitation here was just poor and it just didn't seem like Racheal had done anything quite so bad as to deserve being dragged down to the level they went.
That's not to say there's nothing great here, I just expected a little more consistency. Erica Ash, in particular, shows real versatility and talent in all of her sketches. And the sketches with Stephen Guarino as the mocking and unhelpful customer service representative do just fine as great classic comedy.
There's a generous amount of bonus materials that include bonus sketches, behind-the-scenes stuff, and interviews. I'm not sure where some of the running time estimates are coming from for this DVD, because the first disc full of only the show itself came up to 2 hours and 11 minutes, at least on my DVD player, and the extra content comes up to about 68 minutes on its own. Either way, the extras are all good content and I wouldn't call any of it filler. The interviews with the cast are particularly enlightening and tell the stories of how and why they signed on to this show. Plenty of silly antics and free moments make the extra content more fun than the show at times.
For what it is, The Big Gay Sketch Show is pretty enjoyable. It may not be what you're expecting, but there's plenty of variety. You're bound to find something that gets you laughing, but it just may take a while to find it.
